What’s your favorite game (card, board, video, etc.)? Why?
Some of the very first “games” that I began playing were actually text-based role playing games that were designed to be played on forums. In these forums, a player would make a post in a specific thread like the Introductions page. Here they would introduce their in-game persona, and their OG persona. After introducing their main character, players would then go to a separate thread to create a post describing their other characters, horses, wolves, cats or whatever the characters end up being. For me, I played a lot of forum-based horse RPGs that essentially allowed for me to create text-based role playing posts that others would answer in-character.
Horse RPG’s are quite popular, and they were even more popular in the past. The threads would include character generation, horse sales, shows, breeding, and many other fun activities. I can’t really explain it well enough to truly encapsulate what playing forum games really feels like.
I honestly credit playing text-based role playing games for providing me an opportunity to really garner a passion for writing. In these posts, one would need to use proper grammar and phrasing so that the other players knew what the post was conveying. There were actually spell-checking moderators that would float around in the forums and correct posts/ give warnings for poorly written content.
This is what really assisted and spurred my love for writing and specifically writing fantasy and fiction.
Multi-User Dungeons or MUDs are games in which individuals take part in a text based dungeon-crawler that were “inspired by text-based ‘dungeoncrawls’ like Zork, a team of researchers at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth developed an open-source code base known as AberMUD. Named after the town in which it was developed and an acronym of the phrase ‘Multi-User Dungeon’, AberMUD allowed multiple players to connect and adventure with one another in real time.” (Medium)
The above quote from Medium mentions the game, Zork. Zork: Grand Inquisitor was one of the first, text-based PC games that I ever had the chance to try. I was young, so the premise escaped me then, but now? It is still one of my favorite games of all time. “FISH HEADS. FISH HEADS. GET YOUR ROLLY POLLY FISH HEADS!” –Some lady at the fish market, Zork: Grand Inquisitor
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