In high school, dad gave me a secondhand laptop. It had a crappy graphics card that prevented me from playing any 3d games. World of Warcraft was out of the question. So I found another avenue for entertainment – text based role playing games.
TELNET Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and MUDs Object-Oriented(MOOs) are old programs that allows users to communicate in rooms, much like a chat server but with descriptions per rooms and the possibility of connecting rooms with exits. I played with five characters on one server, and was eventually asked to help expand the game.
In one weekend, I built a city with three hundred rooms, each with a unique paragraph-long description, the whole thing mapped out in pencil on a graphing paper sheet beside my laptop. That exercise alone tested my descriptive skills, and was loads of fun. An apartment complex had unique apartments all over, one with shag carpet and a lava lamp doorknob. Fun things like that. You could see buildings in the distance depending on where you were in the city.
And the gaming, the role-playing… We’d RP for hours every day. Paragraphs of thought, speech, and action, typed as fast as we could manage in turns.
Fond memories. I kept a log of all my role plays but the hard drive it was on got corrupted over the years. A pity. My characters there inspired characters in my stories later on.