Genesis
MUD is an interesting world. It’s based on several different
fantasy book themes, but I’ve never read any of them. One was the
Lord of the Rings trilogy. I enjoy telling people that I used to be an Ithilien Ranger who lived in
Gondor, and that I have fought
orcs and had tea with
hobbits in Bree. For someone who’s never read the books, I know quite a bit about them.
Another realm of Genesis was based on Dragonlance. I'm not really familiar with the stories because, oddly enough, I’ve never really enjoyed reading fantasy. Except the Chronicles of Narnia, which I loved when I was a kid but couldn’t get into when I tried again as an adult.
So I was walking around in Ithilien one day, and I came upon this young woman who was just hanging out. She was the same ‘level’ as me (Great Adventurer) but didn’t seem to know much about how to get around in the game. I ‘teamed’ with her for the entire evening. You can form ‘teams’ of any size with other players, you see, and then wherever you go, they automatically follow. Apparently, she had achieved almost all of her experience in the MUD by being dragged around by her real-life boyfriend. She was nice. Quiet, serious, and nice. We ended up getting married eventually, to much fanfare. We were a proud Ranger couple. There was never any real passion there, but we respected each other. It worked out pretty well.
The life I had in the MUD was, in some disturbing ways, a very real one. When I was living with my real-life girlfriend there was a time that an affair I had in the MUD (after my MUD divorce) that literally brought me to tears when it fell apart. I’m not kidding. It was all very strange. It was just a game, see, so I wasn’t really being unfaithful. How the hell I managed to fall in love, then, was completely beyond me. Trying to hide my tears from my girlfriend was a chore. I spoke to that woman a year later on the phone, at which time she apologized for having ripped my heart out the year prior. I accepted the apology but I never regained the feelings I’d had for her. Ironically, she had dissed me because she was frightened by the intensity of the feelings she had for someone that she had never seen and who existed only in a game. Go figure.