No one in my adult life understands. They're like was it a forum? A role playing game? That sounds kind of weird. No, I don't even know what it was. But it was all I was doing all day for years at a time from age 10-14. It was the first thing I ever had to quit. Feel withdrawals for. Years before any drug, any relationship, before anything really, I was shamefully addicted to this.
Never spent a dime on there, didn't have money, I was just a kid, but I'd pay anything to get those years back. To have spent them at some camp or learning to play an instrument or in any other way besides alone in my room clicking buttons on a screen. Cause you only have so many years before you're an adult with a modern corporate job ~ and being alone in a room clicking buttons on a screen is basically all you do.
It was a community. We had a neglectful messiah site developer named Carlos who barely spoke English and blessed us with an update nobody wanted every 6 months. At one point he added The Hunger Games and it was new so the first few games were a site-wide spectacle, it was electric, I got into a couple of them and felt some of the most visceral emotion I had in years trying to 'stay alive' - convince other players not to shoot me to death with virtual arrows.
In The Hunger Games, you play a shitty 2009 .swf flash game against another real person to take their health or kill them. I wanted to win so bad I let Tengaged user Don_Draper log on to my account to play these games for me because he was really really good at them. I think I was the first person to win 3 Hunger Games in a row. I lost friends in the process. It was all very dramatic and must sound so silly now but to my younger self it felt incredibly meaningful. More meaningful, more real than anything does in the adult physical world. What a cruel joke.
On this site I fell in love with girls and they fell in love with me. We didn't call it that but that's what it was. One of the girls turned out to be a guy. We didn't talk after that.
Actually, pretty much everyone on Tengaged was Gay. You would be an anomaly as an openly straight male. This was before everyone was Gay in real life too. I felt special for being a straight white boy with a male avatar. This was before gender identity, intersectionality, before Trump, before everything. This was when you were just a boy or a girl or you were gay. And on this Big Brother Survivor Role Play forum website, pretty much everyone was Gay.
The one silver lining: I was always writing. Maybe this is why writing feels so natural to me now. Because I spent so much crucial development time on this website... typing messages to people. Here I am rambling on. I鈥檓 25 now, at the end of my life and reminiscing. Now I have exactly 4900 blog posts written by my 12 year old self to review. Thank you randomize.
Comments
One of the girls turned out to be a guy. We didn't talk after that.
On this site I fell in love with girls and they fell in love with me. We didn't call it that but that's what it was. One of the girls turned out to be a guy. We didn't talk after that.
