Where did Crane go? (part 2 of ?)

Where did Crane go? - a multipart blog series that will explain how I found 2old2play, why I "left", and why I'm coming back ASAP.

Part 2 of ? – My first year on the inter…web…tubes…net…thing

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When I joined up with 2old2play and “Old Man Mafia” near the end of August 2005, I had no idea what I was getting into.  I mean that in every way possible.  I had no idea that I could make real friends via a gaming service and a web site.  I had never been a member of an internet community with forums and posts, private messages and user generated content.  It probably took me more than a month to get my profile configured and get a crappy sig made.  I didn’t know what a n00b was, but I was certainly a fine example of one.  You would think that since I had been working as a computer programmer for 5 years at that time that I would be a little more internet savvy, but that just wasn’t the case.  I considered the internet to be little more than a vast, networked encyclopedia/newspaper/magazine.  If there was something I wanted to know, I hit the internet and looked it up.  I did not consider it a safe place to develop new relationships.  I mean, people get ABDUCTED and SODOMIZED when they meet strangers on the internet, right?

I guess some people do.  (Especially if you give out your contact information to XSSmoke.  No matter how sweetly he asks, just tell him you live in Siberia.  Unless that is where you live, in which case go with Tahiti.  Just TRUST me on this one.)  But after just a few days I realized that most of the people on the site were regular folks, with regular jobs and a house and kids and all that stuff.  I was very surprised with how open people were willing to be with “strangers”, but after I saw that the people they shared with were being supportive and sharing in kind it just stopped feeling weird.  I can’t put my finger on when it happened exactly, but at some point during those first few months of membership I stopped being a casual observer and started getting more involved in the site and my clan.

The first thing I did was take some classes from ARMnHMR.  I wasn’t the best student, but I couldn’t have asked for a more patient teacher.  There are a lot of folks in the OMM and all over this site that owe ARMnHMR a case of beer or two for the free tips, map walkthroughs, weapons training, jump training and all the other classes he has done.  After a couple of these classes I felt less like a n00b and decided to sign up for the internal OMM tournament.  I mean, what the hell?  They had an opening and needed another person to round it out to an even 32 combatants so I jumped right in.  I don’t think I have to tell you that I totally screwed up in the tourney and that my team was knocked out in the first round, but in spite of my “weak sauce” performance, not a discouraging word was said.  Everybody was in it for fun, and I was probably the only guy who was disappointed with the loss.  Besides, I got to meet even MORE cool people during the tourney, like The Professor and Deman.  I really dug the OMM and I tried to play Halo 2 with them as much as possible.  Pretty soon I wasn’t just playing when my wife was at work, I was playing whenever I could get a span of about 30 minutes with the TV.

I got really into my clan and the people in it.  I was pretty active in the forums and had a blast just bullshitting with some of the post-whores like DanLeCrinque and LoneWolf.  I got to enjoy the artwork of uber-talented folks like BatmanKM and DarthCestual, enjoy the writing styles of Webmonkee, and listen to music from Freakmullet.  I foolishly challenged Gaius Ceasar to an origami sho-down (and lost miserably) and constantly marveled at the ladies like CapnHun, LadyIsRed and Skeyewalker7 who were somehow able to not only tolerate the foolishness, crassness, and general grotesquery of our predominantly male clan, but in fact were able to dish it back out and hang in there with the worst of us.  I guess what I’m driving at is that over time I made real friendships, with real people, and that was something I would never have thought could happen via a web site and a gaming service.

Before too long I had gone WAAAAY off the deep end and gotten a friend of mine who owns an embroidery shop to help me make a custom hat and gaming jersey, complete with Halo emblems, OMM clan name and my gamertag in Sopranos font across the back.  I even talked DanLeCrinque into ordering a custom hat for himself with a rocket launcher on it.  I also started seeking out other 2old2play members in “real” life.  My wife and I moved to Birmingham at the start of 2006, and I soon learned that there were several members in the area.  Since my highschool buddy Raste already lived here, we decided together to try and meet some folks.  We had dinner with Sunburned Goose, and A Hovis (who was visiting from Texas) and they turned out to be really cool.  They didn’t even make fun of me for wearing my nerdy custom game hat and jersey to dinner.  (Umm…yeah.  Yeah, I really did wear that to meet them for the first time.  And no, I didn’t see anything wrong with it… until they walked in wearing business casual attire and I felt like a complete spaz.)  Later we met up with DrEsquire and again had a very pleasant evening talking about all kinds of stuff, not just games.  I think maybe that is when I really “got it”.  Gaming might have been what brought us all to the same web site, but it wasn’t what made us a community, it wasn’t what made us friends.  If all we ever talked about in the forums was our most recent gaming pwnage, then 2old2play would have rapidly dissolved due to lack of interest.  (In my case, it would fall apart because I have no pwnage to discuss.)  The community aspect rises from the other common life experiences that we have.  That is what makes you able to translate a persons gamertag into the actual person.  Batman becomes Kirk,  Goose becomes Rick, and Dan becomes…uh…Dan? (because not everybody is that good at coming up with an alternate identity  J  )   So when I started hearing stories about the LAN I had missed in 2005, I knew I had to make it to the one in 2006.

I wrote a whole bunch about my fantastic experience at the 2006 LAN (in fact, note to self, I STILL need to finish it… one year later, hah), and if you are a masochist you can read all about it at http://www.timandleia.com/lan/.  The short version is that I went, I met a bunch of people “in the flesh” that I had previously only known through a voice on a headset and posts in the forums, and I got absolutely rip-roaring drunk off my ass like never before in my life.  (And if God loves me, it will never happen again either.  Unless I am at another LAN.)  I played some games, sure, but mostly I just “hung out” with good people and chewed the proverbial fat.  Good times, very good times indeed.  The LAN was everything I hoped it would be and more, and for a while it looked like 2old2play and the OMM were going to be my own little everlasting slice of Utopia.

But then I screwed it up.

How?  Well, I have to save something to write about tomorrow, so I suppose the two of you that are reading this will just have to wait it out.   Adios.