From: jmh@athena.mit.edu (J Michael Hammond)
Subject: Old Addictions Die Hard
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 13:56:35 GMT

Back around 1986 or so, someone at MIT's Project Athena loaded xtrek
onto a machine in their headquarters.  It took a few months for the
game to really catch on, but soon, with the help of the Zephyr
messaging system, a robust xtrek community formed.  One could sit in
any of the half-dozen or so main Athena terminal rooms and see at
least a couple of people rlogged-in to e40-302-13 playing xtrek at any
time of the day.

Two major groups formed.  A group of players mostly from the Media
Lab, led by Mark Levine (Eleazor), got together informally and played
the Romulans.  Steve Balzac and I crowned ourselves the Rear Admirals
(Lower Half) of the Orion Combat Fleet and recruited about a dozen
effectives.  We never had any preplanned battles with the Romulans,
but most evenings there were enough of us were on that we could "get a
clue" about team play.  (Fighting along the diagonal is especially
tedious, I might note.  But most of you already know that of course.)

Most of the strong players at the time belonged to one or the other of
these groups.  One notable exception was a guy who used the codename
Maverick -- referring not only to "Top Gun", but also to the MBTA blue
line T stop near which he lived.  I'd mention his name if I
remembered; perhaps he's out there on the net somewhere and can
introduce himself?

Note that at this time the MIT distribution of xtrek didn't have
differentiated ships.  Cloaking didn't get into our mix until (I
think) spring of 1987.  I guess we were all flying destroyers and
happy as clams about it.


The GPA/game-playing constraint curve was well-known at MIT at that
time.  Urogue, (net)hack, and moria were widely played as were a
couple of other graphics-y games.  In fact, in either 1987 or 1988,
Terry Donahue attracted a major following to his 'xtank' game, all but
killing the xtrek fever at MIT, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.
I ended up graduating a summer late, really because I'm an
incorrigibly lazy bastard, but which I can conveniently blame on all
my time spent playing xtrek.

Just as a side comment: you young whippersnapper vanguard netrek
philosophers would have called every one of us "clueless", because
although we considered planet-capturing worthwhile, players tended to
derive their satisfaction from dogfighting more often than netrekkers
do these days.  I have a feeling that eight of us old-timers, in top
condition and time-warped to 1992 for the experiment, would be
genocided in an hour in a league game after amassing a very high kill
ratio.  But such is life -- strategy and tactics change.


Anyway, the point of this article wasn't (originally) just to blab
about the past so I'll cut that short, but rather to present a warning
in the form of a case study.  I'm probably a lot like most of you who
read this newsgroup -- maybe a few years older than average but
psychologically we're all cut from the same cloth.  *FIVE YEARS AGO*
was the last time I played a significant amount of xtrek, and since
then I've been an Air Force lieutenant and am now a brash young
manager in an established software company.  The point is that now I'm
dangerously close to having a Real Life(tm).  Even so, now that I've
(re-)discovered netrek, I'm slipping back into my old college habit of
punting all my puntable activities in favor of spending my off-hours
playing this damn game!  And (here's the point) YOU MIGHT END UP LIKE
THIS IN A FEW YEARS TOO.

So fight it if you want to -- go cold turkey and consider yourself a
recovering interactive-network-gamesaholic; the metaphor is more solid
than you might think -- or don't fight it if you don't want to.  Just
know that you are playing with something that is every bit as
compelling as alcohol and chemicals and leave it at that.  And have
fun while you're doing it.  :-)  I sure am.

It's just too bad that netrek isn't a spectator sport; there might be
some money in it then... oh well.


-J. Michael Hammond
 formerly OCF RAdm. JMikey
 now random low-ranked clue-impaired scummer on
  a few servers