So are billions of other personal fictional creations. A 'net-wide plague is killing off hundreds of 'people' a day. It's a classic case of too-little-too-little as the World Wide Web thrusts the final nails in the coffin of online text games.

You kids today don't even know what the Internet is. You've never searched with a gopher. You've downloaded files without ever using a Get or Put command. All you have to do is turn on your miniature Cray and your browser takes you wherever your bookmarks lead.

When I first logged on (Go ahead, K00L k1dz, explain to me the original derivation of that term, pleez?), there were no pictures. Can you believe that? All you saw were file directories. That's it... exactly the kind of junk you see if you back all the way out of Windows. (Does Windows still let you do that? I'm a little behind.) And when my terminal (hah! 'terminal') connected to another machine, I could see their directories as well. No pictures. No chatting. No animated gifs. No real-time audio. No streaming video. No dancing babies. Why, when we wanted porn in those days, we had to guess at what it looked like by the file name!

That was the internet. Connected computers allowing varied access to shared file directories. Sounds pretty weak, right?

Well, it was.

But the users would not be denied. While the dusty military and educational sysops displayed this new resource as solely an informational tool, the college kids and lonely geniuses began to push. They pushed the initial concepts and uses of the internet into something that eventually described a complex social structure, a world for the knowleged - but in text only.

We had bulletin board services instead of chat rooms. It wasn't real-time and it wasn't private... but it started the avalanche of interactivity. We had hackers and crackers, experimenting with the amount of damage they could do over phone lines... but mostly just breaking the copy protection on Apple // games. We had the very beginnings of all the problems with lying and flaming and spamming and porn and everything else that is going to cause computers to be eventually controlled like television. And we had the MUD.

The concept of the Multi-User Dungeons were what sold me on even owning a computer. They were a combination of gaming and chatting, based on the thought-provoking text adventures that were already obselete by the mid-eighties. But in those days of 1200 baud modems and zero bandwidth, text games were all that we could do.

In the MUDs' glory days, you could find a hundred people at a time walking north-south-south through mazes, battling ogres and casting spells. These were the Tolkien fans, the role-players... using their imagination yet again. The MUDs spawned text games that changed venue to outer space, nuclear futures and cartoon landscapes. On some, players stopped fighting and begat the social MUD (like StocDred's favorite TinyCWRU), logging on solely to chat and build their own mazes and rooms.

But remember - about mid 1995 - when you first noticed that EVERYBODY had their own website, from Coca-Cola to Oprah Winfrey? That was when the online text games, in all their many forms, lost a lung.

With the onset of a completely visual internet - the World Wide Web - who needed the text-based BBSs and MUDs? Some stalwarts who refused to buy a 14.4 modem kept posting to rec.arts.barney.die.die.die but now you could access your newsgroups through America Online. StocDred, longtime denizen of TinyCWRU, is, in the video-game words of Gauntlet, about to die.

We all should have seen it coming. Once I started on MUDs, MUSHs and MUSEs, I never set foot on another BBS. The new replaces the old. If today's internet community wants to fight, they have a multitude of network games from Avara to WarCraft. If they need to chat or meet people, they have family-friendly America Online or graphic-based forums like Palace.

A fellow MUSHer said it best: "These are games for hackers 7 years ago, when this was majorly cool. This bores the kids now. They play network Quake and whatnot. That can't compare to watching people [type] that they're drinking beer at a fake MUSH party."

Indeed it can't. People today don't even understand what the online text games used to be, let alone what they are. The modern internet is built that anybody can use it, not just computer science majors. One year ago, I was mocked by co-workers for spending 10 hours a weekend 'on the internet.' Today those same bozos are telling me about the 'neat homepage' they found searching Yahoo, or the 'funny e-mail' they received while online with AOL's Instant Messenger thingy. Most users today don't even realize that AOL and the web are different entities.

And that's what bothers me most about the World Wide Web and the death of my old text game haunts. I have had to surrender my space to the very boneheads who used to make fun of me. It's the one battle computer geeks have seriously lost.

The internet used to be exclusive. It was a haven, a resource, a forum. Now it's like your average big American city... littered, abandoned, full of salesmen and porno... awash with the ignorant and the excited... and nobody knows which is which.

Feh.

But here I am, using America Online's web space for my own home page talking to the very users I just maligned. Later tonight I may buzz a friend and we'll play some network Duke Nukem. And I'll log in to my MUSH and not type anything for hours because no one's there and it's just not fun anymore. I am just as guilty as anyone. Real time marches on.