I make it a point to list Metasquarer, one of the masterworks of my childhood, on my resume. I’m proud to have demonstrated such a masterful grasp of programming, AI, and even algorithms at such an early age, for I was only 12 when I wrote it, and I do sometimes refer to it as the “magnum opus” of my childhood. However, for a relatively brief period between the ages of 15 and 18, I accomplished something that is perhaps even more impressive, and yet almost no one even knows that it was my work in the first place. It certainly isn’t on my resume. For even though I strive to be the best in every field I enter, it wasn’t until I was the best that I knew I could accomplish this on a larger scale. In this sense, my success at that critical moment opened the floodgates for all of the spectacular failures I am fighting society’s tide to avoid, for it was here that I utterly mastered my first skill.

Everyone attributes my success in the Ultima Online emulation community to “Rudenid”, which was the handle I uniquely used in the SphereServer and Irth communities. I left nearly no trace of my actual identity, for I didn’t see the need to associate my UO activities with the work I was doing with Metasquarer.

As always, my schoolwork was underchallenging, but at the time, this did not bother me for two reasons: I was receiving the same education as everyone else (a view that has instilled a great disgust for the standard system of secondary education in me, because the standard model caters strictly to the lowest common denominator), so I didn’t need to worry about inherent inequalities in training and could instead breeze through classrooms on intelligence alone (to the extent that I wouldn’t do homework because I already understood the material, thus receiving excellent grades on tests but mediocre overall grades due to zeros on homework), and I had already demonstrated programming competence far beyond my peers, most of whom either couldn’t program at all or were just writing their first programs.

So I did what every bored kid does after school: I played games. I still maintained Metasquarer, of course, but it was stable and the community was thriving by that time, so maintaining it did not require much work. Though I was conscious of society’s problems at that age (for that matter, I was conscious of society’s problems for as long as I could remember – in particular, I wanted to take action to stop global warming since I was six, shame on the rest of you for not even agreeing that there was a problem until recently), I did not have the compelling altruism that I later developed, and as someone who was constantly tortured by other students and faculty alike when all I wished was to be left alone, I was perfectly content to let society solve its own problems. So, as I said, I played games, including one called “Ultima Online”. Referred to the game by Jesse Alter, one of the three friends I would have before college (we later lost touch), I was directed to two free shards. The name of the first escapes me, but as soon as I created a character on it, I was immediately ambushed and killed by someone riding a llama who apparently decided to welcome “n00bs” to the server in his own special way. I left that shard almost immediately.

The second shard I joined was a roleplaying shard known as First Sundering. I knew nothing of Ultima lore (which is surprisingly rich) at the time, so I generally took “roleplaying” as “speaking in Elizabethan English”, which I was an expert at thanks to my many readings of Arthurian legends. I originally wanted to choose the name “Zandar”, after a character in an RPG I had just developed, but a character named “Zander” already existed on the server, so I chose “Rudenid” (another character) instead. First Sundering required an application for accounts, but their standards were not very high: after a week of eager waiting, I was welcomed to the shard, despite knowing little about what roleplaying was truly about.

What a difference! The community was helpful in the extreme, and it wasn’t long before I had much of what I was doing down thanks to their guidance. While on FS, I developed my character into a powerful mage (who crafted bows, of all things, in his spare time!) It was the perfect escape from the misery that defined my life from 6 to 2.

Unfortunately, while the shard’s playerbase was everything that could be asked for, the shard’s leadership was rather inept. After a series of successive bad decisions, culminating in a shard reversion that cost everyone nearly a month of progress, I left. Only a few months later, the shard folded, scattering the community. First Sundering was indeed an appropriate name for the shard.

Some members simply left UO altogether. Others found other shards. I did neither. From First Sundering, I had learned of “SphereServer”, the scriptable server that FA was powered by. At first, I simply toyed with being a Game Master on a test shard I called “MetaShard”. However, I very quickly decided to seriously start a roleplaying shard in the vein of FS. This shard was originally called “Endless Void” (Jesse’s idea as a member of the staff), but initially failed to attract players due to the relative sparsity of the world and the fact that building such a community is endosocial (an existing player population is required to attract players to the shard in the first place, resulting in a nasty feedback loop and a very difficult launch; see my previous posting on “exosocial” and “endosocial” communities).

But I was never one to let poor adoption of my ideas hinder me. After a policy disagreement with Jesse, he left and I changed the name of the shard to “Final Aegis”, where it would remain. At that point, I became serious about running the shard, and began reading “Taran’s Guide to Sphere Scripting”, a fairly well-written (better than any other documentation, anyway) guide to the Sphere scripting language, which was somewhat C-like (maybe Delphi is closer) and rather powerful despite Sphere’s quirks. This language is recursively enumerable, and thus probably qualifies for Turing completeness, surprisingly enough.

Within one month, I had mastered Taran’s guide. I would occasionally use it as a reference, but I would never rely upon it, or any other documentation, as learning material for the language again. My future training would come from running my shard, which began to grow, as well as visiting the Sphere Scripting Boards, where I fully intended to ask many questions, yet found myself answering instead.

And answering and answering, and scripting and scripting…

Within six months, I reached a ceiling of sorts: anything the server made it possible to do, I could do, no matter how impossible it may have seemed before I solved it. I knew the entire language (not trivial) by memory, and though I’d occasionally forget minor details, they’d always come back to me when I needed them. More importantly, I could construct scripts that many simply considered impossible with those tools, shaping the universe of my shard in highly novel ways. Despite this, I did not think of myself as a master of the craft until later: the true breakthrough moment came when I found myself fixing and extending scripts written by Swindler (considered one of the top three sphere scripters, along with Taran and Belgar). Fairly soon after that, my scripts began to outstrip theirs in both quantity and quality, even though I later learned that they had the advantage of seeing portions of the server’s source code.

Having finally contented myself with my mastery, I went back to answering people’s questions and improving my own shard, becoming one of the most prolific scripters as I wrote scripts for myself and others. Final Aegis became a moderately successful roleplaying shard, never able to accumulate a playerbase to compare with a player-versus-player (PvP) shard, but gathering a closely knit community nonetheless. The shard went down on September 29, 2004.

I just brought it back up today.