Got Game?

[susandennis]

One of the blogs I read sent me to the NYTimes which then got me to this article about online backgammon. I like backgammon. Years ago I dated a guy who made his living playing backgammon. So I thought, gee, that sounds like fun... playing on line with different people and then I bitch slapped myself back to reality.

I have a problem with online gaming. Nope. I am not a 14 year old white boy with joystick thumbs. I'm so much worse.

Years of family Yahzee and I Doubt It and Gin Rummy and Backgammon started me down the slippery slope. I picked up bridge in high school and in college discovered that fools, with cash, were willing to lay that cash on the line... I made beer money and more playing bridge - some of my best games and biggest hauls were to and from and during protest rallys - the 60's were a very confusing time.

When I got out of college I found tournament (duplicate) bridge which was great because I moved around the country a lot. Find a club - which was easy - and you've got a game. But, the problem with bridge is that you have to play with bridge players and a lot of them, a whole lot of them, are boring and/or obnoxious and just not the kind of people I want to spend time with so I abandoned bridge.

Until Sierra On Line. I cannot remember how I found Sierra On Line. Oh wait, yes I can. I read about a woman game maker - Roberta Williams who created Kings Quest. While looking into her and how a person of the female persuasion had blasted into this really tight boys club of personal computers, I found that she and her husband had started this company Sierra and they were looking at on line games and they needed beta testers.

Hello?!!! me! me! me! Pick Me!!! And they did! They had about 6 or 7 games on line and it worked with a real GUI client that they sent to you in the mail on diskette. You played via dialup. And bridge was one fo the games.

I was totally sucked in. I mainly played with one partner who was a Republican real estate attorney in LA who's screen name was Sweetie. For about 4 years, nearly every evening and all day on the weekends I was logged on playing bridge. Then they sold the company.

And I found OKbridge - it's a nice website now but then it was black and white command line stuff via a special Electronic Bulletin Board System kind of a thing. No GUI this time and the bridge was serious bridge - really top drawer stuff. The night of the OJ chase, I won a 7 NoTrump hand with those idiots playing on the TV in the background. No one else did as well with that hand and I jumped up the rankings. It was heady. And the participants were from around the world so it was as easy to get a game at 6 a.m. as it was at 6 p.m.

One night I found myself in a game with a guy from Japan and one from Sweden and one from the US. There was not a lot of chit chat in these games as they were serious play. But that night the guy from the US asked me where in the US I was and I said - Seattle... it took about 6 message swaps to learn he was in an office that I could actually SEE from my terrace! But he sucked as a player so, thankfully, I never ran into him again...

I cannot now remember what brought an end to OKBridge but I managed to get my life back and, so far, keep it. Nope, I don't need online Backgammon, thank you very much.