The Beast in Me

from Better Than IRL: Finding Your People on the Untamed Internet, edited by Katie West and Jasmine Elliott

This and “The Little Gold Colt” are the only two personal essays I’ve had published. They take a lot out of me, and I have great respect for nonfiction writers such as Roxane Gay, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, and Lauren Hough who write stunning essays and books from life. I’d much rather live in my own fantasy world when writing. But this one meant a lot to me. I didn’t “grow up” online, but I’ve been in front of a screen since I was ten or so, from programming my Atari 800, to Bulletin Board Systems on an early PC, to Usenet and UNIX. Forums, chatrooms, and MUDs, Multi-User Dungeons, an early form of Massive Multiplayer Roleplaying Games, were where I found who I really am, and the multifaceted aspects of my identity. I largely share these in my writing, and that was honed by exploring my other personae online… as this essay reveals. You can buy a copy of Better Than IRL: Finding Your People on the Untamed Internet here.

Fox Mask by Merimask

The Beast in Me

by Thomas Pluck

The first time I logged onto a chatroom, I killed the first person I met.

To be fair, this chatroom was a MUD, a “multi-user dungeon” based on fantasy text adventures, so I was forgiven for mistak­ing it for a game. Later my victim and I would be lovers, and then friends. An odd reversal, but “cybering” — or “tinysex”as chatroom shenanigans were called — was less intimate than divulging personal details, like your name.

The original MUDs were the first MMPORGs, multiplayer text fantasy games inspired by Colossal Cave, the first computer text adventure. Sold as Zork by Infocom, it spawned a hundred imitators, and fans of interactive fiction still create and share new games. Some MUDs were timed, and your avatar was supposed to collect treasures, fight monsters, and solve puzzles before the game reset in a number of hours. You could play nice and help other characters or hinder them and compete. Or you could hang around and talk, by typing say and words in quotes, such as:

Roxiana says, “Stop looking at my tits, Japhet.”

or /em (short for emote) for actions, like:

Japhet grins. And thinks about them, instead.

The social thing caught on, coders made spinoffs called Tiny­Mucks (a pun on playing in the mud), and all sorts of variants blossomed on secret ports on college servers. On these, you could hold long conversations in virtual “rooms” full of other characters or go off alone as a couple and have cybersex, typing at each other one-handed.

There was a whole host of people I knew intimately back then, everything except for their real names. People like Peganthyrus. Ashtoreth. Misty. I was Japhet, a charming thug brazenly based on James Gandolfini’s psychopathic mobster Tony Soprano, and Roxiana, a rapier-wielding fox musket­eer who fended off the advances of the over-amorous furries with wit and violence. Life on the MUDs was a book you wrote as you typed, a book you could live in! It was addictive and terrifying.