I read up on Van Hemlock’s adventures in A Tale in the Desert over at his site, and had a wave of nostalgia sweep over me. I played ATITD waaaay back during the first telling, actually quite a lot. Even convinced my wife to join me, and for a period of about two months we had our own little well-loved campsite full of ‘the stuff that you use to make stuff’ in ATITD. This was long before tents and other modern conveniences they’ve since added, so it was sort of a sprawling melange of distaff/stonegrinder/etc. all spread out on a hill. We were just a short walk away from a nice little river (source of various resources), and a short walk in either direction to one of the temples of learning spread across the region. It was very pleasant, really, and aside from the fact that the game itself tended to be a bit boring I have nothing but amazingly good memories from my time in Egypt.

The person that made the experience what it was, was this chap named Kaizen. I’d made my camp within walking distance of his, and purposely. He was my mentor starting out, the guy that I sort of randomly fell in with as a newbie to the world. This sort of thing was heavily encouraged when the game first came out, something obviated a bit by the newbie island nowadays. Kaizen was well into the ‘elder game’ of the title, making sculptures for contests, participating in Tests, and (most enjoyably) making lots and lots of wine. He’d have wine-tasting parties and my wife and I would meet up with him and a few other Egyptians to try out his stock. There was a wine tasting skill, and as it developed you could detect more subtle tastes and variations.

Thinking about this sent me diving into my A Tale in the Desert gallery over on Flickr, and even more memories have come back from looking at that. There was the time we all got together to pull mud from this special hole in the ground. I don’t quite recall what the mud was for, but the gist of it was a community project. One person would make this special food that gave us the ability to pull mud really fast and well. We’d pull the mud from the hole (which was hard to dig), and toss it into this purpose-built chest. When the hole closed up (eventually), everyone who participated got a share of the mud. The person who organized the party got several shares to compensate for her time, the food, and to primarily assist her with the project she was working on. A bunch of us, if I recall, gave her our shares too. The mud pulling thing was a great example of what ATITD is like: getting to know people and hanging out with them as you work on projects together.

It’s a distillation of what a lot of other MMOs are like into its purest form, and if you can look past the graphics there’s a lot of love to be found in that game. I highly recommend it.