Just Clanning Around part 1

Hello, my name is Dervish and I am in a clan.

Whew, glad I got that off my chest.

For those of you who don’t spend all their free time playing online games and have therefore probably not been exposed to this phenomenon, clans are groups of nerds who form teams based around their favorite multi-player games. If you’ve played any mp games, even just a few times, you’ve probably seen them. They have tags in front or behind their names, such as {HS}Hyper or <SR>Boogeyman^TKL.

My first experience with clans was not a good one. I was addicted to the game Baldur’s Gate, so when my wife and I got the internet for the first time, I decided to try playing BG online. I hooked up and was sent to a site that linked to several electronic rooms. Many of the rooms had weird names and said “recruiting”, whatever that meant. After wandering around for awhile, I chose one that seemed to have a few players, but not too many, and entered.

Within seconds I had been recruited into a clan, although I didn’t realize it. They told me to put some letters after my name – I thought it was some sort of thing that was required by the software or something. I kept asking when we were going to actually play the game, and they said, “Oh, I guess we can do that.” But we never did.

I was very popular there – I kept getting private messages asking me to join other clans, and even got in a tug-of-war between two guys who apparently had a history and didn’t much like each other. I think one of the problems was that the name I had chosen to connect by was Trendil, because that was the name of the kick-ass ranger I had been planning to play with. So all these pre-teen clan leaders thought I was a girl. Eventually I got frustrated, told everyone that all I wanted to do was play the freaking game, and disconnected.

I didn’t try another multi-player game until two years later, and when I finally did try it again (with Jedi Outcast), I knew one thing for certain – I sure as hell wasn’t going to join any stupid online clans.