When I Was a Boy, the Internet Made Me a Man

It's strange to think I've had a Twitter for six years, a Tumblr for seven years, a Facebook for nearly a decade. These services have chronicled my day-to-day living, allowing to me to look at what I thought and did without necessarily realizing I was thinking or doing. I see exactly how excited I was to announce my summer internship, or how drunk I might've been when tweeting about listening to Japandroids. These snapshots are sometimes a little embarrassing, obviously, but in a way that looking at old memes makes me sentimental, I'm glad they exist.

But six and seven and nearly ten years pale to my account on GameFAQs, the widely used video game message board and the first one I ever cruised as an 11-year-old given free access to his 56.6k modem. I signed up for GameFAQs in 1999, which means my account has been active for 16 years—only ten fewer than I've been alive. Back then there were anime-themed posters on my wall, comic convention badges hung from lanyards around my doorknob, flashlights near my bed so I could play the original Pokemon under my covers at night when my parents were asleep. With my homework done, I'd dive into countless hours of some game— Final Fantasy, Chrono Cross, Star Ocean 2, and the Japanese RPGs like it.

It's hard to think about what I was like at that age, namely because I was 11 and all 11-year-old boys are gremlins, but especially because I hadn't been exposed to anything. I had friends, but we mostly gamed and talked about gaming. When I first signed up for GameFAQs, I was looking for help with Final Fantasy VII. (Or so I think—it's possible I just wanted to talk about the game, period, using the pretense of needing help as an excuse to wax about how cool Cloud was.) There are millions of registered accounts now, but I was one of the first couple thousand. As the boards grew, there were so many threads comprising so many different topics: pro wrestling, comic books, anime, religion, Tool records, other video games, all of which I wanted to know about.

There were people, too: vibrant, seemingly hilarious people capable of expanding on any subject, each of which was a new frontier past my limited prepubescent self. Most of them were older, and willing to lecture a young person about how the world worked. I absorbed their wisdom through osmosis on the boards, and eventually, in private AOL Instant Messenger chats with those I liked the most. I came to be interested in a great many things not because I thought they were interesting, but because my interest could give me access to digital social circles I thought were elite. They'd talk about Dream Theater and I'd think, Wow, Dream Theater must be great, even if—to be honest—John Petrucci's zealous licks didn't do much for me.

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At the age of 11, it did not occur to me that grown men who spent their free time talking about Pokemon with pimply prepubescents were anything but socially enviable. These were the men I wanted to know. My grammar tightened up and my spelling matured, because I didn't want anyone to know I was young. This was more than talking about video games, or talking about our lives—it was absorbing entire value systems, aesthetic tastes, senses of humor, thoughts about race and sex and women and family from people who, as I see now, were adding only a few drops to my basin of knowledge. It was a world of one's perception built from sole exposure to those who'd see it the same way.

Within the first year of signing up for the boards, I was maintaining several hundred active posts at a time. It was almost a contest: How many could you have? Originally, I'd post when I had something to add or ask. Then it was as simple as a non-sequitur, or a basic "haha" (or, as my aspirationally pretentious and anime-obsessed 11-year-old self would've rendered it: "^_^") As posts were deleted every few weeks, it took an unbelievable effort to maintain a steady output—I entered each topic prepared to say something and exited with one more post to my name, added like a bean to a giant jar.

Would you be able to tell how much of anything was in there? No, but it sure was a lot. The days ended, the nights stretched, the family phone line was clogged to uselessness until my family added a second to avoid the conflict. My father, who built his own computers, understood the attraction; my mother only wanted to make more phone calls until, in response to the ceaseless conflict, a second line was added.

"You grew up in the technology age," she tells me now. "No, I didn't think it was strange." This must have required endless patience on her part—a belief that her gawky, pale son prone to paroxysms of rage when a Tekken match didn't go his way would naturally develop into a normal adult. But at the time, this was natural. C, a boy my age whom I befriended on the boards and eventually became Facebook friends with (though we never met in real life), tells me the same thing. "Sure, my parents thought it was a little weird," he says over Facebook. "But I kind of felt like there wasn't much to do otherwise."

I felt the same way—until one day, I didn't. My limits expanded through the natural process of aging and coming in contact with more than what I knew. At first, I only cared about games, but the access to so much cursory information made me want to go off and see what I could learn outside of a message board. As it turned out, quite a lot. You could find out about music from VH1 or Pitchfork or kids your age; you could find out about comic books from going to the comic book store and talking to the clerks; you could find out about anything from going down a deep Wikipedia hole, or even better, reading a book. One crucial moment was when I hosted a foreign exchange student, and while planning our hectic schedule of activities, realized I didn't have time to participate in the online Pokemon tournament I'd entered. Well, I guess I have to withdraw, I thought, and promptly did so, rather than abstaining from my tangible social duties. While I gravitated away from GameFAQs, I stayed social online, instead using AIM and websites such as Livejournal and Xanga to stay connected to the friends I already knew in real life.

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Today, my usage of the internet is largely cyclical. I work online, which means I check one site, then the next, then four or six or 12 more, until I go back to the first; I continue conversations from where they left off hours ago; I read tweets until I'm caught up, then scroll back to the top so I can begin anew. I'm panning for treasure on an endless beach, walking over the same territory as soon as the sand has shifted, convinced I'll find something new—a wrinkle to a story, or a particularly wonderful video of bears. There's little of the raw escapism I felt when I was younger—the sense that when I went online I could do whatever for as long as I wanted. My world is too professional for that.

I wonder what it would've been like if I'd developed without the internet, and come to it as an adult ready to use it like the information superhighway it was meant to be, with no habits coded into my system. The hypothetical is obviously ruined by the fact that I don't know how I would've developed without the internet. I've been using the internet for eight hours a day since I was 11 years old—if practice makes perfect, I'm the Tiger Woods of finding memes.

What it's like for someone born in the 21st century to grow up using the internet, I don't know. Maybe today's parents are more mindful of letting their children soak up endless hours in front of every type of screen, or maybe not. Maybe the average millennial, plugged into every source of information, grows up a digital star child. Or maybe the mundanity of what they're doing becomes apparent before long, and they seek—at ages younger than ever—to unplug in ways they write about in think pieces. Mindful of what they lost from being glued to their iPads from the start, they'll move to rural Wisconsin to raise little Bon Ivers in the woods, free from the corrosive effects of modern society.

But as I think of how much has changed since I started gaming and using the internet, I'm reminded of how much is the same. When the Gamergate scandal hit last year, I was grossed out by the selective attitudes of the gamers who plugged their ears and shouted about ethics in journalism even as real threats were made toward women trying to have a conversation. I wondered if, as a clueless 11-year-old frequently wading into conversations he didn't deserve to be a part of, I would've joined them in bleating. Worse: I wondered if, absent the direction I found, I would've been one of the grown men hooting about his precious games, mindfully apathetic of the greater world and the more important issues within it. It was my own private Sliding Doors.

Even when I wasn't posting as much on the boards, I'd check in every day to see what we going on. Over time, I recognized fewer and fewer names, saw the conversations grow coarser, and understood less from what I read until one day, I didn't log on. Sometimes I think about all the people I knew back then, wondering what happened to them—what jobs they took, spouses they met, cities they saw as they gradually uncoupled from their youthful baggage, and entered the real world. This is what we'd talk about, if we ever met. And eventually, we'd go back to talking about games.

Jeremy Gordon is on Twitter.