What's in a username?
The year is 2004 (ish), and I'm playing Blockland.
I remember booting it up the first time and just being amazed at the size of the room. Everything is massive. It's a bedroom like any other, a bit sparser, but my character is tiny, a little Lego man. There's so much space, not like a real house. I could an entire Lego mansion in here and not run out. I have to fly on tiny jetpacks built into my Lego man's legs to get anywhere high up. And if I want, I can just fly around like that — there's no limit. So that's what I do.
The first place I remember building is the dresser. It's massive, easily the tallest object in the room, not counting the lamp on top of the dresser,[1] so of course I've got to get up there. I start with something small, just a box. It's weird and a little clunky, I can't use my hands but instead I have to use the keyboard and the mouse and the numpad to drop these bricks into the game. It feels weird. But after some time I have a little plastic box, and it feels good. I've learned something about how to build in this game.
There is a name function. Every player on a Vanilla Blockland server, even a one-person locally-run one like mine, gets to pick a name. I'm struggling because I love Spider-Man, but I also love Lego, the whole reason I'm playing this game in the first place. I just can't decide which to go with. So of course I go the obvious route of mashing up the two: Spigo. I then decide to make my character look like a stormtrooper, because I also like Star Wars and stormtroopers are cool.[2] Not just a stormtrooper, but a green scout trooper — this week my favorite color is green.[3]
I remember the first stranger to join me in the game. It's another kid, I don't know who. I'm hunting and pecking, struggling to keep up with the rapid pace of this kid's typing. Eventually I get sloppy and just start slapping the keyboard, because there is just no way I can keep up otherwise. My spelling, which I am pretty good at when going slow, slips. The kid types back to me, my dad doesn't want me to play with someone who can't spell. So he doesn't. It hurts.
I decide to work on typing.
The idea of a server, of playing online, is mindboggling to me. I am homeschooled, with no homeschool group, and no suitable neighbor kids for friends. I play with my sister and my cousin, and that's it. The idea that I can get on this box and build Legos (possibly my favorite thing) with any strange kid on the Internet — it's just wow. How can I say no?
Soon I'm playing online as much as I can get away with, between homework and all else. It's a lot of playing. I build houses with people, we color and decorate them collaboratively. We build other things, little police stations or cars or whatever we feel like. Online I see huge complexes of buildings, things I wish I could have thought of, enormous sprawls.
It's not always other kids my age. Eventually I run into older kids, teenagers of some sort. It's confusing; I don't understand what they're talking about and it makes me uncomfortable. But that's another story...
At some point there is a fracture. There are three different versions of Blockland: The original version; a mod for the original called Return to Blockland, also called RtB; and another mod, TDM or TBM I think. ("That Blockland Mod"? It would make sense.)[4] After a while hardly anyone plays the original version; it's so much more limited than either of the others in so many ways. The others have cool character customizations and so many new bricks — there are even moving doors, if I recall. I can't imagine going back to the original, so limited by comparison. I end up playing mostly RtB.[5]
There is, eventually, a retail version. This costs money, which I do not have. It also involves paying strangers over the Internet, which is a thing we are very much not comfortable with. Nobody I know knows how to do this. I remember my parents selling something on eBay and struggling to get money back out of PayPal — then struggling again when someone claimed that the cookie jar they sent was broken on arrival.
At some point, I end up getting Half-Life 2. That means making a Steam account. Unlike Vanilla Blockland, Steam requires usernames to be unique. That's a problem — spigo, I think, is already taken. So, okay, I'll add some numbers on the end to make it unique. spigo900 it is. It works: The service accepts it.
It's such an odd arbitrary name and nobody knows how to say it. Any time I voice chat with anyone they've got to wonder. Is it like spigot without the t? Is it like spy-go? Is it spee-go?[6] So of course it's unused anywhere I go to use it. In that way, it's perfect: I never have to remember another name, unless I inflict that on myself by getting creative. In many places, I stick with what I know.
It works… enough.
or the doorframe, probably, unless that was just a texture... who knows, it was 2004-ish. ↩︎
probably this was later, in the time of Return to Blockland, rather than in Vanilla Blockland — but who knows ↩︎
others included orange and blue; in a different context and on a different character I mixed all three together. ↩︎
probably there are more. there is always more fragmentation. these are the ones i remember, the ones i played. ↩︎
i remember visiting TBM servers at one point and finding them mostly empty — but this might have been later, when RtB also started to die out. ↩︎
by the etymology and my recollections — i think it is spieh-go. but who's to say except doc brown? ↩︎