I REMEMBER… BARB FINDS FED ON GENIE IN 1989
by Barb
I first discovered Federation on GEnie in 1990. I had just started working for GEnie and all employees had after-hours access to all its resources. I was already familiar with MUDs by then but, as I explained to fellow workers, I was bored and impatient with magic based games, games that forced battle to advance, and any game that required endless repetition to gain advancement points. The Product Managers all told me to check out Fed; one even dug out a copy of the now legendary Idiots Guide (Federation Manual). I decided to keep my player name Freya and her persona which I had been using for a couple of years in MPGs on CompuServe and the internet.
I entered Federation for the first time and soon found myself in Chez Diesel with Occy. Shortly thereafter I met Oddball who told me to ignore any advice Occy gave me and provided his take on how to succeed in Fed DataSpace. It became evident pretty quickly why advanced players wanted to help newbies – they needed our help hauling their commodities. One of the terrific things about Fed was that it required cooperation for success.
While I worked at gaining promotions in Fed, I spent most of my time socializing and exploring. One nice thing about Fed back then was that pretty much everyone tried to keep things entirely IC (in character). So I told no one about my OOC (Out Of Character) life. I was simply Freya – the one in the red 5” high heels. Most of us worked at creating distinctive characters in Fed. The description feature and the utterly flexible act/say command system allowed an almost uniquely rich level of customized communication/role play. And then there were the spybeams. I loved and hated the spybeams. Most of us did. I’m still fascinated by how many players forgot they were almost always under surveillance by spybeams and carried on with secretive conversations and intimate roleplaying. It became group entertainment to sit around in a bar and watch a target couple with our spybeams while making MST3K comments to our fellow patrons. Many evenings were passed in CDs with a dubious pizza, an Old Peculiar, and spybeams fixed on the couple de jour.
