#006 | Interview: Peter
17 Years of Fire Emblem Friends
Welcome back to Playing on the Computer. This project’s aim is to explore life online before and after the rise of the recommendation algorithms which now shape society, culture, and individual taste.
Today’s guest: Peter W.
Screen name: Nitro
31 years old, Chicago, IL
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
PETER: I feel like my internet activity from 2006 to 2011 is, like, literally, the most embarrassing part of my entire life. Like, I haven’t even told my husband about any of this.
Alright, set the scene. How are you getting on the internet at the time? Family PC?
PETER: So my parents were divorced. At my mom’s house it was a shitty HP laptop. At dad’s house it was like a big, chunky white Mac (ed. note: likely a G5, — downright anorexic by the standards of that time). It was in the basement, plastic fold-out table, beige walls, beige shag carpet, that sort of thing.
I think there’s a correlation between how fucked up your childhood internet experience was, and whether or not the computer was in the basement.
PETER: Easier to watch porn, for sure.
Where were you hanging out online?
PETER: In 2006, all of my friends were into this Game Boy Advance game called Fire Emblem. My one friend was like, “hey, I’m on this forum, you all should get on it as well.” It was called Fire Emblem Empire, we were all on it for maybe a month or two. Fast forward a year, I was bored at my dad’s house, so I got back on, and just kept coming back after that point.
Can you tell the folks at home what Fire Emblem is?
PETER: It’s a bit like chess, in that you move pieces around and take turns, but it’s in a fantasy world — so there’s magic, a dragon, lots of court intrigue.
Did you play the one with like, Lyn, Elwood and Hector?
PETER: Okay, so you know about this. That helps with the secondhand embarrassment.
What drew you to the community around this game in particular?
PETER: When your characters died in this game, they were like, gone forever. It was a game with consequences — you wanted to seek out advice. And it had all of these imaginative aspects. Your character in the game is just sort of a nameless, faceless hero. So one of the main activities on the forums was to mix and match elements of other characters and make your own little avatars. That was something I actually did a lot of — in MS Paint, but eventually I got a cracked copy of Photoshop and upgraded to more advanced stuff.
Did you make friends on there?
PETER: Sure. There were maybe 30 highly active users, maybe 30 semi-active, and then a host of new users coming into it.
So running this was probably like, one guy’s passion project.
PETER: Right. I think he was an Australian doctor. It was originally owned by some guy named Tricky. It passed onto a different person… Dave, maybe?
Anyways, my whole schtick on this forum was that… there was a previous user, I think his name was Thunk, and he was a communist. Leninist, specifically. Super serious about it. And he left, so I just kinda co-opted his whole… communism… thing, but in a very insincere way.
So to be clear, one commie left and you decided “I’m the commie now.”
PETER: Yes. You know, I feel like so much of childhood development is about individuation. You're kind of picking and choosing from, like, totally different identities. So I adopted this sort of communist… playboy… drug addict personality.
In the context of a forum about the video game Fire Emblem.
PETER: Correct.
So one minute you’re asking for tips on how to level up your character, and the next minute it’s Trotsky and designer drugs?
PETER: Correct.
What are people’s reactions to your forum persona?
PETER: I think that was a function of time spent there. At first you’re an outsider, you put in your time, then you’re more a part of the in-crowd. Some people didn’t make that leap but kept coming back, in a “gluton for punishment” kind of way.
So you took a little shit, but then were eventually kind of embraced.
PETER: Exactly. There were some other personalities worth getting into. One was the eleven year-old girl who was likely actually a 34 year-old pedophile. There was a Nazi. There was a Panamanian twink — no idea what happened to him. One of them actually does translations for Atlus (ed. note: makers of Persona). But aside from them, the general life outcomes for people on this website has been pretty low.
The one person I still keep in contact with was someone under the username Metronome. We’ve kept in touch over the years, but they got upset with me as I went off to college, because I just completely stopped communicating. They are now a trans furry who does too much ketamine.
I think the phenomenon of having a childhood internet friend you no longer talk to, or maybe that you outgrew, is pretty widely felt.
PETER: Totally. So I wasn’t bullied in high school, but I wasn’t out either. I was just sort of jaded and unhappy. It was nice to have someone I could talk with. But after figuring myself and my sexuality out, I realized that I needed to get the fuck out of my town so I can actually like, be a human. I started being more positive, having better relationships with some of my IRL friends… and that was kind of a turning point. Eventually we just stopped talking. I do reach out once or twice a year, just to check on her.
What would an average interaction between you two back in 2007 look like?
PETER: We actually started texting after a while, that and MSN messenger. She was the only one I had that level of connection with, her and one other person. Their screen name was November, and they were the first gay person I’d ever actually interacted with. Very important for me in retrospect.
That’s huge.
PETER: During COVID, I reached out to Metronome, and I was like, “hey do you know what happened to November?” And she was like, “no, but here’s where everyone is now, you can ask them there” — and I got invited into a Discord server with like, 15 members, all who used to be on Fire Emblem Empire.
Okay, whoa, so this exact same community from the late-aughts was still sticking together through the 2020s?
PETER: Yeah, exactly. But even in there, no one knew where November was. But I did get their first and last name, and after some Googling, I found they had an opioid overdose in the middle of an intersection in Nashville, or something like that.
Jesus. Is he alive?
PETER: Yes, thankfully, if he had done that in his home he’d probably be dead. Someone must have had Narcan. He does have a felony now, though. But I can’t find him, and it’s a shame, because that’s someone I would definitely want to reconnect with. I think if there was one thing everyone on that forum had at the time was a little bit of loneliness going on. So for them today, especially if they’re a thirty-something queer person in Nashville, of all places, there might not be a huge scene for that.
(Editor’s note: Nashville’s scene is underrated, shoutout the Lipstick Lounge)
What was the impact they had on you?
PETER: My opinions of gay people were largely negative, even though I was, you know, gay. So to see a gay person who was, by all accounts, normal — treats me like a human being, had a shitty job at GameStop, that kind of thing — that was like, “oh, wow.”
I think that was the great equalizer of the internet of that time, too. When you were online, it doesn't really matter who you are, you’re treated as just another screen name. So to have this person open up about ex-boyfriends, to be so forthcoming about their lives… that was great, especially since everything I said about myself online was a lie.
Right, fair enough. Because at the time you were pretending to be, like, a very hypersexual, straight person who did a lot of drugs?
PETER: Exactly. Just weed, to be fair. It felt like a safe enough thing to pretend to like. Like, “I’m chaotic” but not a problem.
Weed was also cooler back then.
PETER: Yeah. Not like now.
In the context of the forum, were there any scandals, drama, petty bullshit?
PETER: Plenty of it, there was a lot of bullying people — making mean shit using YTMND. One thing people forget is that any attention, never mind fame, on the internet at that time was exclusively negative. Think Star Wars Kid, Numa Numa Guy, Chocolate Rain. Like, you only got famous on the internet for being embarrassing. People didn’t crave attention like they did now. If you expressed any emotional sentiment online, you were going to get roasted for it.
People I’ve been talking to remember the online of this era as being much more merciless.
PETER: Well, in a way? When you think about the internet today, what are you really paying for when you're going into that social media platform? It's the moderation. Back then, moderation was by community. This had strengths and weaknesses. It’s more permissive in some ways, but it’s also more democratic, communal. As soon as you have billion-dollar platforms in play, that’s not tenable. That moderation is automated. By nature, that won’t give you the same sense of community. That’s not profitable. None of these old forums were even for-profit, never mind profitable.
That’s very fair. Forums like this were usually hosted as passion projects. Maybe some advertising, but rarely.
PETER: Yeah, my understanding was that ours was almost entirely covered by Google ads — but just the hosting, not the time and effort of moderation.
What was the thing that kept you coming back?
PETER: Honestly? I was so bored. I didn’t have a lot going on, and I was just like… it’s Saturday. Nothing’s happening. Might as well go online. I think I literally stopped going when everything else in life got more interesting.
But to be honest, I also think that shame is really important. I think we need to bring back bullying in a real way.
Elaborate on that.
Editor’s note: here the convo digressed a bit. Pete had some feelings about his childhood spent online, and what might have been better or worse about it. In the moment, it seemed as if he was still figuring out how he felt about it in real time. However, he sent a clarifying email days later that conveyed his point beautifully. I’m going to run that here and give him the last word.
I had this nagging sense that I should have been doing more when I was a teenager. I don't know what that would have looked like, necessarily: I never felt like there were a lot of options for me other than waiting to grow up and get out.
I don't think I could have ever been happy in junior/senior high in the environment I was in. My online persona was an expression of that frustration — insane, unhinged, hedonistic, overly sexual. I think that's why I don't view that time with rose-tinted glasses. I felt all of that time was wasted, that I wasn't growing up or developing in any meaningful way.
But I do view that time positively in retrospect because I can see the change that was happening. I was able to be a part of a creative online community and was treated with respect. Though I did not realize it, I was able to try on different hats and see what fit and what did not. My actions had no impact on the real world. But a second part of me is disappointed with what I couldn't be at that time, the life that I didn't live outside of the internet.
…
When I see online culture today, I don't think of it as a means to an end but the end itself. Sometimes I think people treat the internet today as indistinguishable from lived experience — like it is mapped 1:1 onto the world and we're always thinking and breathing it. People feel like they can't afford to log off, and since people can record and share anything and everything, it makes sense that people feel this way. But I've always been resistant to that mode of thinking, in part because I think I spent so much time online and never really wanted to be there.
I'm much more nostalgic to the Geocities era (even though I never experienced it for myself) because there was no concept of fame or reputation or social credit. It was just people being passionate about their interests and sharing them. I have no idea whether that was the case or not, but an internet that exists peacefully side-by-side with life seems far more utopian to me than the social escape hatch it was for me from 2006-2011, and much less what it is today when it is completely inextricable from living and making decisions around what and how we enjoy.
So when I say “people should be ashamed about using the internet,” what I mean is that people should feel ashamed that they can't live without it, not that they shouldn't enjoy what they are passionate about.
I'm a bit of a luddite like that I guess, even though I chaotically got the word ".net" stick-and-poked on my ankle in college.
Do you have a story about life online pre-2012? I wanna hear about it. Drop me a line.