MSN Gaming Zone, and how I became Trihedralguy
My first taste of playing games with strangers over the internet, back in the dial-up days. It is also where a random username generator handed me the name I would carry for years: Trihedralguy.
Before The Sims Online, before any of it, my first real taste of playing games with other people over the internet came from the MSN Gaming Zone. This was deep in the dial-up era, on my eMachines computer, back when we were still on AOL and my email address was the very on-brand emachine4me@aol.com.
The Zone had been around a while by the time I found it. It started life as the Internet Gaming Zone in 1996, Microsoft having bought the small company that built it, and it grew into this huge hub where you logged in and played card and board games and, eventually, real PC games against people anywhere. By the time I showed up it was the MSN Gaming Zone, and it had millions of members. To me it was just the magic place where the games had other humans in them.
The name
Here is the thing the Zone actually gave me, the thing that outlasted everything else: my name. When you signed up, it generated a random username for you, and the one it spit out for me was Trihedralguy. I looked the word up, because of course I did, and a trihedron is a shape formed by three planes meeting at a single point, like the inside corner of a box, the kind of thing that turns up in three-dimensional geometry and 3D art. And I latched onto it immediately, mostly because of the three.
Three was secretly the story of my whole social life back then. I was always orbiting three very different groups at once: the skateboard kids, the preppy kids, and the tech people. I was never fully in any one of them, I was the kid in the middle who could sit with all three. Over time the lineup changed, the skateboarders or the preppy crowd would drift off and my DragonSiblings friends would take a slot, but it was always three groups, always me in the seam between them. So a random name generator handing me a word built on the number three felt less random than it should have. It stuck hard. Trihedralguy, and later just the Trihedral idea, followed me for years, into my forums and my games and my email long after the Zone itself faded.
What I actually played there
The Zone was where I logged my early online hours. I played The Game of Life on it, and I played a lot of Age of Empires II there, sometimes solo against the computer, sometimes against real people. It also had the whole spread of classic table games, chess, checkers, backgammon, Reversi, the kind of thing it had launched with years before. Those were fine. But they were never the reason I was there. The Zone mattered because it was the front door to playing real games with real people, and once I walked through it, I basically never came back out.