When I was a young lad, I had what some may call an unhealthy obsession with the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) “Maplestory”. Every day, after biking home from school, I would log in, say hello to the friends, and continue about training and leveling up my characters. I vividly remember the messages the game system would broadcast after three or more hours of consecutive play were registered: “You have played MapleStory for X hour(s). We suggest you take a break from Mapling.” To me, those system notices were almost like badges to be worn on my chest, a testament to the dedication and love I had for the game. Unbeknownst to me, this childhood game of mine would serve as the stepping stone to my first real encounter with computer programming.
Fast forward a couple years from playing on the public Maplestory servers, a few of my online friends had made the jump to play on the latest craze, which took the form of a few dedicated private servers. On these servers, the EXP rate had been altered in a way that EXP received would be 500x, 1000x, and sometimes even 2000x what was normally obtainable. The appeal of being able to fast track our way through the game, through what was normally months and months of grinding away was simply too tempting for any of us to withstand. Being able to fully experience the game and all it had to offer which had previously been gated by time and money offered us an experience like none we had had before. Eventually, a friend had learned for himself how to make his own server, and our little group of friends had gone from players to game masters almost overnight.
Initially, I wanted to invite some of my school friends to join us in our little escapades. My online friends had guided me through the set up for our personal server, but setting up access to the server for others was something I had yet to try my hand at. In my middle school brain, I thought that simply dragging the MapleStory desktop icon to a USB would suffice. Imagine my surprise when the game failed to load. What my middle school self had failed to also copy over were the rest of the files that game required to launch. Without them, the desktop shortcut would not properly load the game. It wasn’t until later on when one of my online friend pointed this out that I had realized that there was more to the game than just the desktop icon.
Ironically, the same friend that explained the concept of game files, the same friend that had set up the server for us so quickly, had also taken it down just as fast. However, he was keen enough to teach me how to set up my own server for me and my school friends to play on. Logistics aside, creating the server and learning to modify the code within to my liking served as my first real programming experience, to which to this day stands firmly as a fond memory that I can be proud of, and that I look to as my first real introduction to the field of computer science.
