The other day I found my high school self online. He was on a long abandoned forum channeling his frustration and hormones into a rant about overpowered strategies in a card game that he played. It was a surreal experience for me, stumbling upon a moment in my life that was all too familiar to me, but also felt so foreign due to the amount of time since I originally wrote the post. Spotting myself among a couple dozen anonymous users on a once thriving forum, it got me thinking. How did my internet usage habits influence how I think about myself now? How do I think about my online presentation now compared to my more anonymous days? I fully intend to return to this disgruntled youth, but I think it’s important to frame him in the context of a mid/late 2000s adolescence so I can give my takeaways from this experience.

Growing up during the turn of the century was a cultural moment unique to itself; and I believe many of us take for granted how special the ride has been. In 2017, online presentation is a practice all too familiar to anybody with an account on Facebook or Instagram. Speaking for myself, I take minutes to make sure that the next status I’m positing is an accurate reflection of my informal “brand,” I take great care to make sure that pictures of myself are curated to my liking, I don’t post on this blog for months on end due to a combination of laziness and a vicious internal editor that says everything I create isn’t good enough. Needless to say, everything that goes online is filtered, distilled, revised, and mutilated to a point that it’s no longer a fair representation of me, but of a bizarre caricature.

I feel confident in asserting that everybody that was reared during the revolution of interconnectivity practices very similar internet hygiene. We have this shared experience for two reasons:

• Humans have always taken great care to present their best self in a public space, and our online personalities are just the latest iteration of the self.
• We all had a moment where we realized the internet was much more public than we originally thought.

I want to focus primarily on this second point, I think the self-inflicted embarrassment that typically forces one to learn this lesson is a pretty common framework for how people my age cemented our self-presentation habits online. We’re almost to the good stuff in this story, but I still need to give a little more context about my high school self.

Ever since I was a kid, I love playing card games. Much to my mom’s frustration, I played every single game I could get my hands on, those little pieces of cardboard crack collected in messy stacks all over my room. I played Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, MLB Showdown, and I’m sure there were half a dozen more that I at least bought cards for once. But the one I got the most involved in was Duel Masters. Since it was a largely unpopular game, I wasn’t able to find many people that I could play with on a regular basis. So like any kid my age, I turned to the internet to solve my problems.

I found a fan made java application that allowed you to build decks and play with people from all over the world, it was a dream come true. I dove in and got involved. I built several decks, joined the forum, and I even found a couple players that I could talk strategy with into the wee hours of the morning. Needless to say, I felt like I was living out a trading card game anime where I was the plucky hero who would always draw the perfect card for whatever pinch he was in at the time. All was great, at least for the time being.

About a month into my regular participation in the online Duel Masters forums, the team that hacked together the online client announced that they completed coding the most recent set of cards into the system. The introduction of this set included a card that in my eyes, ruined the strategy of the game forever. “Bolmeteus Steel Dragon” was a card that was so cost-efficient, and ignored so many of the game’s basic mechanics, that it rendered several once viable strategies obsolete. You couldn’t go two games without playing against a deck that focused on using this card. You could imagine the frustration seething from this high schooler who’s leisure derived mainly from playing cards online with strangers.

If memory serves, I spent about a month getting thrashed by this card. Player after player would roll out “Bolmeteus Steel Dragon” decks and tear me to pieces multiple times a day. My win/loss ratio dipped below 50% (again, a point of pride for me at that point in my life). Hope became despair. I was a broken shell of a teenager. So after another Friday night of getting thoroughly picked apart by another series of players using that card, I did what any teenager does when they face insurmountable adversity, I logged onto the forums and I complained about it.

Several hours later, I would publish a post that would become personally infamous. It would later go on to inspire this blog post. It was titled “BROKEN: Thoughts on Over-Powered Cards.” At the time, I thought I was writing a magnum opus, a call to action to my fellow players to stop using this terribly broken card, I used every literary device I picked up in my Cambridge English classes to make my argument come off a sophisticated as possible. I hacked away at my keyboard until I heard birds chirping. Satisfied with my work, I didn’t bother proofreading, certainly they would recognize my brilliant prose and ironclad logic. With a click of the “Post” button, I sealed my fate, then went to bed.

The next day, as soon as I had a chance I hopped onto the forum. As expected, I got a huge response, over 50 replies since I wrote the post the night before. I took a dive into the comments to see the accolades that my fellow players were heaping upon me. Only to my horror, no such accolades were found. Much like that evil steel dragon, the other forum members were tearing me apart. Not just with the typical viciousness that characterized anonymous forums in the late 2000s either, but by demonstrating that I was by and large, uninformed on the topic. My understanding of the game was elementary and I didn’t have the slightest grasp on anything beyond the game’s basic mechanics. And it only got worse from there.

By the end of the day, even the head moderator of the forum got in on the action. She wrote her own article, using the flow of my argument as sort of bullying mad-lib, to explain to everyone in the community why I specifically didn’t know what I was talking about. Her conclusion is the one thing that always stood out in my mind, when she said:

“…the problem arises when young players think they have an understanding of Duel Masters when in all reality they have no idea what they’re talking about and just want to waste everybody else’s time with their complaints.”

Her criticism of my argument was biting, it made me question my very core. It didn’t help that everybody on the forum echoed her opinion more or less and further dogpiled onto me. Up until that point in my life, I don’t think that criticism ever affected me quite like the time a person online told me that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. It was different than receiving criticism from a teacher, a coach, my parents, or my pastor. Those people were figures of authority, they knew what they were talking about when providing feedback. But when the criticism came from a person I viewed as a peer (and was more or less anonymous outside of my interactions in this game)? That was a reality check I was not equipped to deal with.

Having that blunt criticism levied at me was a watershed moment in my life. It was a real moment of humility for me, one that I reflected on for several months after the fact. Ultimately I think it made me much more mindful of what I said and who I said it to. I didn’t have all the answers, and there would likely be people out there who wouldn’t agree with what I thought, some would even be downright hostile to how I thought. Thanks to the ever embarrassing “On This Day” feature Facebook implemented, I can see a distinct change in my post frequency, the subject manner I felt comfortable sharing online, and even to an extent my writing style. It was such a minor moment in my life, but the reverberations it had in how I conduct myself in public spaces was much more profound than most other moments in my life.

I would stop playing the game shortly thereafter. Probably about a month later I would go to college, schooling and trying to survive the greek system at school would cause me to drop my card playing habit. After thumbing through some of the more recent posts on the forum after I stumbled across it again in 2017, the community remained active until summer of 2016, but the posts mainly consisted of asking who was still around. Seeing the long since abandoned forum was a cathartic moment, and reliving my personal defining moment that would go on to influence how I interact online to this very day.