![]() Over the past decade or so AIM has slowly been replaced with services that de-emphasize traditional internet patois. Over AIM, we'd tell each other what we were assigned to draw, instructing whoever was guessing to wait a solid ten seconds before revealing the answer. "That's why my friend June and I were passionate about cheating. ![]() It was very wholesome," says D'Anastasio. One player would etch out an image in a Microsoft Paint-like interface while the chat would dutifully guess at what it could possibly be. "One of the Flash games I discovered was basically Pictionary, but online and with a chat room. I don't think anything sums up the juvenile euphoria of instant messaging quite like using that power to cheat in stakes-free freeware. As an 11-year-old, she was already griefing in the multiplayer Flash games she shared with her friends over AIM. A service that belonged to teenagers, sequestered from leering ears and concerned authority figures.Ĭecilia D'Anastasio, senior reporter at Kotaku (and a friend of mine) went a step further. The expectation would be that if we're adding each other, we're going to chat regularly.… It had a weight to it."ĪIM was surreptitious, clandestine. "I'd only really do it with people I felt close enough with. "I wouldn't hand out lightly," explains Freeman. It was rare to feel fully untethered from your parents, so you guarded that sliver of liberty with your life. A domain, an aesthetic, a communication channel you could control. ![]() As Freeman notes, a screen name was one of the few commodities a young person could fully own. A service that belonged to teenagers, sequestered from leering ears and concerned authority figures. That secrecy is immediately familiar to me. "I was still in high school," says Freeman. ![]() Eventually they met, but not before Freeman satisfied her aunt, (who she was staying with) with a fabricated narrative-Glenn was no longer a dude from the internet, now he was just an old family friend who happened to move east. She spent months locked in the holy matrimony of Final Fantasy XI and nightly AIM treatises with a boy named Glenn from New York City. Years ago Nina Freeman, level designer at Fullbright and one of the foremost thinkers on love and technology, launched a flat-out covert campaign to get close with one of those friends. Boston's Kyle Seeley nailed that feeling perfectly with 2015's Emily is Away, and this year's sequel Emily is Away Too-both of which transport you back to the spongy leather office chairs of your parents' computer room. In 2017, the web feels less like something I approach for those connections, and more like an overwhelming ennui that I'm constantly trying to outrun. ![]() The early millennium revolutions in online multiplayer pitted us together and asked us to collaborate, so of course we carried those early internet accords to their logical extremes-talking all night in lonely chat boxes about what's cool, what sucks, and how easy it is to relate. It was simply the medium of choice to grouse about homework, The Decemberists, girls I liked, and the rest of my random bullshit.īut I do believe that there's a special union between AIM and people who grew up playing games, or at least came of age on the internet with people who played games. As a 26-year old, I'm crucially aware that my appreciation for the prodigal instant messenger is colored by a nostalgia that has nothing to do with the service itself. As a pioneering force of internet communication, anyone born in the early '90s or late '80s has spent some time on the platform. If you were on AIM, you probably remember how once upon a time those bonds felt illegal.ĪIM belongs to all of us. ![]()
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