GemStone

4843-word narrative essay on being addicted to GemStone III in middle school.

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This essay first appeared in The Paris Review in Spring 2026.

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GemStone

1

In 1995, when I was in seventh grade, I became addicted to a multiplayer online role-playing game with no graphics or sound, just words. It was set on a two-mooned planet called Elanthia, in the continent of Elanith. There, I was Esperath Wraithling, a dark elf wizard with black eyes and black hair.

I’d chosen everything about my character, including his statistics. Character creation involved “rolling.” Each roll produced ten numbers. People rolled for hours or days to get the highest numbers to apply to ten attributes—discipline, strength, etc. Player-written guides helped me decide what to do. Dartaghan’s wizard’s guide began:

The following is for you wizards out there that want to create and develop a wizard that will come into their power fully as they approach maturity around level 30 or so. Following this path will not be easy.

2

A virtual world is a persistent, shared reality in which player-controlled characters enact real-time changes governed by automated rules. GemStone, one of the longest-running virtual worlds, was created in 1987. It became GemStone II in 1988, GemStone III in 1990, and GemStone IV in 2003. Each iteration expanded and complexified the game.

Everything that happens in GemStone appears on the screen as lines of text that scroll up, like in a chat room. In middle school, I saved some of the text logs on 3.5 inch floppy disks, but I no longer have those. So in 2024, to help me remember the game, I created a wizard named NiniLali in GemStone IV.

He spawned in the town of Wehnimer’s Landing, as Esperath had twenty-nine years earlier. After a description of his surroundings (“Silver-veined grey marble comprises a short wall that lines the entire expanse of the courtyard…”), there was a line break, then: “Obvious paths: out”—the underline meant the word was interactable.