When I was in elementary school, I and a lot of my friends did not have a phone. So, instead of texting or contacting each other on mobile apps, we played habbo Hotel.
Habbo Hotel was an online game where you could customize your avatar, decorate virtual rooms and communicate with other players. You needed coins to buy furniture and make the rooms. Then you could put your room online and anybody could join and check the room out. Users were really creative with their rooms, creating themes and stories around them.
I myself was not as dedicated to creating the most impressive rooms, as I did not have the money or patience to do so. However, I did like going into big extravagant rooms with a lot of visitors. You could call me somewhat of a menace in these rooms, as I always stirred up some kind of drama with somebody.
As a visitor you could not do much in other peoples rooms, but you could always make your avatar do different dances. Sometimes you could travel through rooms, through portals. Other times you could interact with the furniture. One of my favorite actions that you could do in the game was go swimming, as this was also a “furniture” you could add to the room.
However, besides being a fun creative game for people to share their virtual room decorations, it could also be a scary place. Like I mentioned before, I got into some drama at times. When you were in these rooms you could talk to the people in it. A text cloud would appear above your head with text whenever you typed. This way you could have full on conversations with strangers. As we were all pixelated avatars, this was all anonymous. This way, unconsciously, I was dealing with my own online persona. I had the power to be whoever I wanted to be to these strangers and nobody would know if I was being authentic or not.
I think at some point this power got to me and I, a very quiet person in real life, started creating arguments in these rooms. To me it was a great way to escape reality and just piss some people off. Habbo Hotel is also the place where I learned a lot of cusswords, until the game started censoring them.
This online persona obviously did not match my offline persona. And what was even more interesting is that the game was so oversaturated at the time that I could keep playing with the same character and display a completely different persona in a different room. There was no indication I had been arguing with other players in another room after I joined another. This way my online persona kept changing and I did not have to do anything to get away with it.
Now, I know this all sounds insane. However, I am glad I got the chanse to be in this game and play around with my persona. Even if it was just for a silly little argument with a stranger online. It allowed me to express myself without any consequences and learn how others react to different personas of me.
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