My Gaming Biography

When I was born in Sacremento, California, my family was already big. I was kid five, followed shortly by a sister and brother. At four, I moved to Mississippi and hated moving so much that I never gained a southern accent the way a number of my siblings have. Then I got two more little brothers, putting me right smack in the middle of nine kids in a four bedroom house (well, three and a converted garage).

With so many siblings, you'd think I had a ready supply of gaming partners. And I did. Kinda. So long as what I wanted to play was Climb Up the Tree Blind Folded or perhaps Jump Off Of the Roof. When our second hand swing set split down the middle while we were currently playing on it (thanks, Rust!), the regular game became Climb On Two Halves Of a Rusty, Broken Swing Set With a Couple Of Completely Unsecured Two-By-Fours Laying Across As You Shove Each Other Trying To Be the Last Person To Touch the Ground. We later shortened the name of that game to Watch Your Step.

But never Monopoly. Never Risk. Never Connect 4. Not that they were great board games. They were all we had. That changed when I turned ten. Mom mom, after much convincing that it wasn't Satanic, got me a copy of Heroquest and Battlemaster for my birthday. Suddenly my brothers and I found ourselves spending more time inside. Less time risking our lives on activities the Devil wouldn't make us play.

Those games spread into Battletech, which we were introduced to by a buddy of ours who didn't know the rules. I saved up (who knows where I got the money...) and bought a set. My brothers fell in love. I enjoyed the game, but not as much as they did, and soon they bought all of my mechs from me. That was okay. My friend Cory had just picked up this strange book called Heroes Unlimited. It was a game. But it was a book. But there were no pieces. Or even a board. Just paper and pencils and dice. And with my Battletech money, I was able to pick up my own copy of Rifts, which I hid from my mom because she'd think it was Satanic.

At my granddad's funeral (on my mom's side), we met my cousin Billy (who is strangely Korean for my mom's very conservative Kentucky family. To this day, I don't know how he's related to us). He was in college. How cool. We were still in our early to mid teens. "Oh, you like Battletech?" he asked. "I've got some tech read outs in my car that are out of date. You want 'em? I also play this game called GURPS you should check out."

We get home. We play battletech. KC, my oldest brother, picks up GURPS when I am at the impressionable age of 13. My first character is still alive to this day. And that's saying something, considering the way my brother makes buying milk a life and death skill roll. Again, we convince mom it isn't Satanic. She lets us play GURPS and Heroes Unlimited and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, so long as we promise to never play Dungeons and Dragons. "That game," she says, "makes people kill themselves."

"Your uncle used to be a Satanist," she says, "and he says magic in that game is EXACTLY like real magic."

"Is this the same uncle wrongfully imprisoned for allegedly poisoning the spaghetti sauce at Ragu?" Our family does not eat spaghetti sauce from Ragu. We couldn't afford it, for starters, but even if we could, we don't do it because of my uncle's wrongful conviction.

But she never tells me if it's the same uncle. How many crazy brothers can she possibly have? Dad's brother once rocked out so hard with his band that the police were called by people who lived ten miles away. This is the uncle who says he saw the Devil at a crossroads. Dad lets me know which family is which.

My first girlfriend, if we can call her that, my first blind date who stuck with me as I stuck with her because no one else would stick with us. She went to Italy and brought back a big box of cards for Magic: the Gathering. She said her cousin Fabio loved the game and got her a bunch of cards. She didn't get it, so she gave them to me. Later, I would meet friends who were quitting magic and selling their cards off cheap. For the first five years I played magic, hundreds of cards passed through my hands (including revised clones, dopplegangers, serra angels, wrath of god, shivan dragons and on and on), I spent perhaps ten dollars total on the game.

She also had a friend in Long Beach. He knew of a game shop called Dream Weavers. For the first time in my life, I met gamers who knew games. Not like me and my friends, who picked up a book and figured things out together. They knew. And they taught me. World of Darkness hooked me for its simplicity and an angsty power-gamer trip that appealed to anyone fourteen years old. She and I broke up because we realized we were really just friends anyway. But I kept her friends and the wonderful games they brought with them.

We played everything. Magic and Netrunner, Roborally and the Great Dalmuti, Werewolf and Vampire, LARPS and table tops, HOL and homebrew systems, and Warhammer of every color and stripe. I was in gaming nirvana. I was zen with my dice.

And then the store closed down. And we couldn't hang out as regularly. Most of their parents weren't about to let twenty high school gamers crash their couches. Jeff's would, and Dustin's, but they were the exception. Plus, Long Beach was REALLY far away. Twenty miles! That's huge when you're a kid with no gas money. "Besides," dad would say, who objected less to gaming than my mom except in terms of Dungeons and Dragons, "there's a game shop five miles away by the air force base. Two of them even."

Yeah. With no gaming space. And no friends.

My gaming circle closed to just guys I went to school with. People I'd personally taught to game. But they were all into Magic now, and lost interest in board games and RPGs. I got a sweet deal on their books though. My cards for their books (almost exclusively Palladium books). I guess some people just liked Urza's Saga more than they liked Mega Damage. My gaming circle narrowed more, even though my sister still regularly saw my old Long Beach buddies (she was dating my friend Matt, and would later marry him and have two beautiful daughters. And you said gaming only led to Satanism, mom).

I could count my gaming friends one one and a half hands. We crammed our games in when we could. Long weekends. Lunch at school. The back of the bus on band trips. A brief flirtation with Mage Knight did little reignite the old spark. Then my mom decided I had too much Satan in my life. She took all of my gaming books, highlighted anything that caught her eye that violated the Laws of Heaven, and then sat me down to show me page by page why I was on a fast track to Hell. Every book she could find (essentially all but those loaned out to my friend) disappeared into an undisclosed dumpster that very night.

Years passed. I did a lot of theatre to fill my role playing itch. I graduated. I moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career, then moved back when I realized I didn't know the first thing about acting as a career. Agents? What? I didn't devote two years of my life to preaching religion. Instead I spent five years at college learning how to teach things like English and History and German. And all the while I wrote to fill the story itch. And all the while, I practiced with an improv troupe to keep my impromptu character and story development sharp. And all the while I longed to game.

I picked up a few games over the years. Zombies!!! and Heroclix and Munchkin and Settlers. I played them a little at college. Toys R Us had a sale on Hasbro games and my roommates and I picked up Heroscape games two-for-one. Twenty bucks is an amazing price for that much plastic. And I remembered how much I loved to game. My girlfriend of one year knew I loved board games and found this strange and cool little site called "BoardGameGeek" and bought Puerto Rico, because according to that site, it was the best game in the world. I really enjoyed it. I joined the site (she did years later at my insistence).

I was hooked. My gaming fire once more caught spark to kindling and burned hot. Lots and lots of games followed. But I still wanted the experience of the RPG. Improv was good, but...

Why the hell haven't I been playing RPGs with my improv buddies? It's what we do already. Come up with a character, work together to create a story, and anything one person says is truth in the world of the game. It's improv with dice rolls and a smaller chance of tearing your ACL like Robert did. So I made a zombie apocalypse setting hack to World of Darkness. Rob, Jere, David, Matt, Chris, my girlfriend, and I. Everyone played normal people trying to secure the city of L.A. from the living dead. We had a blast. Suddenly, we were chomping at the bit to run for each other. Chris took my notes and ran his own game in zombie ridden L.A. Matt picked up Iron Kingdoms and we adventured in a floating city called Gear. My girlfriend of two years was ecstatic. She always wanted to play RPGs in high school, but was too afraid to ask the nerds if she could join. Everyone agreed.

Heaven.

Even though most of us have moved, we still game together. My wife of two years (previously my girlfriend of five years) and I drive to the coast, where we meet with Rob and Jere. On the way, we pick up David in Hattiesburg. Matt, who lives in Jackson with us, stays in Jackson. He can't drive to the coast with as much freedom as us. Still, he logs onto Skype and joins us, as does Chris who is now a forensics investigator in San Diego.

And still my gaming horizons expand. We've met several more gamers here in the dice desert of Jackson, MS. I design perhaps one or two board games a year (which I never do anything with because, like acting, I have no understanding of the business side of things). I toy with RPG writing (which I never do anything with. See above). And having recently discovered narrative heavy games, GMless games, and games that focus on cooperative storytelling more than combat resolution and dungeon crawling, I suspect they will expand more and more as the years come.

The Beast in the Bathroom

I’ve had my life threatened by some random angry stranger while waiting for a bus in L.A. I’ve been stranded in a foreign country for a while with no way to contact my family at home. I’ve told a guy twice my size that I thought he should leave a certain much smaller friend of mine alone. I love turbulence and fast roller coasters. I love rides that suddenly drop you when you least expect it. I used to let my friend hit me with his car, just to shock and amuse passersby. I used to run a couple miles nightly through the bad parts of town for my exercise. I have no qualms about performing in front of many people. I am fine with inevitable death. I’m not arachnophobia, acrophobia, or claustrophobic. I seem pretty fearless, but there’s always been one thing in particular that scares me like nothing else. Strange bathrooms.

I don’t understand where this fear comes from. I’m not afraid of small spaces. I’ve had to share changing rooms, so being seen naked isn’t the problem. Though I dislike that bathrooms are often cold, that’s hardly a reason to fear them. Even so, I am frightened of them. Modern bathroom arrangement, especially in public bathrooms, seems designed to terrify. Sound echoes from the tile to the toilet. Every gasp, grunt, or cough reverberates until it returns to my ears with an intimidating ethereal quality it lacked when it left my lips. The eternally dripping faucet drives me mad as the water splashes like the sound of blood in the creepy caverns and haunted houses of bad horror movies. The florescent lights are in a state of perpetual flicker, washing the room in the eerie gritty blue of films like Saw and Pulse, the blue I’ve come to associate with horrible death. The mirror is always cracked, causing my reflection to line up just a little off. My disconnected face stares back at me fragmented like a scar that wasn’t sewn up properly. The corroded faucets spew blood-rust water that freezes my hands with its arctic cold and fills my mouth with the vile taste of unwashed pennies. Though I dare not even bring it remotely close to my head, the taste is there just the same, making me want to gag, to throw the door open and breathe once more the fresh air of freedom and feel the warm yellows and greens of a safer world. It does not matter if the bathroom I enter is the world’s nicest and cleanest. Once the door locks, they all turn into these intimidating septic pits.

I'm not sure why I have this irrational fear of unfamiliar restrooms. From the moment I step in and lock the door, there’s a terrible sense of foreboding breeding in the back of my skull, the anticipation of some cataclysmic event that for some reason can and will only happen within the confines of this eight-by-ten room of tile and porcelain. It’s never a plausible fear either. I’m don’t fear some angry trucker will come in and stab me for taking to long. I don’t fear serial rapists will kick in the doors. That would be at least possible, if not probable. When I enter that tomb of the unknown bowel movement, my fear is ghosts. Someone could be watching me and I would never know it. There could be some strange entity observing me at my most private of moments.

Perhaps this fear stems from childhood experience. I suspected my own bathroom was haunted. When showering, the hot water would frequently cut off suddenly and unexpectedly. Some may say that it was simply bad plumbing. A faucet runs hot in the kitchen and a shower turns cold in the bathroom, like Butterfly Effect: The Home Game. If that were so, the hot water knob would not have been rotated to the off position. Perhaps its because I once used the bathroom only to see a person-shaped shadow dart across the room while I was home alone. My privacy felt very violated. Either way, the result was the same. Locked or not, alone or not, I was never alone in a bathroom.

After many years of forced acquaintance, I’ve made peace with my parents’ bathroom. I use it without fear. Whatever is there has not hurt me aside from the severe neural shock that comes from rapid temperature changes. After a year and a half of constant use, I’ve finally ok with my current bathroom. I cannot say the same for other bathrooms. I haven’t had time to acquaint myself with their idiosyncrasies. Until I’ve spent years with every rest stop and Texaco in the world, I fear I shall always fear my Achilles heel: The bathroom.

Love on a Skateboard and a Massive Tangle of Tangents

Once upon a time, if I had to hazard a guess, we'll say in 1991, I had a dream that I was skateboarding through the halls of my church growing up and went into the nursery, as I was so fond of doing in those days. Allow me to make an aside.

Babies make a lot of noise and babies like a lot of toys. As such, our church building had a room set far away from the chapel at the end of several zigzagging hallways located near the library (actually a materials center, but we let it dream big) and the clerk's office. In this room, various members of the congregation would watch any kid under three while the rest of us were getting edified according to our age group. My guess is that keeping a baby from screaming is just as holy an act as learning about our Lord and Savior, and thus, it was considered fair to leave some church-goers with the screaming tiny masses. To help combat the cacophony of crying, they had cabinets full of toys for the children. I loved the nursery because even at the age of nine, I still loved playing with any and all toys. G.I. Joes? Yup. Ninja Turtles? Yup. Five large, multicolored plastic rings that stacked neatly on a large plastic cylinder creating a sort of rounded pyramid shape if you sorted them by size? Yup. Even that little phone on a string with the wheels and the eyes that would look around as you pulled it, the whole while a little bell hidden somewhere in its plastic body went "ding, ding, ding" all the way home.

In said dream I rode this skateboard--far better than ever I rode it in real life, mind you--into the nursery, presumably to play with toys. And toys were there, to be sure. As were other children playing away. However, also in this room stood a girl the likes of whom I'd never seen. She was attractive, my age, and had a name that I think started with a K. Instantly, I was Mr. Too Cool for School. I did tricks on the skateboard to show off--again, tricks I wouldn't even attempt in the waking world, I told her I was just hear to make sure the kids didn't hurt themselves playing with the toys, unless of course, she wanted to play with them too, which was cool by me. I was a cool, understanding cat who was open to all kinds of experiences. Most important, upon waking, I remembered I told her I was ten.

I was convinced this dream was prophetic. In scripture study, it seemed every dream anyone ever had was prophetic. Why shouldn't mine be?

For the next year, after every church meeting I would hang out in the nursery, convinced that eventually she would come. Was she there at night? During the day? I couldn't remember. My only hope was to maintain a near constant presence if ever I wanted to meet my destined lady love.* Logic should have told me the dream would never come true. I never brought my skateboard to church. I would certainly never be allowed to ride it through what, at the time, felt like labyrinthine corridors of the church hall. Also, I never practiced doing anything on my skateboard except going forward in a straight line and falling down. I especially spent a lot of time practicing falling down, it seems. I would NEVER be able to do anything remotely resembling the tricks I did in the dream.

Still, I was convinced that one day I would go to church and there would be a skateboard lying there in the parking lot, eagerly waiting for me to set my feet to it and do ollies in the hallways so that I might impress Kristen or Katrina or Karoline or whatever her name was. Fueled by a force much greater than myself, my feet, my legs, my body would instinctively know what to do to perform a kickflip, a handstand, an ollie, and some weird thing I'd never seen before, but it involved spinning and the windowsill two feet off the ground.

Age ten came and went. No Kathrine or Karen or Karlita. I convinced myself that I had misheard myself in the dream, that I said I was eleven in the dream. Maybe even twelve! Goodness, I had two whole more years in which she might show up and whisk me away to relationship bliss!

Eleven came and went, and twelve followed suit. Every week found me waiting for her, waiting for that skateboard and that talent to miraculously arrive. The weeks passed. Weeks in which I could have spent playing in the "cultural hall," trying to jump high enough to reach the top of the padded wall panels, playing on the stage or scaling the basketball hoops.

But she never did show up. And I never did become the awesome skateboard virtuoso I was meant to be. I did, at least, stop hanging out in the nursery.

*Ever since I was old enough to understand that there were two genders, I've been a sucker for love. My first crush was my first day in kindergarten. I carried that crush for seven years. Yes, I realize that time frame overlaps with the story above. No, it never occurred to Little Me that I was being unfaithful to a secret, imagined relationship with a real person by longing for this completely imaginary individual.

Friends in Dresses

I was four years old and everything that came with it: young, innocent, and horribly naïve. My friend Justin McClinton had come to play as children often do. I really don’t remember much about him except that he was the only kid my age in walking distance and that he had curly brown hair. He may have been black. I was too young to even notice the difference then. We’d spent the afternoon basking in the sun playing Snakes in the Grass, a game we created in which we, being much shorter than the grass in the field behind my house, would run blindly through the tall stalks of gold and tackle the other the instant they were spotted. I had no idea what any of it had to do with snakes, but I did know there was grass involved and that “snake in the grass” was a real phrase my mom used to describe salesmen and some of my brother’s friends. Following an itchy round of getting tackled in the weeds, we would throw spiky bits from the bomb trees and hurt our little four year old bodies some more. Eventually, it was time for He-Man and Go-Bots, the K-Mart Transformers, and other afternoon cartoons. This was our daily ritual, which always ended with Justin having to go home shortly after dark. It was an inevitable parting, always bewailed with all the begging and pleading our four-year-old vocabularies could muster, but never to any luck. Soon even the begging became routine. Even though we knew we’d never win, we would still try, in the hope that maybe some day our moms and dads would come to their senses. They would clearly see the inherent logic of our four-year-old argument: there is still fun to be had and thus, there is no reason for either of us to leave. Our reasoning was so obvious, so direct, our parents must have been idiots not to understand why parting us was folly.

One particular afternoon, Justin and I were watching Bugs Bunny and dreading the coming separation. Bugs was trying to get away from Elmer Fudd, and after being caught in the old “Duck Season-Wabbit Season” line, Bugs ran and assumed a disguise, throwing his would-be assassin off the scent. At that instant, lightning struck my brain. Like Elmer Fudd, my parents weren’t clever enough to be reasoned with, but that meant they must be easily fooled. While my mom was in the other room preparing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, I laid out my plan Justin. Being as brilliant as I was, he instantly recognized foolproof nature of the plan. We finished our cartoons and scurried off to mom’s room. Digging through the pile of laundry to be washed, I found a couple of floral printed sheets.

“Put this on,” I said to Justin. “We’ll wear these sheets like dresses and my mom will think we’re pretty ladies.”

Realization flashed across Justin’s face. “Yeah! The sheets have flowers and girls like flowers and boys don’t!”

Excitedly, we wrapped ourselves up and paraded around the room in our best sashay. We considered the need for make-up, but before we could reach a consensus, my mom entered with two sandwiches and a surprised look on her face. Clearly she was shocked to see two strange women in her room.

“What are you two doing?” she cried.

“Us?” I replied, “Oh we girls are just looking for some pretty make-up.”

“What?” my mom cried, confused.

Not wanting to worry my mother too much, I explained that everything was all right. “Those dumb boys are out in the yard playing with bugs.”

“Alright, enough is enough. You boys get out of those dirty sheets right now. Justin, I’m calling your mother to take you home.”

Curses! She was more clever than we had taken her for. How could she be smart enough to see right through our disguise and still not see the error of her ways in sending Justin home? Justin and I tried to convince her to let him stay, but the moment his parents arrived and saw him wearing a makeshift dress, it was all over. I guess there’s something about a small boy in drag that makes parents uneasy, especially on a military base. Justin was stripped of his sheet and taken home. But then that’s how things are. Sometimes people have to leave and there’s nothing you can do about it. So I said goodnight to Justin and spent the rest of the evening reveling in the fun that we did get, rather than crying over the time we missed out on.