Thursday, January 13, 2011

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 "I've got some tech read outs in my car that are out of date.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.

2 comments:

  1. Getting to know you a little better. Great writing Sean! Cheers, Leonie

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  2. Memory Lane! *Heather

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