A Gamer's Life

Back on the horse and riding into the internet... um hinterlands.... or something.

Wed, 11 Feb 2004 21:07:10 GMT

Okay, I'm really going to stick with it this time....

Gamer-Geek has finally been updated with a piece on gaming and collecting. What prompted it was my successful sell-off of games and toys on Ebay this past week. Much to my surprise, people seem to want my crap and will pay handsomely for it.

Through the magic of the free market, my old games will be transformed into a shiny new ATI 9800XT 256MB video card, courtesy of discounts through work connections and my auction sales. I can damn-near smell the Half-Life 2 voucher from here. Smells like... victory.

Ebay sales part 2 will fund my processor and memory upgrade. After that, I will be embarking on an Ebay business experiment involving Heroclix. If it works, I may never again have to actually spend my own money on those little pieces of plastic crack.

Life is good.

Personal geek history, parte the seconde

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 16:32:33 GMT

The Days of Being Mild (or, the long, dark gaming session of the soul)

One of the biggest mistakes I made was to not leave home when I entered university. While I did meet some people during my time at U of T, my status as a commuter and inherent self-consciousness kept me from making many friends. I joined the U of T role-playing club in my second year and finally learned how to run a proper campaign. On the home front, my high school friends were moving on to other, less nerdy, pursuits. University didn’t adversely impact on my gaming and my new job at the Silver Snail dug me even deeper into the collecting hole.
I had more money than sense in those days. My city friends, all rabid anime fans/import gamers, influenced me to drop a ton of cash on a Sega Mega-Drive and MegaCD. The latter cost me around 600 bucks. While the Mega-Drive was a solid system that I easily converted to play domestic games, the MegaCD was, in retrospect, a total waste of cash. The only playable games on the system were a war game called Tenkafubu and Showdown in the Tokyo Majjongland, Part 3. I went so far as to buy a kanji dictionary to translate the instruction manuals. I had a lot of time on my hands. I had so much time to waste, even with my course work, that I bought an SNES and got heavily into Games Workshop miniatures and CCGs.
This became a real problem when I graduated in 1994. The economy was in the crapper and job prospects for a book-smart but social-stupid BA were next to nil. Free from the burden of full-time work, I spent most days gaming in solitude. It didn’t take me long to decide to take the plunge and move out on my own in an effort to save my mental health.

The Renaissance Nerd

The person I am now can largely be attributed to the changes I experienced over the last decade. I realize now that I will have been and always will be a geek. I envision my future retirement home self struggling to roll a d20 or manipulate a Sony PS15 controller with palsied hands. As I am found of bullet-points, here is a list, in no particular order, of the most significant personal geek events of the last ten years:

· Meeting, dating and eventually marrying a wonderful nerd-girl, without whom I would not have the freedom to pursue my obsessions.
· Joining the Toronto VLARP scene, coming out of my shell and meeting whole bunch of fun people, some of whom I remain friends with to this day.
· Becoming assistant manager of the Silver Snail, repairing the gaming department and getting a taste of meaningful work.
· Taking the risk to go back to school and entering the lucrative IT field, which gives me the monetary resources required to enjoy the geek lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.

I must admit the future appears very bright and geeky. I will be joining my voice to the whirlwind of internet gaming commentary with the site www.gamer-geek.com (thanks GrinningSkull). Who knows where this will take me, but at least it can’t make my writing any worse.

Right?

First!!!1!!1

Sun, 04 Jan 2004 17:39:56 GMT

Long time since my promised first update, eh?

What with completing my schooling and good old-fashioned procrastination, it’s been a few months since I’ve touched this blog. Now I should be back on course… that is unless I get completely sucked in by my current games of choice.

This inaugural post will focus on my evolution as a gamer, from my earliest memories to today.

Childhood (or, the pre-VIC 20 days)

I am an only child. I grew up in the small community (although not so small now) of Oakville, just west of Toronto. No siblings meant never having to share and, in retrospect, made me a little spoiled. I didn’t share my toys with other kids at school, because my parents thought that I would lose or break them. Rarely did I have any kids over to our apartment because my parents didn’t want to deal with the mess or noise. If I wanted to play a board game I was left to my own devices.
I never lacked for toys due to weekly road trips to malls around the GTA or western New York. My action figure collection (boy, do I miss my Micronauts) was impressive but private. Oakville had no good department stores: we had a Towers and a Consumer’s Distributing, but we were years away from the opening of the Oakville Centre mall. Toronto was the promised land of toy departments, especially around Christmas.
It was at the downtown Toronto Simpson’s Toyland that I first saw it: the home console version of Pong. Even on a black and white TV it was impressive. Unlike the other shrieking, clanging electronic junk of Toyland, Pong had a wonderful simplicity that was in a category all its own. I played it for a bit against other entranced kids until my mother got tired of waiting and dragged me away. You can guess what happened next.
Sadly, my hopes and dreams were immediately shot down. There would be no Pong in our household. The reasons put forth by my grandmother were:

• I had no one to play it with (since I couldn’t take it out of the house/have kids over).
• It was too expensive (which was probably correct).
• She had heard that video games would wreck the TV (at the time, this was actually true).

So now I was left with anticipating trips to malls on weekends to get my Pong fix. The only good malls were the ones with toy stores or arcades. I was not pleased to be dragged through the crappy malls. Arcades were coming into their own at this time, but due to the imagined “unsavory” characters who hung around them, I was not allowed to go. Only on family summer vacations could I spend quality time with my bleeping, flashing friends. With the coming of the Atari 2600 in 1977, we went through the same song and dance. No Atari for me. It wasn’t all bad; I did get the handheld version of Pong and other assorted Mattell LED games (Merlin, Baseball) to keep me occupied on road trips.
My exposure to video games expanded drastically when my mother decided to take up roller-skating. The 2 rinks near home both had extensive arcades, and in short order I learned how to “spark” the machines into giving me free credits. Even though I spent a lot of time at the rink, even into my early teens, I was rarely in my skates.
Then came adolescence. Our should I say, my nerdolescence.

Teenaged Wasteland (or, the geek ascendant)

With the end of grade school came my first exposure to computers. As part of a select (read: “gifted”) group, we were carted off every couple of weeks to my future high school’s computer “lab”. It was situated in the technical wing of the building and consisted of a dozen brand new VIC-20s connected to not-so-new black and white TVs. We were introduced to BASIC programming and…. well, that’s about it. We only really knew GOTO and PRINT statements. I enrolled in a computer workshop at the local YMCA and messed around with Apple II e’s. And by messed around with, I mean played Choplifter a lot.
Now I had the ammunition I needed to present a reasoned argument to my grandmother about the importance of having a computer in our home. Of course, my true motivation was game playing. To my surprise, my grandmother and mother agreed that it might be best for my education to get one, although they had no interest in using it themselves. So, on my 12th birthday, I received my VIC-20 (along with the monitor and tape drive).
Around the same time I had started working as a counselor in training at the Y during the summer. I was paid an honourarium of 7 bucks a day. I discovered that this windfall bought a lot of comic books, enough to start collecting. I also discovered, in the newly opened Oakville Centre mall’s W.H. Smith’s, the Dungeons and Dragons basic set. And thus, my fate was sealed.
My teenage years were a whirlwind of bad role-playing campaigns, increasingly powerful gaming platforms and marathon sessions in the local arcade. The VIC-20 made way for the C64 (introducing me to game piracy) which lasted me until the end of university in 1994. The damn thing was still fully functional when I traded up to a 486 in 1996. My console systems enjoyed a higher rate of turnover during this time as I went from a Vectrex to an NES. Regrettably, I abandoned these systems to the trash heap of history.

Why I'm compelled to do this.

Sun, 27 Apr 2003 23:38:52 GMT

What led me to this?

Introduction

I’ve toyed with the idea of starting a blog for some time, but I couldn’t come up with a valid topic. I’m not big on revealing the intimate details of my life to anyone save my wife and I tend to look upon most blogs with a sort of distaste. Since my life isn’t a train-wreck of failed relationships and ambitions I don’t have much interest or patience for most biographical blogs. Political and satirical weblogs are another issue entirely, and maybe I’ll list a few of those down the road (read: if this experiment holds my attention past a couple of weeks).

So, why am I doing this? I’ve had the feeling lately that my creativity is starting to erode. I haven’t written anything since my few abortive attempts at script/comic writing almost 6 years ago. Prior to that I would write papers during university. Because it’s been so long and my current career doesn’t require it my writing has gotten very rusty. Hopefully this will change, with the aforementioned caveat regarding my attention span.

My focus will primarily be on gaming. More specifically, what it is about gaming that has made it fairly central to my life as far back as I can remember. “Gaming” encompasses everything from video games through LARPing, from the simplest card game like Euchre (which I’ve always been terrible at) to the most complex MMORPG like Anarchy Online. I hope to answer the question as to why gaming is central to my life. My wife may claim my fascination as escapism but I’d like to think it goes deeper than that. Maybe I’ll find out in time.

I don’t intend this blog to be entirely stiff or humourless. Otherwise, even if someone is interested in reading my scribblings, I wouldn’t be able to keep people interested. I may drift off to other topics, but my intention is to always circle back to my central theme.

As always, thanks to my wife for setting me up with the account.