I began my gaming journey around about 1982, at age 9. It all started when a
friend of a friend (names witheld to disguise the fact that I have no recollection
of these individuals outside of this context) purchased the red box Dungeons
& Dragons basic set (the one with the sweet Erol Otus cover). We got together,
none of us knowing the rules (except that said possessor of the game professed
to know a few of them) and set about, somehow and nebulously, to challenge the
Keep on the Borderlands (also our first exposure to the use of contour lines
on a map). All I really recall is that we were making a map and got almost nowhere.
But my imagination was so aroused that I begged my custodians to purchase it
for me at the earliest opportunity. I was already a voracious reader, much to
their content nonchalance, so it wasn't really a hard sell. And then, those
glorious days of paging through it, looking at pictures of grim adventurers
and breath weapon dispersement patterns... I was hooked.
Really, it was the usual bunch of xenocidal nonsense for the first few years
- enter dungeon, kill critter, take power-ups, kill critter, find blue key,
progess to level 2, etc. But hey, I was young and it was fun. Unfortunately,
I ran afoul of the dreaded Monty Haul GM at one point (and lived!). I couldn't
believe it - he handed out levels and +5 appurtenances like they were going
out of style. I would have called the whole thing masturbatory, if only I had
known what that was at the time. But then, in middle school (those awkward years),
I had another epiphany. I played in a campaign (now graduated up to AD&D
1st ed, that we all know and remember fondly) that lasted about 3.5 years. It
had a story, and recurring villains, and tricky puzzles, and politics. I played
from a 1st level mage all the way up, at the royal rumble to end all such rumbles,
to 18th level, in a game that had structure and closure. I started to realize
then that you could do some pretty cool stuff with this hobby - you could tell
a tale in the tradition of Tolkien, if only you had the vision and the originality.
Then, in high school (still awkward), I met GURPS. That was an epi-ephiphany.
You could do contemporary stories! You could have guns! And most of all, you
could customize your character within the mechanics of the game in a way that
really encouraged creativity. GURPS is what made me into something of a rules
monkey. And I also found that more realistic mechanics (that is, mechanics that
actually make it possible to simulate, rather than shoehorn, the action of imaginative
fiction) did not detract from the excitement - actually, they added to it. Now
the villain could be laid low by a single heroic stroke, and now the square-jawed
exemplar of Middle America could accidently have his brains splattered by a
stray bullet. Both were heady draughts indeed.
I feel that I truly matured in the hobby when an erstwhile friend of mine introduced
me to a more immersive style of GMing, one which used sensual decriptors, music
and evening lighting to fix the player's attention on the scene. By this time,
I had GM'ed two successful AD&D 2nd ed campaigns, played in another epic
multi-year AD&D game, and run a few GURPS games. But now I was being introduced
into the contemporary conspiracy/horror genre, and I saw some cool techniques
being employed (too bad the integrity of the story was often left to suffer).
Also, at this time the same fellow introduced me to Call of Cthulhu, one of
the best games out there, despite its crypto-fascist ideological content. This
game led me to understand that a role-playing game can be intellectually and
emotionally meaningful on a deep level. In other words, it rocked.
Over the course of the years since my gaming maturity, in my freshman year of
undergraduate, I've had the opportunity to run 2 good Call of Cthulhu campaigns
(both contemporary, the first following the usual trope of the 'band of scholars'
and the second, before having ever read Delta Green, starring the PCs as NSA
agents out to study the mythos and eliminate people that Uncle Sam doesn't like),
and play in a quite good GURPS conspiracy/horror/special ops campaign (centered
around a fictional crisis management team in the U.N. and its conspiratorial
trajectory). I've also run several memorable one-shots in CoC, a short Stormbringer
5th ed campaign and a cameo in the aforementioned GURPS campaign. I like playing
in games, but I think I get the most fun from GMing.
A matter of great concern to me right now in gaming is the presence of bourgeois
ideology in practically every aspect of the hobby. Of course, this is not surprising
since the hobby was invented by intellectuals living in the bastion of First
World capitalism (had it been invented in the Second World, it may have been
called "Workers & Parasites"). But all is not lost, particularly
since many of the seminal authors from whom the hobby takes its cues (Vance,
Moorcock and Tolkien) can all be read with a Left orientation. In particular,
I'm cooking up another contemporary CoC effort that tosses out 75-90% of the
Mythos and shifts the ideological thrust of the game decidedly towards the revolutionary
(in ways that will not be immediately evident to the players); I've almost got
the soundtrack finished (CD burners really, really rock)!
Currently, I'm playing in 2 serious games here in Austin. One is the famous
Die Manner Auf Schwartz that you're reading about on this site (7th Sea), and
the other is the Manyhavens campaign alluded to in Jim Heath's bio (D&D3).
In Die Manner, I play Johann Barenschloss, aka Johann Schwartzenbaum (black
tree, get it?). Johann is my critique of the rationalist/Enlightenment ideal.
I'm really taking my cues from Adorno and Horkheimer on this one. He makes a
big show of being rational and pragmatic (his religion, really; while he professes
disdain for religious zeal), yet the founding premises of his ideology are lost
in the obscuring mists of myth (Fatherland, Order, Piety, the Good). So he is
the man of post-religious religion. He's basically a bad person, who styles
himself a champion of right (does any of this sound familiar?). In Manyhavens,
I play Paulos Heraclitides, an effeminate and egotistical 'natural philosopher'
with a fire fetish. A bit of a rascal, this character is really satirical in
nature. Paulos is everything that is good-hearted and foolish about academicians.
He's a rake, a gourmand and a pedant; he uses these powers for good, however.
He fits the lighter tone of the Manyhavens campaign. I must admit that I like
the symmetry of these two efforts: one is a brawny, forthright, moralizing villain;
the other is a girly, complaining, debauched do-gooder.