The Gamer In Me

Growing up, we had a fair amount of card and board games to play. Our selection included, Pit, Rook, face cards, Yahtzee, Candy Land, Stratego, Risk, Clue, Chess, Checkers, Life, Shoots and Ladders, Sorry, and Monopoly. Come to find out, our game closet was miniscule compared to Leann's family's. But there's a reason, I suppose: Her family actually gets along while playing games.

The day the game closet got emptied was a day of mixed emotions for the family. Did mom really just throw away the Monopoly game grandma gave Jan for Christmas? What were we ever going to do without having to play as the penny or broken green Sorry piece because all the Monopoly pieces were missing?

The truth is that games never worked out so well at my house. By the end of the six-hour Risk game where you've taken over almost the whole world three times just to have spread out your forces too thin -- or the Monopoly game where you've begun taking out loans from the bank to pay off your debt on Marvin Gardens with three hotels, the game begins to get a bit fustrating. In our case, it usually ended in name calling or accusations of cheating... or anti-cheating (which is far worse, by the way).

Games these days are entirely based on every player being selfish, cunning, and greedy. Isn't that the basis of Monopoly? Or the bunny game? The bean game? There's really no strategy... it's all about who can get the most the fastest without caring about who you step on or blow away to get it. In fact, there are few games out there that don't involve stealing other player's hard work, or getting joy out of their demise. Is that what fun is these days? Sounds like the basis of personal apostasy to me.

It's hard to be a good loser. Especially when your opponent tries to be nice to you. It seems to be a common misconception that being merciful actually improves the quality of losing. Instead of losing in one massive blow, it becomes spread out over the course of three hours as your paper money is slowly drained from you and your game pieces are eliminated one by one until you're forced into a stalemate.

My family knows the best ways to ruin a good game. Anti-cheating is my personal favorite tactic. The idea behind anti-cheating is that you purposefully play in a way that obviously dosn't help you, but instead makes another player win. Now, they have rules against this (in poker specifically) when the players are in cahoots to pull one over on all the other players. The genius of this game-ruining plan is that the person who you're helping dosn't want to be helped. Games aren't any fun when someone lets you win. There's no triumph, no victory. And the games only last about five minutes.

The day mom threw away Monopoly was the start of a gaming revolution in our household.

Just because you're not on the junior highschool chess team dosn't mean you're not a geek. With a very slim selection of board games to play, most of us kids resorted to other activites to use up our spare time. Some of us read books, some played musical instruments, and some of us nerds began hobbies like computer programming or building Legos. Legos eventually died out, and as Geoff pointed out during highschool, girls kill men's creativity.

In my case, games worked their way back in during the era of single-player computer games like Civilization, Wolfenstein 3D, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Commander Keen, and Doom. We just didn't play with eachother and everyone was happy.

The original Warcraft: Orcs and Humans came out in 1994. I played and beat the demo which fit onto a 3.5" floppy disk. The real game was too good for our computer and we had to create a special boot up disk to preserve enough RAM for the game to run. The modem connection ran so slowly that Kyle and I would get up at 3:00am on Saturday morning so that we could play. I'd stuff my pillow behind the computer in order to smother the modem connection speed negotiating sounds. Lucklily Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness came out soon after in 1995, which had an IPX network play option.

It wasn't until Kyle moved down the street that we put in a network line down the alley and played them on IPX. Tell me I'm not a geek. When you extend your *wired* Local Area Network outside your own house, your DHCP automatically assigns you an IP on the geek domain.

I've been an avid fan of all of Blizzard Entertainment's games since then. I've owned, played, and beaten almost every one. I now play World Of Warcraft, an MMO... at least until Starcraft 2 comes out. The idea of the MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) is that you play with and against a vast number of other real and NPC (non-player characters) in the game. You'd think, now knowing my game histroy, that involving other human players into my game would cause an utter fall-out and devestation to my gaming experience. You'd be right. However, there is a more geeky aspect to the game that entrigues me.

I like to think of myself much like Jason in the Fox Trot comic strip series. Jason is the geeky little brother to Paige (his older sister). He is always involved with computers, science fiction, Star Wars, Star Trek, and video games. Quite a while ago, Bill Amend ran a series of strips featuring Jason and World of WarQuest (Warcraft and Everquest).