Tired Old Life Story

This post is for my sake alone. Nobody should read it unless they really want to. This started as an article about how I became a game designer, but I quickly realized that my story had more to do with my upbringing and youth than it did with gaming. I had almost no contact with the actual gaming hobby until I was already well versed in game design. My design philosophy is derived almost entirely from life experience, not actual knowledge of games, and this is why I chafe at many of the assertions of professionals, like Gygax, Mentzer, Perkins, & etc. I am from a different tradition entirely.

So, lots of other gamers and game designers have this big sweeping narrative of their first game and how it changed their life. A lot of these stories show off how old-school they are as well, like it's some kind of contest for street cred. I aim to tell a very different story: an honest one that revels in the ugliness of sincerity. It is long, and gaming did play a role in changing my Life, but most of how I became a game designer is awkwardness, violence, and accident.

When I was a little boy, I was isolated. It was nobody's fault but my own. I don't know what the hell was wrong with me, I was just deeply antisocial for a very long time. I absorbed nothing from the surrounding culture. I never put 2 and 2 together. I didn't know any popular music or TV shows. My knowledge of games was limited to the card games my parents played and the few board games in the house. (Actually, even that was dodgy. I didn't learn chess until I was in my 20s) I knew nothing of sports, and hand games looked like some sort of arcane ritual. I was... strange. I didn't understand social cues, so I believed everyone could read each other's minds and I was the only person who lacked this ability. (This led to me believing everyone was actually omniscient and shared a single mind, forcing me to "cleanse my thoughts" fearing the world might discover some weakness or error in my beliefs. I worked very hard to not think in words.) When other kids tried to play with me, I didn't know what they were talking about, so I assumed they were attacking me.  (I even attempted to strangle one of these kids, believing myself to be in real danger) Looking back, I see an alien of a child unlike any person I've ever met, and I sometimes wonder why I was like that, and how I managed to escape from it. It's like I turned 13 and spontaneously became a different person.

Anyways, I had a few brushes with video games. The first video game I ever played was a mouse in a maze game on old black-and-green apple computers. In grade 1, while we were walking in single file between classes, I accidentally switched to a second grade class, and spent an hour doing one of the most wonderful classroom lessons ever: learning how to use a computer. When I was found, I was told computers is a second grade class. They sold all of the computers before I got to second grade and never bought new ones while I was there.

My favorite handheld game got stolen and eventually returned by some unknown person, but began to malfunction after a few more months. I wish I could play it again. My second favorite handheld game was taken at an airport because it (EXTREMELY VAGUELY) looked like a gun.

My mom had a friend nearby, and she used to take me and my siblings to her house when they visited each other. They had a genesis. Sonic the Hedgehog was amazing and I loved it... I never beat the first stage until I was maybe 15 or so. They also had Mortal Kombat  (I was awful at it) and a hockey game that made no sense. (I went back and played it again when I was older- it really makes no sense at all.) They also had a NES, but it hardly ever worked, and the games for it were ugly and cryptic. It always confused me how Nintendo could get the light gun to work 100% of the time, but couldn't get the cartridge reader up to even 50% success rate.

Later, my buddy Eaan had an original playstation. I didn't even know computers could do 3d graphics when I first saw it. He had FFVII. I was so shocked by it, I basically forgot about the friend I was visiting. More striking to me at the time than how enchanting the game machine was, is how my friend found it to be so mundane. He looked at me like I was some ignorant peasant who lived under a rock. (I basically was, but I didn't know it at the time.) He owned a personal computer and had been playing video games for years at this point. My knowledge of video games peaked with 2d things at school, like Math Blaster and Lemmings. Through him, I first heard of Dungeons & Dragons. He played some computer games based on it. I'm not sure if he had actually played D&D yet at that point. I should ask him some time.

Then my family bought a computer. I remember sitting in front of it with my brother and sister just watching screen savers. For hours on end. We were stunned that one of these things was in our home and we could do whatever we want with it.

In the background, behind all of these minor brushes with actual games, I was pretty bored. I had few friends, because I had nothing in common with the human race, and I couldn't really spend much time with those few friends. I couldn't ride a bike, and I couldn't remember the layout of my hometown to walk much farther than the path between school and home. (Those who know me: you think my memory is bad now? Imagine a kid who turns a corner in a linear hallway and forgets what building he's in. I spent a lot of time wandering lost in the fog of my own absent-mindedness. You probably remember this, Nick.) When I went to a farther-away school, I was dependent upon the bus to get me close enough to find my way home. So I mostly stayed inside and played with my siblings or by myself. My siblings mostly made me angry, and honestly I remember almost all of my time growing up with them as a never ending fight. We got into some pretty bad scraps, especially as we got bigger. So I spent almost all of my time alone. Reality sucked, and I knew it, so I would escape into fantasy. I figured, as long as I don't think anything real, and occupy my mind with fantasy, nobody will be able to telepathically intuit anything to criticize about me.

As I got older, I started to make up rules to my imagined games. I didn't know It, but I was making actual games. Some of them were even role playing games! I had rules for comparing the physical capabilities of characters, and I had figured out how to gauge powers against one another and limit power access to characters to keep them balanced- all by intuition, and mostly without any knowledge of RPGs. I had a friend who used to walk home on the same path as me, and we used to play pretend together. I tested my ideas on him, and we would play imaginary duels with characters we made up on the spot on the way home. He sometimes made his own rules, and I usually adopted them into our later games. We were basically making a LARP. We were kindred spirits. And neither of us knew each other's name. I don't think anyone ever knew about our friendship. We spent all of our time together in the woods. One day, he moved away. I never saw him again. I continued to walk that path every single day until I graduated, with the faintest hope that I might see him again. I still remember the lessons he taught me about game design on the occasions where he won the duel.

Around this time, before I graduated of course, I moved to a new school and computers suddenly fucking exploded. My family got dialup, and school computers were constantly online. Every grade had mandatory computer classes. (Though the instructors still seemed utterly clueless as to what to do with this class.) I remember that teacher lost his job because he molested some girl. The thought that I was so close to someone so sinister for years on end is upsetting. My family got a PlayStation due to my pestering. This went along with my gameboy from a few years before.

I was still a broken little child though. Whenever I felt I had failed somehow, I would punish myself, typically by pounding my head against a hard surface. Apparently my teachers felt that was pretty normal because nobody ever said anything, and I was never taken to a councillor. I probably should have been. I broke my gameboy by bashing my head against it until the screen broke when I lost at the end of the last level of a Mario game.

The PlayStation opened my eyes to how the world actually was, at least in the realm of gaming. I was finally able to play more than a couple of hours into a game. With all the time in the world, I could play games until I gained skill and completed them. With the internet, I was able to connect with all kinds of information about gaming. A world of knowledge flooded toward me... and I squandered it. I made the most minimal use of the internet possible: pornography and cheat codes.

Oh, yeah, I started looking at porn when I was really, really little. Started swearing pretty young too. I didn't hide either of these things at all, and still nobody saw anything wrong with me. Yup. Just another typical antisocial, self-destructive, delusional, physically violent, verbally abusive, perverted 10 year old. Never you mind me throwing furniture and books, openly wishing death upon my peers, and insulting instructors- everything's fine!

It wasn't until high school that I would finally play actual D&D. At this point, I kind of thought D&D was some sort of weird gamer subculture based on some old games that had loose connections, like the Final Fantasy series. I had no idea RPGs predated computers, I had never seen polyhedral dice, and "let's pretend" was considered so childish, I had been abandoned as the only person I knew who still did that. I had some inclination that there were these weird fantasy board games with funny dice, thanks to select appearances of D&D style games in Dexter's Laboratory and Disney's Recess, but I didn't know they were references to D&D, I thought they were just exaggerated fictional games. Then, during a class at school, a new friend of mine asked if I wanted to play D&D. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I wanted to impress him (I hadn't made new friends in YEARS) so I pretended to be on the level and said yes.

What followed was not really D&D. None of us owned the corebooks. My friend had read the PHB and DMG for second edition, but they belonged to someone else he knew, so we had no reference material whatsoever. The whole game was his memory. We also had no dice. There were no gaming stores in Sylvan Lake, (there still aren't, actually) and the half-hour drive to Red Deer was apparently such a burden to my parents that they avoided it like the plague. (I now realize that the reason is likely the gas expense of my father's work commute to Red Deer. Why make a separate trip out with the kids, when the father can just make any necessary stops before he comes home from work?) So instead of dice, we tore up bits of paper, numbered them 1-20, and put them in my buddy's fedora. (I was weird, but this kid wore a full suit, hat, and tie every day. He outclassed me in weirdness every way I can think of.) The game we played was, essentially, the same game I had played with that friend in the forest years before, and the same game I played with my fictional characters on paper at home- but with dice as a neutral arbitrator, rather than some vague rule about arbitrarily inverting a guaranteed success or failure any given number of actions. It was awesome. We fought a flock of giant crows that assaulted us as we escaped a dungeon, and I was an elf, and I was finally playing the game I loved with people who understood again.

Then I asked him more details about D&D and he leveled with me: he couldn't remember the rules very well, so he basically just made it all up as he went! I asked him if I could take his ideas and make my own game, and he said he didn't care.

I've been engaged in nonstop game design ever since. The rest of my life is basically just logistics to me. Without something to be passionate about, I'd probably have died at age 16 when I became aware of the concept of suicide. Life offers little of value to me, even to this day. Things people are deeply passionate about rank as nearly irrelevant in my mind. The only reason I am here at all, the only reason I am motivated to have a life of any sort, is because I was able to find a few people who I could understand and who understood me back.

My first design took the d20 roll-under check and turned it into the core mechanic. (I wouldn't hear that term until 3rd edition came out, but that's what it was) Then I swapped the d20 for d10s because they look cool and I wanted simpler numbers. Then I doubled the ability scores and switched spellcasting to a FF style MP system. Things get blurry after that, there were just so many revisions.

My first ever game was run for a friend of mine with Tourettes syndrome. I bought a video game walkthrough that I thought sounded cool, and had halfways detailed explanation of the underlying math. Then I improvised dice mechanics to emulate the video game and took him through the whole story. The game was called Orphen, in case you're interested- and yeah, I really did find a way to turn that into a game using lined paper and a box full of d6s. I wish I'd taken notes so I could remember how, because looking back, I have no idea, and I doubt I could replicate it.

By the time that campaign had run its course, my pet project was playable, and I'd made enough setting material to run a session. I gathered some friends- different ones than those who'd introduced me to RPGs, I didn't want to embarrass myself -and ran a game. At this time, I had not played any sandbox games, and I wanted to push my system to its limits, so I decided it would be brilliant to just dump them in the environment and let them have at it. One started the first international bar chain the world had ever seen. Another started his career as a hero, but accidentally became a vampire's slave- and then betrayed his master, stealing his power to become an elder vampire, and slowly began to take over the world. A third became the most intrepid explorer the world had ever seen, singlehandedly sailing a home-built sea dinghy through a hurricane to a distant continent nobody had ever seen, where the entire ecosystem was a self-sustaining cycle of predation.

By now, I'd realized that negative logic, (roll under checks, negative bonuses, subtractive penalties, etc.) was counterintuitive and took longer for players to compute, so I reworked all of the math to function in positive values only.

I took that world as it was back to my other friend, and he and his brother gave it a shot. He set loose an ancient weapon possessed by a demon in return for a position of power in its service. Though evil, the demon repaid him in spades for his loyalty. He eventually became a dragon-riding arch-lich commanding armies of thousands of undead in the name of Gaullock the Ancient Death. His brother was playing a heroic-to-the-core good guy though, and he wasn't having it. He consulted the gods for a solution and chose to summon a rival demon. Posing as its mortal general, he redirected the undead armies from invasion to fight against the rival demon's golem army. At the climactic war scene, he tricked the two demons into direct conflict with one another and sealed the two of them away in the same artifact that had once held only one of them! After this, the two characters confronted one another atop Gaullock's crumbling tower. They had opted to have their characters be brothers as well, and they played one of the most heartbreaking scenes I've ever seen- without any input from me. The two duelled, but each refused to deal lethal damage with their attacks. They fought and argued until the tower collapsed with them inside it, each trying desperately to sway the other to see things their way so they could escape alive together. At the end of the campaign, I hadn't added any input for over two hours. I described the fall of the demons, and started the countdown to the tower's fall, then watched this story unfold before me until I was forced to bring it to an end. I've never seen anything like it since.

Currently, that system has been split into a dozen different versions based on similar principals. They all are pretty much finished and functional, but I can't decide which one I like most. Because I keep flipflopping between systems, I can't commit to making detailed setting content for fear that my time will be wasted.

Now, it might sound like I was a bit of a Monty Haul, but keep in mind, this was all test-play. In order to test as much of the system as possible, I massively accelerated the passage of time so players could see the fruits of their labor within a single session, and so that I could test aspects of every level of play every time I played.

My first game of actual by-the-books D&D was 2nd edition under a new DM who definitely thought his purpose was to kill the players as quickly, gruesomely, and pitifully as possible. One player slipped and drowned crossing an ankle-deep stream. My character died of some disease due to wearing plate mail in cold rain. We never even got to the adventure. We barely got out of town alive. I walked out. Later at that same party, after the session was over, I apologized  (rudely) and asked to read the books again. I was disappointed. THIS tangled morass of arbitrary, internally inconsistent, dysfunctional GARBAGE was Dungeons & Dragons?! And the second edition of its advanced version as well?! The game I'd made was already faster, smoother, tighter, and more comprehensive. I got an ego and assumed I was just smarter than Gygax. As it turns out, I am only smarter than corporate bureaucracy- and so is just about everyone else.

Then a bunch of teenage drama BS happened. Five years worth of it, all crammed into 8 months. Tried to murder a friend, stole another friend's girlfriend, had that girlfriend stolen from me, got laid for the first time, then I went to college for the fine arts and moved out of my parents house. Tried drugs for the first time. (Note: acid is not a good choice for a first time trial.)

In college, I reconnected with Eaan, and he was definitely playing RPGs now. He was also a hobbyist game designer, and had created a 3.5e inspired PvP tactical tabletop game called SQUIGL. I should feature his game here simetime. It's freaking fantastic fun. I played 3.5e D&D under him as DM for 2 campaigns, one a standard fantasy and the other a planescape adventure generated entirely at random by a program he wrote for Inspiration Pad Pro. Then we switched to Mutants & Masterminds. In between campaigns, we tested SQUIGL. He introduced me to Forge Theory, (Though he admitted that I read it in far greater detail than he ever did.) around the same time that I was learning aesthetic theory, moral philosophy, and Scott McCloud's comics theory. I came to the conclusion that these theories, as well as what little I learned of music theory, were compatible. I now believe very strongly that games are simply another aspect of aesthetic theory, and aesthetic theory itself is merely a a small portion of an as-yet-undefined unified theory of humanity. I believe games are one of the highest forms of art, and that games can not only change the world- they have the potential to save the world.

Then I graduated and started falling into a bit of a depression again. Started cutting myself off from friends.

Then I met the woman of my dreams. Five years down the line, I'm married, in my own house, and have a professional career in a technical industry. I am happy. I have comfort and security- more than I've ever had before. I lost a couple of friends in the shuffle. (Sorry about the comic, damage deposit, and rent, Rez; I'd go back and do it all different if only I could. I miss you dearly, Xaos, rest in peace or come home soon. Shawn, grow up and call me back, I'd like to share a beer some time, and I don't give a damn about your debt any more! Cam, it doesn't matter what gender you want to be if you're still a dickhead and a pussy either way.) Overall though, I can't complain too much.