Games: doesn’t everyone enjoy these through their lives? Whether it’s sports, board games, video games, card games, it’s quite likely you have a favorite game or two that you’ve enjoyed throughout your life so far. In this entry, I’ll be reminiscing about my gaming journey and how I got to where I am today.
Earliest memories for me (with regards to games) are baseball, card games (mindlessly playing “War”, “Go Fish”, among others), and board games.
What I remember about baseball is easy – my grandfather and uncle were big baseball fans and I guess it rubbed off on me. I played little league for about 7 years and often had really good statistics (from what the coaches relayed to us, anyway) so that was satisfying. I tried-out for the team in high school. Unfortunately, I wasn’t chosen for the high-school team, so my activity in baseball started waning at that point. When I started working full-time, I enjoyed playing softball on the company team, but that wasn’t very often.
As far as card games go, my brother and I would play “War” and “Go Fish” (sometimes mom would join in, if my brother wasn’t around). As I got older, I watched my parents play “Rook” with my grandparents, aunts, and uncles. I learned that game, too, and would often partner with one of the family members during visits. That’s probably the card game I’ve enjoyed the most.
For board games, I guess it all started with something like “Candyland” and then progressed to a variety of games for older children: Risk, The Game of Life, and Parcheesi. I particularly remember playing “Life” with my cousins. Those were some good times.
As my taste in board games matured, I got interested in what were called “Bookshelf Games” because they were packaged in a convenient box that sat on a bookshelf oriented like a book. At that time, a company called “Avalon Hill” produced many war and battle simulations, which I collected and played. There was quite a bit of mental bookkeeping you had to perform, since the rules for movement and actions could be in somewhat of a grey area, so allowing adequate slack in your plans was usually a good idea (at least for me). I also learned to play Chess when I was young and often participated in local chess tournaments, getting my rating up somewhere in the 1500-1700 range.
Video games were very primitive when I was growing up (remember “Pong”?), but once I got into college, some decent video arcade games were available (like “Asteroids”) and I learned that it was possible to actually make games on the computer. There were some single-player games, like “Adventure”, which were text-based and allowed you to enter text commands to guide your progress (assuming the text command was even recognized by the game!) There were plenty of times when you had to just dig through your vocabulary and try to find just the right phrase or command that the game might recognize so you could do something to move it along.
There was one multi-player game I remember from those days called “Multi-Trek”, which was basically a space game played on a grid, with the computer keeping track of each player’s position. You had commands for firing weapons at a certain bearing, and if another player was in the path of your weapons fire, they would be hit. It was fascinating, trying to plot the position of other players and calculate which direction they were moving so you can plan a shot to intercept them. Good times.
It was also during this time when started learning about computers.
At some point between all of those bookshelf games and going to college I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). That was appealing because you could use your imagination to better effect. I could pretend to be, or role-play as, a character with behavior and qualities that I enjoyed in a realm that was totally make-believe.
I realized in college that many of the mechanical aspects of playing Dungeons & Dragons (rolling dice to create your character, determining the outcome of various encounters) could be somewhat automated on computer. My dream at that time was to be able to enjoy games like D&D and the depth of immersive game play they offered when no one else was available for a gaming session. Having the computer take on the rolls of dungeon master (the moderator of the game), intelligent enemy, non-player characters with an agenda, and the like would offer so much in the way of enjoyment if you could always have a game ready for you whenever you wanted to play.
This is my journey so far, and this all happened in the years before 1984. In the next blog entry, I’ll talk about how I got into console games (once the above dream actually became a reality).