How long has it been?
It’s been so long that I forgot how to log in to the blog.
How long has it been?
It’s been so long that I forgot I changed the theme.
How long has it been?
Well, long enough. I got back into blogging a bit over a year ago because of Belghast’s vast network of blog-friends. I always struggle with blogging because it takes a lot of time, and I don’t really have any insights into gaming. I’m just… a gamer, and old enough that I can raise my kids to be gamers and old enough that my grandchildren are gamers. I’m at the place where I’m not old enough to be a boomer but not young enough to be anything else. I’ve never felt I really fit in to any group or demographic; I just lurk at the edges.
This isn’t the first post of “Blaugust”, but I think the time is right for me to do some introductions.
When I was a kid, there were two kinds of gamers: card gamers, and board gamers. My family played cards. Our church held Whist nights, cribbage was super popular, and if you had nothing better to do, you could always fly solo with a hundred different versions of solitaire. I didn’t learn about board games (aside from kid board games, like Life and Monopoly) until I went to St. Paul’s School and met a bunch of guys who played Avalon Hill war games. (re: SPS ASP – no, my family is not rich. I got in for a summer program because I loved math and happened to live in the same city as the school and got a scholarship).
I talk a lot about how my high school has an old PDP 8/e microcomputer, on which I laboriously typed out programs from Creative Computing magazine on a teletype and saved it to paper tape. The gamer group at Concord High was big into Othello for awhile (hey, another board game), and we all wrote programs to play it on that computer. That was probably the high point. It was at St. Paul’s that I discovered their computer lab had VIDEO. TERMINALS. connected to a PDP/11(!) with all sorts of STORAGE SPACE. It was then that I became a computer gamer. I had this bright idea of writing a program to play this new game called “Monopoly”, and found someone had already done it. I abandoned that and wrote a program that solved Tic Tac Toe, which wasn’t really that new, either. I then moved on to trying to write a program that would let a robot find the best path through some obstacles to leave a room. I was encouraged in all this by my professor’s teaching assistant, who led me through all the theory and stuff.
By the time I got back to Concord High for my senior year after ASP, I was fired up. I’d seen how the rich kids lived. Programming was fun. When I entered the University of New Hampshire that fall, I was fired up to be a game developer; and it was just the right time, too. It was 1979. The Apple II, the TRS-80, the Commodore Pet – all were crushing the new home computer market. I couldn’t afford any of those (again: we were not rich), but I knew of them.
It was at UNH that I really learned what computers could do. New Hampshire public schools were, at the time, wholly in thrall to Digital Equipment Corporation – DEC. Concord High had their computer from them; St Paul’s probably had a rich donor hand them one. UNH was infused with DEC tendrils in every possible pore. Massive PDP/10 mainframes – Scylla and Charybdis – handled instruction and administration. All the computer clusters had DEC VT-52 terminals or DEC LP-100 line printers. The terminal clusters were controlled by old familiar PDP 8s. The engineering labs had PDP-11s and VAXs.
I had everything I needed. I coulda been famous.
But then I fell in love and got married and didn’t finish college and instead embarked upon real life. So, instead of becoming a famous game designed, I became a gamer. I wrote games for my own enjoyment – I wrote a real time dungeon crawler called TG (for: The Game) and I put all my friends in it as monsters. I then did a roguelike called Rooms (named after the dungeon generation algorithm I wrote). The monsters through their wandering actually constructed the dungeon. Since they had no particular desire to find and kill the player, it ended up largely being about wandering around in a vast dungeon that monsters had largely abandoned, and because I had never really solved the pathfinding algorithm I’d first attempted back in high school, they couldn’t have found me anyway. But it looked REALLY NICE. I’d love to have those old games back again; not because they were so good (they were not), but because I worked so hard on them.
So now, here I am. I never became a game developer, or even really much of a gamer. I’m middle-aged. I have two kids, three grandchildren, three cats, a long-term relationship and a ranch-style house in a Connecticut suburb. I work as a tech lead at an insurance company, and I’m more likely to write an API than an Apshai these days.
But, for what it’s worth, I still love gaming – both kinds, board games AND video games! And when I find the time, I sometimes write about them here. Or on Twitter.
Blaugust will give me the opportunity to, once again, talk about the sort of gaming we elder gamers enjoy. You know; slow-paced games with big text and a lot of encouraging noises, like… actually, I don’t know what games elderly people are supposed to like now. Bejeweled is a few years gone now, right? Do old people still play games? I honestly have no idea.