I played a couple of pc games while writing the first ten chapters, but then got so immersed in writing I stopped playing for a long time. Which is pretty strange for me, as I have been playing games all my life.
After thinkling about a youth and adulthood spent playing games of all sorts, I decided to write a short piece about my life with gamin.
So here it is, your chanche to hear about my life (maybe not so different than yours?)...
The life of a gamer
Long before I became a writer I loved to consume all sorts of entertainment, and games more than anything.
I started early on as I grew up with a dad who loved card and tabletop games. Our family traveled across Denmark often, so we could spend time with our grandparents and the rest of the family, as we lived far away from them.
Games and books were some of the things that made these trips fun. It is just not that much fun watching the same roads and countryside for 500 km once every second month or so. Remember this was in a time before we got smartphones or car-sized tv-screens.
I think you can tell a lot about a person from the types of games they enjoy, or if they don't play any games at all. I have met plenty of hard working and clever people that never play any games, some say its because they don't have time to play because of their job or their children, others because they are afraid of getting hooked on games, and so wisely abstain, and a few because they simply find little enjoyment there.
I have never understood how you could not like some kind of game, just a little, but I have always had great respect for people who simply love other things more or prioritize other things more.
I used to envy those people their clear focus, but on the other hand I had a lot of fun playing. Then as I progressed into the writing process I became so focused on this endeavor that I found myself playing less and less, and eventually I stopped all together.
What I played in my youth
I played with my brother and my parents, we played a lot of card games on the ferry, and my brother, mother and I played "car games" (dad concentrated on the driving,) simple kid's games like you get 1 point each time you spot an animal or someone select a category i.e. Cities, someone else a letter, and then you must come up with a city-name beginning with that letter.
I would also play tabletop games with family and friends such as Clue, Derby and Finance (a bigger version of Monopoly,) and later I moved up to more complex tabletop games like Conquistador (a ridiculously long game,) Space Hulk, Warhammer and Warhammer 40K. I also loved reading and playing Fighting Fantasy novels which was a great combination of two things I loved.
Computer games became big when I was a kid, we first got a simple Pong TV console, and when I was eleven (1981) my brother bought an Oric, a small French computer that you connected to a tape recorder and the TV, so we would now try to get the TV to ourselves as much as possible. Watch out parents! As we were some of the first kids in our city to own a computer, this felt truly special.
We played a lot of different games, but before we could play you had to type in the entire game code into memory, and this we did one letter at a time. It took forever! You actually bought the games code in geeky magazines full of codes, (crazy, I know.)
My brother quickly became adept at programming, while I just typed for hours. You can see why he became an engineer and I became a writer. I wanted to see what the small screen would do once the program ran, a bit like writing a book to see what and how it will turn out.
Later we got an Amstrad, a bigger British computer with a decent sized monitor by the standards of that time, and then later my brother got a pc.
My brother and I tried to make our own computer games, not that I ever contributed much besides enthusiasm plus the odd idea or visual, but we never quite got them finished. Mostly because my brother programmed them with the clear vision of improving something which annoyed him in the games you could buy - he did not like the flickering sideways scroll in the science fiction shoot-em’-ups for instance, so he programmed a flawless scroll which could do a sideways scrolling of the screen and move a sci-fi fighter up and down in a much more realistic manner than any game on the market. Unfortunately the improvements he came up with always let the game get some large (code wise) that our home computers, did not have memory enough to play the full game, yes you could do the scroll, there could be some enemy fighters and bullets and a short circuit to fly over, but there simply was no space left for all the levels you were supposed to cross for it to be real game, so that was the end of my dreams as a "future game creator".
Why the computers did not have enough memory - well as an example the Oric had only 16 kilobytes of memory which is a LOT less than the memory this one article takes up on your device!
Nostalgia in a box.
Roleplaying it out
When I was 15 (in 1985) I got my first roleplaying game, the Marvel Super Heroes RPG, and it was a shaky start because for some reason my mom and dad did not want to play the Invisible Girl and the Thing.
I wonder why .-)
The roleplaying games I mostly played were of a type not so common these days, there was no running around or dressing up, we just sat at a table much like for a tabletop game. Before playing you would create one character for each player on sheets of paper, and me or some other person running the game would prepare obstacles for the players to encounter during the game and a story for them to experience. In a super hero game this would mean that each of the players were a super hero and were expected to act and talk like Spiderman or whoever they portrayed, while I would do the voices for everyone else in the universe then encountered, such as super villains trying to get the best of the heroes played by my family on our first and only Marvel adventure. You also used a lot of dice which you rolled to find out if an action would succeed or not. Can Hulk even feel if Thor punches him? Let’s roll the dice and see.
I later bought the Fighting Fantasy Roleplaying game and the Warhammer Fantasy RPG, and once I started in high school I got all my new mates to play, and we were hooked. For the next 10 years I did little else than try to play as much as possible. We would play during high school breaks, in evenings and for all of the weekend when possible.
Besides participating in other peoples games I wrote new scenarios every week, and always had two or more groups going. Here I was the games master, and typically hosted the games in my room.
I hosted so many games at home, that to this day most of my close friends are former roleplaying gamers, I met back then.
Another fond memory is driving with my older brother in his small cool Nissan sportscar, where I told him stories, mostly things I had planned as a roleplaying game or something I had played previously. I think we both enjoyed that a lot.
I later started earning a bit of cash from the hobby. During high school I started to write articles about roleplaying games and reviewed all sorts of games, from big hits like Dungeons and Dragons to fringe games like Runequest, and I covered Copenhagen live events and gaming conventions. At first, I did so for free for fanzines but went and got a job writing the RPG section in a national wide Gamer magazine (about games for Commodore 64, Atari, and Amstrad). Together with two other young men I worked every Thursday night at a local school playing RPG games with the kids from the school as part of a culture club, that also paid a bit, though for the work I put into it, they got a bargain deal.
Tabletop games
I have always played tabletop games, and still do, though only a few times a year when two friends and I play. These days it’s mostly Games Workshop's Shadow War Armageddon (I might review that later on, see below if I get around to it).
During my RPG-phase I did not play all that many tabletop games, but once it became apparent that my friends and I were too busy with girlfriends and our first real job (and later wife, career and kids) to actually commit to playing regularly, I got frustrated with RPG. Playing is such a "team event", and if you can't trust people will show up every time, it ruins it for everybody.
I started playing strategy games like Warhammer 40K, Space Hulk, Blood Bowl and lots of others, but I got tired of those as well, I still paint figures a bit though, that’s always fun.
Then one day someone introduced me to Magic the Gathering, a really fun fantasy card game. They call it a trading game, but we never traded anything, we did buy a shitload of cards though.
Card games
During my public-school years, I spent countless hours playing cards with my classmates (mostly a game called Master and Slave, no idea why we played that, but it was great fun). I was never much into games of chance, I'm not the betting type, and I don't like losing money, but I did play a bit of Poker, but it was not really my thing.
I love other card games though. Besides Magic I have played all sorts of "trading card games" for instance Doomtown and later the World of Warcraft game. I enjoyed them immensely and for many years I would host little tournaments at home only for me and my friends. This eventually led me to play Hearthstone on my iPad, pc and phone.
I only ever played two tournaments outside my own home, one time at a local comic/games shop in Copenhagen I participated in a draft tournament, and got a decent deck drafted, but lost my first game to some kid from Sweden, who I was pretty sure cheated with his life total, and then lost to someone who played smarter and had made a better deck than me. I decided to call it a day.
The second time went better, I won the National Danish Championship in an obscure card game called Warlords. If you don't remember it, I won't hold it against you. It might sound great being the National Champion, but I had not played the game very much, and did not own many cards. It was a wonder I won anything at all, and I never bought a single Warlords card after winning that tournament, nor played any other tournament ever again. Why not stop while you are ahead?
How did I manage to win with a lousy deck and not much experience?
I copied one of my favorite strategies from Magic; Rush the opponent with lots of good small creatures right from the start and combine it with a few nasty surprises if the initial rush fails.
Lucky for me most of the opponents I met during the tournament had slower decks and did not get enough defenses down in time. In the final game I met the then current champion and was lucky to make "his card house crumple" before his nasty dwarf defenses and cannons were ready to obliterate me.
Well enough bragging and "old wife’s tales". Its time to write the next chapter...
/Rune S. Nielsen