User Generated Content, circa 1982
A sad day.
Who knows if it was good for me? Who knows if it was bad? All I know is that I spent a large chunk of my early high school years playing games. The old kind that didn’t involve computers. Way, way back in the Reagan era early teen-age losers like me would gather in bedrooms and basements and murder entire afternoons playing elves or dwarves and later super heroes or space adventurers or World War II generals. Parents around the country freaked out fearing that we were learning to be pagans or forming cults and getting into human sacrifice. Since I happened to be the child of a man who was an avid sci-fi reader and a woman who believed that anything that encouraged the use of a person’s imagination was a positive I didn’t have to deal with that. They thought that it was better that I was in some safe basement being a geek instead of drinking beer and/or smoking non-tobacco substances in the woods.
Of course, that put me behind the learning curve I would have to climb in college, but that’s another post.
In the late 90s RPG’s and wargames moved away from paper and dice and chits and statues and boards onto computers and the Internet. I leave it to others to say if this was a positive development, although I suppose it is a good thing today that mothers no longer have to step around a large map of the European Theaters of WW II covered with carefully arranged cardboard squares representing armies while doing the laundry.
In 2008, I don’t know if spending so much of those years playing games was good, or bad, or responsible in any way for my current lot in life. All I know is that I had fun and I didn’t hurt anyone in the real world in the process (but oh, the millions of bits of cardboard or scribbled character sheets that perished at my hand…I fear the day of reckoning with The Great Eraser for that one).
Thanks Gary. Anyone who improved the quality of any kid’s teenage life deserves an express ticket to the best part of whatever’s next.
Who knows if it was good for me? Who knows if it was bad? All I know is that I spent a large chunk of my early high school years playing games. The old kind that didn’t involve computers. Way, way back in the Reagan era early teen-age losers like me would gather in bedrooms and basements and murder entire afternoons playing elves or dwarves and later super heroes or space adventurers or World War II generals. Parents around the country freaked out fearing that we were learning to be pagans or forming cults and getting into human sacrifice. Since I happened to be the child of a man who was an avid sci-fi reader and a woman who believed that anything that encouraged the use of a person’s imagination was a positive I didn’t have to deal with that. They thought that it was better that I was in some safe basement being a geek instead of drinking beer and/or smoking non-tobacco substances in the woods.
Of course, that put me behind the learning curve I would have to climb in college, but that’s another post.
In the late 90s RPG’s and wargames moved away from paper and dice and chits and statues and boards onto computers and the Internet. I leave it to others to say if this was a positive development, although I suppose it is a good thing today that mothers no longer have to step around a large map of the European Theaters of WW II covered with carefully arranged cardboard squares representing armies while doing the laundry.
In 2008, I don’t know if spending so much of those years playing games was good, or bad, or responsible in any way for my current lot in life. All I know is that I had fun and I didn’t hurt anyone in the real world in the process (but oh, the millions of bits of cardboard or scribbled character sheets that perished at my hand…I fear the day of reckoning with The Great Eraser for that one).
Thanks Gary. Anyone who improved the quality of any kid’s teenage life deserves an express ticket to the best part of whatever’s next.
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