Chapter 1 - Zero-Level

At the risk of starting this account on a flat note, I thought I'd start out by mentioning that my childhood is hardly worth mentioning. Hannibal Lecter probably best described my ancestry when he called Clarice one step removed from poor white trash. Not to throw my entire extended family under the bus, but I've grown up to be an urban, technologically-competent smartass whereas most of them are straight out of the American Gothic painting: dour, unemotional farming families from strict judgmental Christian upbringings who raise children through shame and oppression and believe any comforting physical contact is anathema.

They had a lot of weird ideas in their heads. My grandparents were cheap, angry, and outright insane most of the time. My grandfather's idea of fine cuisine was Kentucky Fried Chicken because, to him, it was the best food you could eat in a restaurant that didn't require you to tip a waitress. My uncle refuses to go to McDonald's because he heard on fundamentalist Christian radio that they put LSD in the salt shakers. Why anyone would waste perfectly good LSD in public salt shakers, or if McDonald's even uses salt shakers anymore, or why he doesn't just, y'know, not use the salt shakers, I don't know. My grandmother raises chickens and to this day refuses to wash the eggs before cooking with them because she believes doing so keeps them fresh longer. Her sister died of E. coli poisoning.

My dad managed to escape by becoming a civilian contractor for Hughes during the war and we moved to Arizona when I was about two years old, before I was able to remember much of anything except that before we moved out of the Ozarks my dad wore a beard. Arizona is a miserably hot place about ten months out of the year that can kill you in about fifteen minutes if you're not careful, but I'll still take it over the humid hickville that is rural Missouri, where they still refer to most distances as "yonder" and very long distances as "o'er yonder."

My younger brother and I are of similar age, and so we share most of the same gaming experiences. He's much more introverted than I am, to the point that at an early age, my parents were increasingly worried that there was something wrong with him. There isn't, of course: in fact, he's probably much smarter than I am. I just test better and have a more natural ability to bullshit people. Miles is more thoughtful. Where I will whine and complain for anyone to hear, he's content to suffer silently. I also had the habit of speaking for the both of us, which probably did more long-term harm than good.

In truth, had Asperger's Syndrome been thought-of in my childhood doctors probably would have labeled us both as mildly autistic. I tested as a genius at some psychology department at ASU at an early age when I started displaying the ability to read very complex material long before I should have been able to, and I was able to focus on complex tasks for hours at a time. I was smart, so clearly my parents thought something must have been wrong with me, too.

It really just came from my dad's computer, which I sat in front of almost every hour of every day. These were the days of slow, prohibitively large IBMs with monochrome monitors and seven-inch floppy drives that held less data than you could write on a saltine cracker with a blunt crayon. For some reason, to me, the device was magic. And this was before computers did anything flashy and amazing. At the time, it was all just a DOS prompt commanded by a huge, clacking keyboard.

Dad had bought some pathetic program called "Learning Games" which was really just a collection of simple arithmetic problems and spelling tests where it would show you a poorly-rendered picture of something and I would spell the three-letter word it represented, like "IVY" or "JET." Eventually we got a new monitor, one that showed a shocking eight colors in spectacular EGA graphics, and Dad had bought a big floppy book that contained whole plaintext files of stuff written in BASIC that, if copied exactly, would do things like play Hangman or Pong. I must have reproduced every file in that book, work that also taught me how to type quickly and accurately. I didn't know BASIC at all, so I could never have tracked down a typo if I'd made one; I had to get it exactly right the first time around or it wouldn't compile.

That computer (and its many replacements) dominated most of the years of my life since I learned to speak. The games I remember playing most were the old Ultima series, primarily Ultima III: Exodus, a game I was too young to truly understand but spent most of my time just running around killing stuff, dying, and starting over again with another, more outlandish party of characters than the last. To be fair, there wasn't really much more to Ultima III than wanton slaughter, but it's my earliest memory of an interest in the sword-and-sorcery genre.

My older brother Doug liked it, too. It inspired him to pick up some Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books, something I found fascinating. But Doug is a lot older than me, and he was in high school when I was about seven years old, so everything he did was interesting to me. Everyone wants to be like their cool older brother, even if he was only cool in my eyes. I doubt he was able to find other gamers in high school to play with, which probably explains why he was willing to run me through a bunch of solo adventures and teach me how to roll up characters. Doug was always good to me, a great older brother. Even as a child I knew he didn't have to treat me as well as he did, but he was always willing to play games with me whenever I wanted. And that says a lot about him, because looking back I was a fairly petulant, annoying kid. I didn't deserve the attention.

These early AD&D games didn't go very well. I was too young to handle such a complex game and I was easily upset at the notion that my characters could die, or that bad things could happen to him because I'd failed to notice something or act properly. Roleplaying at that age is difficult to handle. Kids aren't exactly masters of the art of empathy, something necessary to playing an effective character. Doug, to his credit, didn't fudge the dice or let me win just because I whined. It made me realize that AD&D was the big leagues, not for mere boys!

Miles and I found the Hero Quest board game to be much more palatable. It had miniatures, a colorful map, and scripted adventures prepared with pre-generated characters. It was fast and fun hack-and-slash, a great introduction to fantasy gaming that we discovered on our own. It had just enough story elements to keep us interested without overcomplicating things. We were the good guys in a dungeon full of bad guys. It's all a kid cares about.

Hero Quest occupied us for a long while, along with its expansion packs, but eventually we'd played it out to the point we'd worn out the cards and the dice and played every scenario. There wasn't much to do beyond that; we were in elementary school or junior high, and there just weren't any gaming clubs around for us if we'd wanted to pursue fantasy roleplaying.

Instead we'd become enthralled with the Nintendo Entertainment System, the home gaming console that simultaneously gave me some great memories and a crash course in how to deal with ulcer pain. There were a lot of good games for the NES, and of course I gravitated towards the Mario titles and the RPGs like Final Fantasy, Faxanadu, Dragon Warrior, and The Bard's Tale. But I owned just as many horrible games like Robocop, Fester's Quest, and The Adventures of Bayou Billy. Remember, this was before the dawn of the Internet, where you could hit Gamespot or Gamefaqs to find out whether a game sucked or not. We had to rely on Nintendo Power (a house rag that never gave bad reviews of its own products) and word-of-mouth. I got inventive and convinced my mom that it was much cheaper to rent the cartridges at Blockbuster Video for $3 a pop to scout the games out. After all, it's much cheaper than dumping $50 on a game we'll hate, and more often than not three days was enough for us to beat the game anyway.

I played that thing to death. Probably more than it's safe to admit. I'd beaten Final Fantasy more times than I could count, even being as pathological as to attempt it using freakishly unfair groups of characters like four thieves, four black mages, or (most hardcore of all) four white mages. The release of the Super Nintendo came as something of a relief to us all, because it meant that there were other Final Fantasy games I could move on to.

Junior High school presented me with new ways to slack off. It was my first opportunity to take computer classes in the school lab, which was populated entirely with Apple IIes, primitive gadgets that were nonetheless quite impressive for having a graphical user interface, where I had a much advanced IBM PC still operating on a DOS prompt. Not only that, these computers were networked, also a revolutionary concept for the time. These computers communicated via a stone-age media access protocol known as Appletalk, a one-bit-at-a-time method that was prone to deadlocks, stalls, bit collisions, and dropped connections. But even more amazing was that each computer in the lab came with the earliest networked multiplayer game I've ever seen: The Oregon Trail.

Acquainted for the first time with nerds who shared my interest and who had already far surpassed the rudimentary curriculum perpared for us by the Mesa Unified School District, we finished our week's homework in about ten minutes and hit the Oregon Trail hard every day without fail. We had huge wagon trains braving starvation, cold, raging rivers, and dysentery, but our biggest nemesis was the dreaded Appletalk. Our attrition rate was horrendous; we lost entire wagons due to connection errors, and once you were kicked off, you couldn't rejoin the train.

The trail got boring after a while, so my friend Bill and I started making a game-within-the-game. There was a control within the game where you could hold a vote and exile individual wagons from the caravan, something that struck Bill as particularly hilarious and exercised as much as possible. Me, being a much more orderly sort, suggested a more reasoned approach to the game where every time we stopped at a town we would hold a vote and remove who we determined to the the weakest link to the group. The criteria was all over the map, from who kept breaking wagon wheels (incompetence) to who lost the most people to cholera (to best avoid the wrath of God), to whoever failed to be the most disgustingly wasteful while hunting animals (manifest destiny means leaving a trail of bodies all the way to the Pacific). Most of the time groups of friends just voted as a bloc for the sole purpose of pissing people off, but it was a ton of laughs. It was like an early, grade-school version of Survivor.

Bill was out of his mind, most of the time. All he cared about was filling his wagon with ammunition and stopping every quarter mile to hold a vote that the train should go hunting. Everyone would agree, because then the game would shift to a first-person shooter view where you could snipe rabbits, squirrels, deer, bear, and (most importantly) buffalo with your rifle. Your character could only drag 200 lbs. of meat back to the wagon, and nobody was ever lacking for food, but that didn't stop them from annihilating any sign of life that dared to cross in front of their gunsights regardless (or should I say, especially) that they didn't need to. Everyone got a good chuckle out of the notion that our wagon train was leaving a horrible, bloodstained nightmare of carrion-eaten dead bunnies and wasted buffalo strewn carelessly for three thousand miles across the Great Plains. Our settlers would rampage across the nation like a pestilence, raping the land and suffering none to live behind us.

We made the Indians cry.

Introduction

At the time of writing, I am a 26-year-old graduate from ASU who still lives with his parents and has done absolutely nothing appreciable with his vaunted intellect or (more remarkably) his degree in computer science other than unpack Dell PCs on a loading dock for Boeing. And that job lasted almost exactly four days. I have little room to complain about a stagnant job market. I'll readily admit that my own failure to leave the nest comes from a near-total lack of interest in slinging code for a living and an apathetic self-image. I could get a job in the industry if I felt like it-- almost everyone starts out jockeying phones. I just know enough about myself to know that if I did, I would probably start a shotgun massacre within two days.

I do have "work," if you can call it that. I write a movie review for a magazine based on my own slightly-more-coherent-than-your-average-Internet-dork ramblings on a message board and I act in a local dinner theatre troupe. Both jobs pay about the same, ironically, each probably less in a month than your average waitress at Denny's makes in a night. But the sheer notion that either job pays at all is so astounding that most professionals in either industry would tell me to be pleased simply walking away with a profit of any kind. After all, telling people I'm an actor and a writer is as near to saying "I'm unemployed" as makes no odds. So I certainly can't complain about my success there.

I'm the sort of guy who still doesn't even really have a vague notion of what I want to do. I thought for a while that I wanted to work in the computer industry. I thought that for a long time until the movie Office Space came out and scared it out of me, and now I want nothing to do with any form of cubicle labor. I'm very talented when it comes to programming, software, and all of those kind of Internet things that my mother still thinks is black magic, but my attitude universally sucks and I hate people enough that putting me in any form of long-term group environment is about as helpful as using me as a disease vector for bacterial meningitis.

I suppose if you were to nail me down on the issue, I'd say that I'd prefer to do what I do now, if I could get paid for it. Acting, writing bitchy reviews about stuff, maybe making people laugh, generally sitting on my ass in a foul mood. But all of these are wishy-washy choices that nobody ever really gets paid for except people who least deserve it, like Larry the Cable Guy and Carlos Mencia. Success in those areas comes from a maddeningly chaotic ratio of hard work, proper contacts, shriekingly good luck, the inherent unfairness of the universe, and a stupid catch phrase.

The closest I've ever come to a job-- that is, the type of job where actual work is accomplished most days of the week was at my friendly local game store. This was in my high school days, when I was in my full-on nerd/rebel mode, rejecting anything mainstream and cool because of my desire to avoid being a drone: things like Green Day, Edward Scissorhands, and pussy.

I haven't really moved on much since high school, as you can probably tell. I still hate Green Day, Edward Scissorhands is overrated, and I've done little to revise my brilliant dating strategy of outright cowardice and self-pity.

Anyway, most of those days were spent in a state of near-total slacking-off. High school was never a challenge for me; I was one of those genius students who took all the advanced courses and still had time for marching band and drama club. You probably would have hated me. I spent most of my time at the local gaming pit playing RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, Shadowrun, RIFTS, almost anything you can think of, I've picked up and played at least once. I spent almost every day down there after classes until close, gorging myself on enough snack food, sugar and caffeine to make a nutritionist want to retreat and say three Hail Marys for my salvation. I was about as permanent a fixture in Michael's Magic as Norm's ass on Cheers.

You have to understand, a gaming store is normally not like most other stores. Customer goodwill is paramount in a game store, now more than ever because there's nothing-- literally NOTHING-- stopping your average gamer from buying the books and games he needs on Amazon.com for far less money. All your average FLGS owner has is a near-feudal system of vassalage and loyalty. It's understood that if you're a gamer, you swear an oath to shop only at the store of your nearest liege lord. Any patronage of other stores is outright treason. In exchange for this loyalty, game store owners open their floors to daily parties of food, drink, personal abuse, and foulmouthed gaming.

Some stay there more than others. A lot more.

After a year or so of being legally unable to make me leave (after all, I was supplying him with regular business and was involved in role-playing games almost nightly) he offered me "work," which essentially amounted to doing everything I was already doing, jockeying the register when necessary, occasionally mucking out the toilet, and making sure nobody stole anything when Mike went out to get cigarettes. For this, I was paid in store credit and I was perfectly happy with the arrangement. Odds were good that even if he'd paid me actual money it would have just gone right back into the purchase of Magic: The Gathering cards or something equally frivolous from the store.

Most of the fine details of those memories are lost in a haze of Mountain Dew. I usually don't take the effort to remember anyone's name until we've spent about six months talking, but that's common for most hardcore gamers. We like to use nicknames and mnemonics to distinguish the crowd of gamers in our minds, especially since baby boomers were depressingly boring in the names they chose for their children. At one time I knew six Mikes: Big Mike, Crazy Mike, Store Mike (who had to be renamed to Viking Mike when there suddenly became two Store Mikes), Pizza Mike, Gay Mike, and Supermike. I remember at least three Steves and I still know three other Noahs (which admittedly is weird...), each requiring their own Mafia name. The point is, while I can't vouch for every tiny detail in the events I'm about to recall, I can promise that they're generally accurate. Probably.

Gaming has changed a lot from the days of my childhood. Michael's Magic closed a long time ago, victim of a lack of business and an inability to compete with the Internet and eBay. Old school gaming has likewise withered away, replaced with the polished, monolithic spectre of WotC and their popular d20 System: a cash cow of a game loudly derided by veterans much like fans of heavy metal complain and argue about when Metallica officially sold out. The grognards have retreated into their basements to get away from the noisy card gamers, and though there more gamers now than I ever remembered seeing in my past, I find myself rather unsettled by how much it's all changed sometimes. There's a new generation of gamers, and at 26 I'm already one of the grouchy old-timers trying to recruit people for an older edition of a game none of the kids have, a half-dozen retorts already pre-programmed in my mind to shout at anyone who buys the new Player's Handbook.

Bitching and arguing are two of the three major joys of being a gamer, the third being telling anyone who will listen about your characters and how they died in particularly gruesome fashion. This act is best told while hanging from the arm off the store counter, babbling endlessly about die rolls that you somehow remember and rules from obscure books to some nodding clerk who does an admirable job of pretending to be engaged in the conversation while secretly trying to make your head explode. People who compulsively tell these stories are known as counter monkeys, individuals who will exist as long as game stores endure.

Few other jobs have customers like this, where people will approach the counter, usually not pay for anything, and without preamble or warning launch into a forty-minute retelling of some fantasy siege that usually ends with someone inexplicably and improbably getting shot in the face. In all fairness, these stories are usually pretty funny when they don't lead into protracted arguments about how min-maxed they managed to make their characters, or how they don't like the magic system, or how they wish they could do away with feats entirely, or...well, most of these stories end up as labyrinthine roundabout parables about how either a specific person or game sucks.

I've been stuck behind that counter for years. And I've got my own stories.

Let me tell you of the days of high adventure.