4 posts tagged “games”

14 years ago, in the late summer of 1993, I remember reading about this game called "Magic:The Gathering." It was played with cards but you and your friends actually bought different random decks so everyone had a unique mix. What intrigued me (other than the art, which looked fabulous) was that no two decks were alike. It was a fascinating concept, and I recall quite clearly holding this idea in my head that we would each carry around this one unique deck. (Remember that line, so you can laugh at it later.)

Being a Trostle, I of course filed away the article, fully intending to check it out "some day" ... hey, games came out all the time and I still had many I had bought we had yet to play, so what was a few months or years, right? A few weeks later, a guy from one of my regular gaming groups called up all atwitter, said we had to come over that night and try this new game he had discovered. It was, of course, Magic. Bastard had stolen my thunder.

No matter. Magic tore thru our group — and the gaming world — like a lightning bolt. We stopped playing anything else for almost a year. Even my wife remarked on it, and for her to notice anything about the games we played, well, the observation was telling. (Funny, too, but when we first started playing everyone remarked how like "Talisman" the card game seemed; years later, when we dusted off Talisman, we all remarked how much it reminded us of "Magic").

We managed to catch the tail-end of the first release, before the game sold out and cards became hard to find, when there was this heady headiness to it all. In retrospect, that period lasted all of two months, maybe less, and I think the rest of the time we were all trying to recapture that first high. (The same was probably true of the publisher, Wizards of the Coast, which was caught off guard by the success of their creation. They threw their original game plan out the window and flooded the market with reprints and new sets.) Magic shook up the entire gaming industry, and pushed me to the point were I was interested in getting back in the business — I even applied to Wizards of the Coast for a job — but luckily (if this story is to be believed), never got it.

Personally, it was all downhill as well -- when new sets came out, gamers bought cards by the shovel-load, and I couldn't compete monitarily or at the table. (When one friend eventually sold his collection he counted over 15,000 cards — 250 decks worth! — and bought a new top of the line computer with the payoff.)

The sense of mystery and discovery were gone as well. I came over the night after one set was released, looking forward to opening a few bright new packs -- only to find that two guys had bought cases of the release, taken the day off work and opened and sorted them all already. This was less than a year after the original game was published, and already it had become mechanized, automated, all about volume.

WOTC put out new versions where the printing was poorly handled (some said deliberately, to drive up the secondary market on original cards), tournament rules were constantly changed to force you to buy more cards, snotty gamers sucked all the joy out of even casual play and trades, and during one convention, someone stole my most valuable card. Dare I say it: the magic was gone.

We ran a couple of small leagues, which admittedly were fun, but overall the game became a burden. Eventually, 3 or so years after first playing it and bitter, I sold my collection. My best guess is I broke even. I kept a handful of favorites and enough cards to make about 2 decks (which was how I first envisioned the game) and moved on.

Fast forward a number of years. Magic was still around and bigger than ever, even if it was a souless money-making machine and now looked like Pokemon. When our neighbor's 12-year-old son found out I used to play, he brought his cards over and challenged me to a duel. I crushed him. Then I showed him how to build a better deck.

Over the next few years, he and his friends picked up thousands of cards. He entered and won tournaments, and began giving me tips on deck construction. Even though I absolutely hated the new cards, WOTC had flooded the market with so many sets over the preceding decade, you could find decent older stuff for cheap and I found myself buying cards again, if only to compete with Eli. The old obsession had returned.

As Eli got ready to go to college however, I realized I was going to lose my main (ok, only) competitor. Like so many other things in my life that have recently folded themselves up and put themselves away, it was clear it was time to put the cards away again.

(The day after I made this decision, a neighbor called and said she had found this big box of her old Magic cards, and would I like them? ...Insert "I keep trying to quit and they keep pulling me back in" joke here ... but damn straight I took the cards.)

Anyway, I helped Eli sort thru all his cards — which had been literally dumped in a drawer some years ago as he discoverd girls and guitars — and got them organized as he packed for school. I couldn't stand to see them languish there. He talked of selling them to help pay for school, or passing them on to the younger brother of a friend, but he'll probably keep a deck or three with which to play.

Then, I got out my own collection and divided them up. This time I am keeping five decks (symbolically enough the number of colors in Magic.)
 
I gave all the rest to Elliot, the 6-year-old son of my friend Kevin. He was overwelmed by the gift, and excited by each and every card in the box. They are ALL new and mysterious to him, and he and his father are having a great time discovering the game together.

As for me, I am done buying cards. No really. Here's how I know. The last card I bought from my last buying spree on eBay finally arrived in the mail yesterday.

Appropriately enough, it is titled "Equalibrium."

Well, not quite, but close enough for me to make the reference...

Our best friend's son, Eli, headed off to college this morning.

Holy cats but they do grow up fast. I still think he's this 12-year-old kid constantly bugging me to play Magic: The Gathering ... and the truth is it was I who was bugging him the last few months to come over for one more round of card games.

Now though he had a cute girlfriend and a rolling pack of friends with whom to play guitar and smoke and sneak out to parties, and I of course was regretting all the chances I missed to play games with him over the years (especially last summer when I was such a mess after Maxie died and turned down numerous invitations from them.)

We did go out in a blaze of glory though. He and his mom made it over for dinner last week, and afterwards we had a great time as he proceeded to kick my ass with my own decks (his own cards having been lost under the video games and hookas in his room), and then he and a bunch of his goober buddies came over last weekend where we played "Conquest of the Empire" until almost 5 in the morning. That was the last I saw of him.

As of tonight he's in Boone, unpacking in his first dorm room and loose on the campus of Appalachian State. He's the exact age I was when I went to IUP, and I'm trying to reconcile that with remembering who I was at the time. I see Eli and his friends and have to wonder 'Is that how WE looked to the adults?'

Weird, you know?

Bitter winter weather out today... a perfect time to stay inside and write this then...

Over this past year I've had more than a few major deja vu moments -- momentary flashbacks where I couldn't have told you whether it was 2006 or 1991, 2007 or 1977. (Of course, it didn't help that I've also just finished up the JPCD Project, the massive compilation of the soundtrack to my life, with hundreds of trigger songs that could effortlessly hit the ol' nostalgia button -- but that's another entry for another time.)

Two of the weirder incidents came about during the gaming weekend my friend Eli throws around his birthday in January.

Eli is the teenaged son of our best friend here in Durham, and we've known him since he was 12, watching him grow up from an awkward geeky boy to a far-less awkward -- but still a little geeky -- adult. I've been playing games with him off and on since we meet him, at first "Magic: The Gathering" and later the occasional board and computer game.

Last year I volunteered to be the "adult supervision" one night during the weekend-long birthday geekfest so Bettina could go out for the evening. At the time Eli and his friends were heavily into Xbox and the boardgame "Axis & Allies" ... and while there was no way I could compete against the practiced adolescent reflexes in a videogame and was habitually annihilated in "Halo", I was able to show them just how much damage a cornered England could do when we switched over to the WWII boardgame.

It was particularly odd sitting around the game table with Eli's friends, who ranged in age from 13 to 16 -- all of whom would have fit in well with my group of geeky and game-playing friends from high school ... if, you know, these kids had been alive back then.

In fact, at times it was hard not to look at the feuding brothers across the table from me and not see Monty & Trevor or Matt & Doug or my brother & myself. (It didn't hurt that Eli's mother has given him a "proper rock-n-roll education," making sure he had grown up listening to the entire history of rock, and was currently on a Pink Floyd and Queen kick. Not only did we play some of the same games, we were listening to the same music.)

Things got weird though when one of the boy's fathers called and insisted it was time to go home. Even though he had cleared it with his mother that he could stay the night, the father wouldn't hear of it. After several phone calls, the father simply showed up at the house. I was sitting away from the front door when he walked in and didn't see him at first. He and his son immediately began arguing from across the room. I turned around to introduce myself and was stunned to be looking at some... KID! --

-- I mean, I was expecting a FATHER -- you know: AN OLD MAN --- and here was someone who was clearly younger than me.

After getting over my shock my first thought was: "I could take this punk."

As their tense and noisy showdown continued my second thought was "Maybe someone should step in here and be the adult" which was quickly followed by "Never get involved in a civil war" -- which was what this clearly was. After the father got his way and forced his son to leave, the other boys told me the family had a lot of problems and that there was a constant power struggle between the two.

It only took a few minutes for us to return to the game, but my deja vu had dissipated. I was once again the adult supervision and there was once again a generation between us.

Deja vu number two happened at this year's gaming party for Eli last Friday.

Once again it was a pack of Eli's high school friends around a board game, and just like last year I got the feeling these kids would have fit in just fine with the guys I grew up with (and vice versa). Even the personalities and struggle for hierarchy I saw in action were startlingly familiar -- except it was now Eli instead of Matt, Martin instead of Monty, Aaron and Aaron instead of Rusty and Paul or Brent and Trevor. No wedgies where dispensed that night but the boys were constantly punching each other in the arm or leg, and more than one spontaneous wrestling match broke out. (I forgot how fast and vicious teenage boys could be, even when they're just playing.)

The setting was complete when Bettina revealed she had gotten Eli the boxed set of the complete Led Zeppelin as a birthday gift, so, just like when I was a kid I once again found myself listening to Led Zep IV and Houses of the Holy as we chucked dice, ate bags of Doritos and called each other names.

The blurring of time continued as we switched over to video games ... didn't matter whether we were playing on an Xbox 360 in Eli's game room or Atari 800 in the Link's basement, we were all just a bunch of goobers sprawled over futons or piles of pillows on the floor with joysticks control pads in hand trying to blow shit up (though I still got slaughtered in Halo just as sure as last year.)

But even with all the displaced familiarity on my part I was immensely conscious of how fleeting this all is going to be. Eli turned 18 this year and is a senior in high school, as are a number of his friends. Whether they are aware of it or not, everything is going to shift soon, is going to change and -- certainly at least in this relatively carefree form -- end.

A few weeks ago I had a rare game night at my house for my birthday and the only people who could make it were Eli and some of his friends; everyone else -- ie, all of my adult friends -- couldn't get away because of their jobs or their own kids. As we went to pick up a pizza I told them to let this be an object lesson and squeeze every possible moment out of what they had right now because once they went to college it would only get harder and harder to get together and play all these games they so clearly love.

Of course, I didn't expect them to follow my advice -- shoot, even I didn't take my own council.

Even before this year I saw things happening to Eli and his friends that echoed what happened to mine a generation ago. As soon as they got their driver's license and after-school jobs -- and discovered girls -- boom, they were off and running with their new distractions, with less and less time to just hang out and goof off and play dozens of games.

I say this with some regret because I knew this was going to happen for years and didn't take full advantage of the window I had to spend time with Eli, before cars, before jobs, before parties. Before I go all Cat's-in-the-Cradle on you, I should say part of it was out of my hands. Because of the custody arrangement between Bettina and her ex-husband, Eli spent at least half his weeks at his father's place. With my weird newspaper and book schedule then, we could only coordinate game sessions maybe 5 or 6 times a year.

When we could pull together a game night though we always had a blast. (After teaching him how to build a faster, deadlier deck in Magic, I gradually lost ground over the next couple of years to his increasingly powerful cards and combos to the point where, after I went 0-20 against him one evening, he looked at me with great pity and said "Can we play something else?" It is probably the only time I have ever felt pride at having my ass so thoroughly kicked.) After that I made sure to pull out a wide swath of games whenever we got together. I introduced him to Circus Maximus and Shogun and my Warbots game -- but there are still a dozen titles we never got to play.

About 3 or 4 years ago, when we moved the last of our stuff out of storage in PA, I found my old Dungeons & Dragons books and debated whether to introduce Eli and his friends to D&D. He was the  about the same age I was when I discovered the game, and I thought it might be fun to update the timeline in my old campaign and drop a new generation of players in the mix.

Although I am clearly double guessing myself now, I eventually decided not to -- you need to get together on a regular basis and have a fairly consistent group of players to get the most out of the game, and given our uneven (and my overloaded) schedule at the time that would have been difficult. In addition, I had a few doubts that an old pen & paper game -- especially one as cheesy as the '70s era D&D -- would hold the interest of young gamers today. Even with the miniatures I had, could it compete with the elaborate boardgames that have come out in the past few year -- much less the hi-rez realism of today's video games? Better to not introduce it at all than leave them bored and unimpressed (and me disappointed).

Finally I had to ask myself -- who was I really getting the game out for? Was it for their benefit -- or was I simply trying to recapture some lost element of my own adolescence? Role-playing games have a different social and interactive aspect than other games, and I suspected that -- even though Eli's friends reminded me of my old high school buddies -- something would get lost in the translation. New wine, old wineskin and all that.

So yeah, clearly some regrets -- as with any passing time in life. And while I thoroughly enjoy playing with young, smart gamers and will certainly try and get in a few more games before Eli is graduated and gone, I have to say one thing: after the kids crashed on Friday night, I returned home to find that our neighbors were still up and having a little party -- and I couldn't believe how much I missed just having a beer and talking about impending marriages and mortgages and all that grownup crap.