Yep...Playboy Magazine.
Allow me to explain...
ANCIENT HISTORY
Cast your mind back...most likely well before you were born...let's say about 40 years ago.
Like all young men in the days before the Internet, I'd sneak-read my dad's copies of Playboy.
Unlike most young men in those days, I'd actually read them. I'd read some of the interviews (I remember Mel Brooks), some of the articles, some of the fiction (they published stories by name science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury), all of the cartoons, and closely read the pictorials.
Very closely.
In the back of every issue back then, there was a single page with 4 or 6 panels of "cool things for guys". Maybe some interesting gizmo for the dual-use of cigar-trimming and circumcisions...that sort of thing.
And in one issue they mentioned this British company that sold lead miniature soldiers for use in playing miniature battles. This company, "Minifigs" by name produced a wide selection of figures, from the days of antiquity through the Napoleonic wars...and incidentally, had a line of figures based on "The Lord of the Rings".
For the first time ever I experienced a Playboy-induced woody that had nothing to do with closely reading the pictorials. You see, I had only a year or two previously started reading (and re-reading [and re-re-reading, etc.]) the Lord of the Rings. Over and over. I was learning the languages and had already memorized how to write in elvish and in two types of dwarf runes. I was a LotR Loonie.
I immeditely ordered their catalog and started saving up money for my first purchase.
When the catalog arrived, I marked it up, analyzing how many figures I could get with the money I had, which ones were most important to me and so on.
I also noticed that they sold rulebooks for playing games with miniature figures, one of which was called "Chainmail" from a company called Tactical Studies Rules, or TSR.
Once the figures had arrived (and in retrospect, they were really terrible minis, sadly lacking in artistic quality or any kind of detail) the logical next step was, obviously, to buy the rules to play with them (in any other way than to hold the Gandalf figure in one hand and the balrog figure in the other while shouting "You shall not pass!" at the top of my lungs).
EDIT: omfg, I found a website that has pictures of the original figures! http://www.dndlead.com/minifigs/Minifigs-Mythical-Earth.htm
Once my copy of Chainmail arrived, some friends and I started playing miniature figure battles using both the conventional medieval rules and the fantasy rules included. We had a lot of fun, but I noticed that in the back of Chainmail, TSR had a list of products, and they mentioned this game called "Dungeons And Dragons". I decided to give that one a try too...
And so my fate was sealed...
NOTHING CAN COMPARE TO WHEN YOU ROLL THE DICE...
That may be the first time I've ever finished three straight sentences with elipses. Oh, and that last one is from the lyrics to a song that has nothing to do with anything in this article in any way except dice.
Eventually, this little fake-woodgrain box with three booklets in it showed up and my life changed. It was the original D&D and it set me back ten bucks.
I can't remember if I got it in 74 or 75, but I do remember buying the first "expansion" for it, Greyhawk, when it came out in 1975. I can't even begin to guess how many goddamned dice I've rolled for that friggin' game.
A bunch of my friends were into science fiction (lots) and fantasy (what there was of it back then) and I roped them all in. We played at least once a week during the school year, and a whole lot more during summer. I DM'd hundreds of times over the next few years, in a bunch of different RPGs and genres. Along with D&D there were "Chivalry and Sorcery", "Traveller", "Bushido", "Call of Cthulhu", "Arduin", and a lot of "Runequest".
Hmm...I need to do another blog soon on why MMORPGs are still slaves to the original D&D and how they'd be better off if they copied more of what was in Runequest.
So most of my leisure time over the next few years was spent either reading or working on the next weekend's game. I put a lot of time and effort into my gaming, and I spent an enormous amount of time jiggering around the rules to fit my own sensibilities about The Way Things Should Work. With my background in board wargaming and a natural penchant for all things mathematical, some of my game-systems got pretty complicated. Ah...but when something worked right, it was a thing of beauty.
I loved my dice, and for many years we were happy together. But we were, at last, broken up by Woz and Jobs.
WELCOME MY SON, WELCOME TO THE MACHINE
In 1979, having gotten a part-time job in a game store (DUH!) while going to college, I bought one of the first Apple II+ computers to roll off the assembly lines. It cost $1098 and came with 48k (that's _kilobytes_ kiddies) of memory.
I am old.
Until I got enough scratch to buy a floppy drive, I used a portable tape recorder as the only read/write medium available. It's possible my mail-order packages back then were delivered by Pony Express.
We still had our game sessions on most weekends (a lot of us were going to college locally), but the computer took a larger share of my leisure-time pie. I bought, and played, a lot of games.
A friend of a friend came over one day with his collection of floppies and showed me something the likes of which I'd never seen...it was a pre-release, unfinished development copy of a game called "Wizardry". Levels, classes, spells, monsters, and a poor-man's first person 3-D view.
I may have wept.
About the same time I picked up a game called "Akalabeth", a misspelled name from Tolkien, written by a guy named Garriott. The next two things he'd develop were a game called "Ultima" and a zeppelin-sized ego.
And so the age of computer RPGs swung into action.
A lot of RPGs came and went, but I remember when I first saw Diablo I immediately thought "You know, if multiple people could play this and a DM could set up the dungeon, we could finally have a computer D&D game for real!"
About a year later, 15 years ago this week, Mr. Zeppelin-Ego and his minions brought out Ultima Online.
WHO NEEDS TWO PHONE LINES?
Somewhere in those first days of Ultima Online, I gave it a try. I never got past the first month.
I have no idea at all why I didn't like it. I can't remember why I stopped playing. If I'd been griefed or ripped off or unable to play due to bugs or disconnects, I'd still remember the rage those things would have induced...but I got nothin'.
I even played with a friend a little, but it just didn't work for me. I can't explain it.
So I kind of gave up on the online gaming for some time. It wasn't until Anarchy Online showed up that I finally got to mainlining online.
A friend mentioned that the game was like an online version of "Shadowrun" (about as inaccurate a summary, in retrospect, as a person could conceiveably come up with) and thus, a couple of months after launch I gave it a try.
And so the hook was set and they reeled me in. It's possible that I've been paying a monthly fee ever since.
Oh sure, the computers have changed, the connection has changed, the graphics have changed...but the basic reasons to game haven't changed much in the intervening years.
And now, MMOs are my primary leisure time activity and have been for years. I still read, watch a little (very little) TV from time to time, but MMOs are my entertainment and also my community of friends. I still have IRL friends, but a lot of them are online friends too.
More and more I am, like most of us, becoming more and more connected to the Internet. Like the roads that we rely on to move ourselves and our goods from place to place, the Internet is an indispensible method for communicating, for getting our words (and our goods and our virtual selves) from home to everywhere else.
And for me, it all started with a stroke mag.
Makes you think doesn't it? Makes you think that you probably don't want to touch my mouse or keyboard.
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