Paul

So one of my true loves is reading, now more than ever. I’ve always been a reader, but never to the degree that my parents were. When I was a kid, we had a whole huge library in the basement of thousands of paperbacks from the 50s and 60s – mostly science fiction and mysteries (my dad into science fiction, my mom into mysteries).

At the end of my Mom’s life, books were her escape – she’d juggle four or five at a time and would bring them home from the library by the bushel. I always joked that she’d be happiest being a brain in a jar, just as long is there was some way for her to turn the pages.

I read every morning during the work-week – 45 minutes to an hour. I’m a slow reader, but slow and steady can win the race. Over time, I churn through a lot of books – maybe 75% fiction and 25% non-fiction, and I certainly get into some themes. Right now, I’m plowing through all the amazing “Grimdark” fantasy novels of English writer Joe Abercrombie. Awesome Game of Thrones type stuff!

But occasionally, I don’t have a book “on deck” so I have to make the hard and stressful decision of what to read next. That’s where the picture came from – this Sunday’s arduous decision-making process. I set out all of the “contenders” and read through several pages in each – culling the pile one at a time until I pick just the right book. It totally stresses me out (what if I pick wrong?), but it’s also exciting, because what I read in the morning is how I start my day.

For the record, the winner in this stack is a re-read of William Gibson’s 1986 masterpiece Count Zero – at least until I get the latest Joe Abercrombie from Amazon!

So what about eBooks? I love them and they are awesome for traveling, either with a Kindle or my iPad (using the Kindle app). Often, a book that I’m interested in is WAY cheap on Kindle and if so, I’ll get that version. These days, it seems like what I want to read is about the same price for Kindle or a trade paperback – so I’ll go with the real life paper book – better battery life that way!

So I’ve always been a gamer, and I’ve had the amazing privilege to work in the game industry for a number of years – as a journalist, as a contract designer (for The Other 90% Inc.), as a lead designer (Mechwarrior 3 for FASA Interactive), as a producer/designer (Prey at 3D Realms) and as the head of my owner software company, Magic Lantern Playware. Even though I work in the economic development sector now, I still do a lot of “gamey” thinking, both at home and professionally.

But how’d I get into that industry? Like all things, it was a twisty path that I could have in no way planned. But one thing was foundational – as a little kid, I was totally engrossed in “rule systems” – and how adding rules to play made play even better. Back then, I didn’t know how to explain it, I just did it. For example – having a friend over and hanging out on a swing set was fun. BUT if you said the swing set was a pirate ship, and the lawn was the ocean and Nikki our poodle running around the yard was a dangerous great white shark – suddenly, you had rules adding structure and challenge to the play, and it was SO much more fun!

So I was a geeky miniatures and RPG gamer in 1977 when my dad suddenly died. My Mom had no idea how to be a single mom, but a family friend was playing around with the totally new TRS-80 and how to do accounting with it. He talked my Mom into buying me one to give me something to dive into to take my mind off of losing my dad.

I totally geeked out on coding in BASIC (Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Interpreter Code, for the geeks out there – you know who you are!) and coded stupid dungeon crawlers and pixel paint programs and a database to track my beer can collection (called PIMS – Personal Information Management System). All the while our family friend Larry sort of became my ersatz dad and we explored coding together, and he started looking into starting a game company. He initially did contract work, and my first paid gig was in high school, coding on an Apple II – doing graphics for an educational math game to be published by Guinness (the beer guys). I coded fun little splash scenes you’d see when you’d get some problems right.

Things took off when the Atari 800 came out. I learned assembler and Forth and Larry’s company took off – called “Rocklan Corporation” – and I was a junior coder there on their “rip off” (as in Wild West of no licensing or copyright) Wizard of Wor port. I also got totally into Eastern Front and became pen pals with its creator Chris Crawford who later became a bit of a mentor to me (he’s widely considered to be one of the “fathers” of modern computer gaming).

But the industry wasn’t all that mature then and when I attended Knox College to get a degree in computer science, I was told game programming wasn’t a valid career path. So I gave it up and pursued an MFA in science fiction writing (through it’s own overly long and twisted path) – and only came back to the game world after grad school writing for Compute (I took over the Gameplay column from Orson Scott Card), Omni and Computer Gaming World (where I was the game design editor)… and that writing work, plus my love of rules systems started the dominos falling and by 1996, I was making games full-time at FASA Interactive up in Chicago (living in a corporate apartment off Ashland during the week and driving home to Monmouth on the weekends). What a crazy ride!

I was thinking today about what I might have done on a Sunday morning when I was 25 or 26 years old – and the first thing that hit me was that I probably wouldn’t be awake in the morning at all – I’d probably be sleeping off whatever drunk or stoned time I had on Saturday night. And then my memory is a complete blank – what DID I do on Sundays? I’m thinking not much, and certainly not much interesting.