Something to make you laugh :)

Confessions of a 50 year old gamer.

“Confessions of a 50 year old gamer”

I’m a 50 year old gamer. There it is. I’ve said it aloud. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. I thought gamers were
13 year old nerdy boys with bad acne who belonged to the AV club. Wrong! Adults and even grandparents are the biggest up and coming demographic in gaming today. But I digress… It all began with text based MUDs. What’s a MUD you ask? Technically it stands for Multi-User Dungeon, but really it’s a wealth of creative fodder just waiting to be put to use.

I have always loved writing. One Christmas while all the other kids asked for toys and games, I asked for a
typewriter and stationary items so that I could write stories. Over the years I accumulated reams of poems and oodles of songs. Every time I read my favorite authors I dreamed of writing tales that excited and thrilled, but ideas, well that was another matter. What to write? Where to begin? Who would my characters be?

Then I found gaming and within moments I was surrounded by war-like ogres, hideous trolls, arrogant elves, and powerful wizards. I learned to create characters that not only had talents, but faults as well. They had families, birthmarks, scars, likes and dislikes. They were bards, warriors, healers and sorcerers. They lived in palaces, caves, tents and huts. They had friends, enemies, political aspirations and loves. I knew them as well as I knew the back of my hand, maybe better. I began to write for them.

Others loved reading my writings. My friends urged me to do something more with them, but how overwhelming a task that seemed. I thought about it constantly and then one day, while cleaning out a dungeon one hard fought battle after another, I realized that writing a book was a lot like cleaning out that dungeon. A “BOOK” was intimidating, but I only had to write one chapter or one event at a time. After all a book is just one
chapter after another which builds upon the one that went before until you reach the climax of the story, just as a dungeon was just one room after another, each getting progressively harder, until you reach the main boss at
the end. Suddenly it seemed far less daunting.

Now 4 books later, working on getting pubished,  I’m still as fond of my characters as ever, maybe more so. I admit the line between author and characters sometimes becomes blurred, but I wouldn’t want it any other way. Every day I send them through their trials and tribulations, their victories and successes, a benevolent guiding hand who has discovered, to my utter and lasting delight, that as often as not they are the ones who are guiding me.

Not bad for a 50 year old gamer, is it?