I love games! As a kid I was heavy into Monopoly, Risk, and Boom or Bust. I had a different set of friends for each game, but sometimes there was overlap. Monopoly was about Bruce Turnbull, his brother Jeff, and anybody else we could dragoon into my cool damp basement on a hot summer afternoon. Boom or Bust was Dave Rustick’s game, played at his place in "Sylvan Estates," a development taht ruined some perfectly fine pasture land, a field that was great for kite flying and model airplanes before they raised all the new houses, paved the streets, put in the lamp poles and a thousand nursery trees that are grown now and make the place look a lot less barren than it looked in those days. Risk was the purview of the Borrowman kids, Steve and Betty Jo. Betty Jo was brutal, forming alliances and then turning around and crushing an erstwhile ally.
These games were played face-to-face with snacks, and beverages, and a social context different from the text based, computer mediated, Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games.
I still enjoy chess and backgammon, a friendly game of poker. Bridge. I played my share of Adventure in the seventies and early eighties, but it wasn’t fun. About all I learned is that "Real adventurers do not use such language." But today three bloggers blogged gaming and I find that interesting. Gary Turner is off to the races. Jeneane is mulling over the possibilities of Second Life. And I’m dissing World of Warcraft, which you might expect me to do since I have a firm conviction that warcraft sux.
Raise your hand if you read Orson Scott Card (mine goes up in classic Horshack gesture). If you raised your hand, you know about Ender’s Game. Well, the aliens have not invaded, and if they had, you aren’t as bright as Andrew Wiggin anyway, so whatever fantasies playing MMORPGs feed, you won’t save the world that way. I promise.
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