How long has it been?
It’s been so long that I forgot how to log in to the blog.
How long has it been?
It’s been so long that I forgot I changed the theme.
How long has it been?
Well, long enough. I got back into blogging a bit over a year ago because of Belghast’s vast network of blog-friends. I always struggle with blogging because it takes a lot of time, and I don’t really have any insights into gaming. I’m just… a gamer, and old enough that I can raise my kids to be gamers and old enough that my grandchildren are gamers. I’m at the place where I’m not old enough to be a boomer but not young enough to be anything else. I’ve never felt I really fit in to any group or demographic; I just lurk at the edges.
This isn’t the first post of “Blaugust”, but I think the time is right for me to do some introductions.
When I was a kid, there were two kinds of gamers: card gamers, and board gamers. My family played cards. Our church held Whist nights, cribbage was super popular, and if you had nothing better to do, you could always fly solo with a hundred different versions of solitaire. I didn’t learn about board games (aside from kid board games, like Life and Monopoly) until I went to St. Paul’s School and met a bunch of guys who played Avalon Hill war games. (re: SPS ASP — no, my family is not rich. I got in for a summer program because I loved math and happened to live in the same city as the school and got a scholarship).
I talk a lot about how my high school has an old PDP 8/e microcomputer, on which I laboriously typed out programs from Creative Computing magazine on a teletype and saved it to paper tape. The gamer group at Concord High was big into Othello for awhile (hey, another board game), and we all wrote programs to play it on that computer. That was probably the high point. It was at St. Paul’s that I discovered their computer lab had VIDEO. TERMINALS. connected to a PDP/11(!) with all sorts of STORAGE SPACE. It was then that I became a computer gamer. I had this bright idea of writing a program to play this new game called “Monopoly”, and found someone had already done it. I abandoned that and wrote a program that solved Tic Tac Toe, which wasn’t really that new, either. I then moved on to trying to write a program that would let a robot find the best path through some obstacles to leave a room. I was encouraged in all this by my professor’s teaching assistant, who led me through all the theory and stuff.
By the time I got back to Concord High for my senior year after ASP, I was fired up. I’d seen how the rich kids lived. Programming was fun. When I entered the University of New Hampshire that fall, I was fired up to be a game developer; and it was just the right time, too. It was 1979. The Apple II, the TRS-80, the Commodore Pet — all were crushing the new home computer market. I couldn’t afford any of those (again: we were not rich), but I knew of them.
It was at UNH that I really learned what computers could do. New Hampshire public schools were, at the time, wholly in thrall to Digital Equipment Corporation — DEC. Concord High had their computer from them; St Paul’s probably had a rich donor hand them one. UNH was infused with DEC tendrils in every possible pore. Massive PDP/10 mainframes — Scylla and Charybdis — handled instruction and administration. All the computer clusters had DEC VT-52 terminals or DEC LP-100 line printers. The terminal clusters were controlled by old familiar PDP 8s. The engineering labs had PDP-11s and VAXs.
I had everything I needed. I coulda been famous.
But then I fell in love and got married and didn’t finish college and instead embarked upon real life. So, instead of becoming a famous game designed, I became a gamer. I wrote games for my own enjoyment — I wrote a real time dungeon crawler called TG (for: The Game) and I put all my friends in it as monsters. I then did a roguelike called Rooms (named after the dungeon generation algorithm I wrote). The monsters through their wandering actually constructed the dungeon. Since they had no particular desire to find and kill the player, it ended up largely being about wandering around in a vast dungeon that monsters had largely abandoned, and because I had never really solved the pathfinding algorithm I’d first attempted back in high school, they couldn’t have found me anyway. But it looked REALLY NICE. I’d love to have those old games back again; not because they were so good (they were not), but because I worked so hard on them.
So now, here I am. I never became a game developer, or even really much of a gamer. I’m middle-aged. I have two kids, three grandchildren, three cats, a long-term relationship and a ranch-style house in a Connecticut suburb. I work as a tech lead at an insurance company, and I’m more likely to write an API than an Apshai these days.
But, for what it’s worth, I still love gaming — both kinds, board games AND video games! And when I find the time, I sometimes write about them here. Or on Twitter.
Blaugust will give me the opportunity to, once again, talk about the sort of gaming we elder gamers enjoy. You know; slow-paced games with big text and a lot of encouraging noises, like… actually, I don’t know what games elderly people are supposed to like now. Bejeweled is a few years gone now, right? Do old people still play games? I honestly have no idea.
My High School was a big square with a courtyard in the middle. So basically 4 long hallways with classrooms and then this totally unused courtyard. If for some reason you did have to go into the courtyard, you’d pass through a set of glass doors into a foyer, then another set into the courtyard.
Our “computer lab” was in one of those foyers. So it was… I dunno, 10’x20′?
We had paper teletypes. To get online you’d dial a modem attached to a PDP-10 at SUNY of Stony Brook. When you heard the modem’s shrill screaming, you’d jam the headset of the phone into a couple of rubber suction cups at the back of the teletype and then you were online.
There wasn’t a single screen in the lab. We stored our programs on paper tapes. Same tech as punch cards, I guess, only it was on a long roll of paper tape. You’d always make a few copies (if I recall right there was a machine that would read a tape and punch out a duplicate) because if you put a roll of tape in your backpack and it got squished it might not read in right.
There was this really smart rich kid named Eric who looked like what a movie of the time would cast for the computer nerd part. Really pale, acne, mass of frizzy hair. We learned that his father worked for some computer firm and that they had an PDP-8 in their BASEMENT at home. We hated and envied Eric because of his good fortune (and his smug attitude).
Before computers I played SPI wargames, most from Strategy & Tactics Magazine. I never had anyone to play them with so I’d make up all kinds of random rules for my ‘opponent’ to follow.
I should have saved all this for MY Blaugust intro!
Anyway I AM a Boomer though just be a few years. I play Watch Dogs Legion. 🙂 OK well I just finished it and haven’t sunk into anything new yet.
Yeah you’re younger than me by a small amount IIRC, and I’m not a boomer, and so therefore, neither are you 🙂
Your school sounds a lot like mine, actually. Our resident nerdy kid had a Heathkit H-8 of his own. Nobody remembers that computer any more…
My understanding is that the Boomer Era ended in 1964, though I suppose it depends on who you ask. I was getting into mischief by 1964! Tho I was not yet in school.
Boomer obsessions like Vietnam and the Beatles and MLK and all that? They all happened way before my time. Woodstock, Summer of Love? Nothing to do with me. My mom was into disco when I was a kid. I can’t think of anything of broad cultural significance that happened until Reagan was elected — that’s the first time I could vote for president, though I don’t think I voted for anyone that year.
Whatever shaped boomers, didn’t shape me. Of me and my sisters, two were born prior to 64 and two after. I’m not thinking our lives were so different then (or now).
It’s a stupid label that I reject.
I went to university in 1978 (I think – honestly, I’d have to check to be sure. It might have been 1979), which suggests we ought to be about the same age. The whole baby boom/boomer thing drives me nuts. It has a huge stretch, from post-war to, by some measures, the late ’60s. It’s a term that bears almost no correlation to cultural clades, which are closer to 5-7 years rather than 20-25. The decade I feel most in tune with (other than whichever one I happen to be living through) is probably the 1980s. It seems to me that conscious attitudes and opinions are more likely to be set during one’s twenties than one’s childhood or teens, whereas the latter set the unconscious ones.
Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, the time I belong to is the time I’m living in. That and the time soon to come. Don’t forget the past but don’t live in it, either. That said, I have to admit I live those ideals a lot better when it comes to music, movies and books than games, where my tastes are definitely a little more unadventurous.
Yeah, the 80s is where my musical tastes gelled, mostly. I had nothing to do with the 60s and really just listened to whatever was on the radio when I was in the 70s. I had to go to college to really be exposed to much that made an impact. I worked at the college radio station — WUNH — and that really expanded my horizons in many ways.