Friday 6.30.00 

Besides spending some extensive time in the dealer room, Zack and I were looking for more footage of me engaged in Dragon*Con, playing games. We ended up in a gigantic miniatures battle.

 A very agreeable man named Dennis had set up a fantastic expansive miniatures playing field - a seven-foot-by-seven-foot diorama with a ten inch square graveyard, two castles, and a whole bunch of medieval looking houses he'd bought just after Christmastime. He has it set up with Mordheim miniatures - inch-and-a-half-high skeletons, spell-casters, ogres, musketeers, all manner of bizarre fighting creatures - all marching through Santa's Village. It was an unusual type of game - typically two people might march their armies across this field - in this case, Dennis was opening up the game so a person could take over a few of the metal men and march them across the battle field.

As I worked my way through the dozen bodies crowded around this table, I was reminded that you can occasionally see the elves and dwarves from fantasy novels living in living humans. In this case, the vast majority of the men involved in this game were decidedly dwarves: stout, short, strong, excited by fight, war, and the craft of wargaming.

 One of our "unplugged" editors, Brad Peinhardt, asked me what my interest was in unplugged games. I guess he knows me mostly from my work on the video games side of things, and I guess he's never seen me playing an offline game. I played plenty of pen-and-paper role-playing games growing up - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Car Wars, Top Secret, James Bond 007, Paranoia, Toon, Marvel Super Heroes, Traveller and Battletech. I bought some Battletech miniatures and painted them. When I reached high school and my role-playing game buddy, Donnan, moved to another school, I spent most all my gaming time alone on PC adventure and role-playing games, only really playing PC games like Scorched Earth and RoboSport with friends.

I flirted with Magic: The Gathering in college. And, I have friends who are into Warhammer. I enjoy Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble's cool, but it takes a long time to play those games. Monopoly is an attractive game, and my old girlfriend had some insane Monopoly strategy. But, generally I'm on a computer so much and I'm stimulated by electronic adventures, they better suit my fragmented time and attention span. When I'm on the road, on the plane, waiting for people, whatever, I usually play a bit of Card Fighter's Clash, an electronic handheld collectible card game simulation. You don't need friends to have fun that way!

I did buy some Illuminati: New World Order cards at the conference today, and I'm psyched to play them further. We tried them this afternoon: Allan, Zack, Llana and I sat down at an empty table in the gaming room and began dealing the cards out. Allan had played the game before, and his brother Mike, is a huge fan, so he was walking us through the game. A passerby with much Illuminati: NWO experience saw us and he immediately kneeled down by the side of our table to instruct us on the creation of nefarious plots and bizarre conspiracies. How nice to be amidst a gaming community!

A few months back I was a freelance writer with a lot of experience working on the Web. I took this job at Gamers.com because I wanted to systematically learn about games. I'm surrounded by them now - video games, computer games, and unplugged games. Obviously, the roots of all the electronic entertainment we're dealing with now are firmly planted in the games that people have been playing with paper and cards and dice and chicken bones for thousands of years. How can you talk about the background and history of a classic computer game like Autoduel without mentioning Car Wars? I grew up playing offline games and I enjoy them, even if I am more often distracted by electronic entertainment.