What it is I do
Like all people that do, in every era of my life I’ve been asked what the do I’m doing is.
The first place I recollect growing up was a nice quiet suburban neighborhood on the east coast.
I lived on a tucked away street in a modest house that sat right on the intersection of where the street split in two. Terminating in a forked double cul-de-sac.
Having now typed cul-de-sac, I love that that’s how it’s spelled. Who came up with that? Insanity.
At the end of one of these cul-de-sacs was my best friends house. I have no idea who lived at the end of the other cul-de-sc, so they were probably old and boring.
And between our house and the twin terminal end points, was the gaggle of children that fully utilized all the quiet suburban space provided to them by their loving families.
We used to play a massive game of hide and seek, with somewhere between 10 and 20 kids. Ages ranging from 5 all the way up to the late teens. My best friend and I always hid together.
Though, I do recall us never really being able to do much other than distract, it’s hard to out run a kid twice your age.
Though, this wasn’t true of one family of kids.
You see, there was a notorious family of very large people (VLP).
These VLPs children would often join in, and I distinctly remember being able to consistently out run them due to the fact that they were VLP. While I don’t remember the specifics of the ways in which we all made fun of them, I do recall there were all kinds of jokes. And it wasn’t just the kids.
For some reason I have kept with me the recollection of my mother, who was an aerobics instructor at the time, using a play on words which mixxed the word fat with their last name to describe them. I also recall their family van had one of those family stickers on the back, but all the stick figures were super fat, and also said like “We’re a zoo!”. Something zoo like.
With these facts in mind, I now present to you what it was I did around the age of six.
One early weekend day, my best friend and I were adventuring through the suburban jungle. It was fresh off a late night rain, and there were a good few spots of mud amongst the backyards we ventured through.
One such spot was placed peripherally parallel to a particular portal of the VLPs palace of paradise. Which with less alliteration, is to say there was a big mud puddle in their backyard in front of their basement window.
I don’t remember which one of us drew first blood, I only remember swiftly deciding that we were gunna chuck all the mud at their window. So we did. I recall it sticking nicely as we threw it. We must have been there for more than 20 minutes, because we covered every inch of that thing in mud.
Then we ran away. Some hours later, or maybe it was days, I don’t recall, my Mom asked us if we threw a bunch of mud at the VLPs house. I said, yes, they are fat so it’s okay though.
I’m pretty sure my Mom laughed. But then she didn’t laugh and got mad.
I cried when I found out it was a bad thing to do, because I often cried when I found out I did bad things.
Regardless, we had to go apologize to them and painstakingly remove all the mud from the window.
I recall this being pretty fun, on account of getting to use a water hose to get it off with a powerful spray nozzle. So, wasn’t really a punishment in the end. Sorry Mom.
Anyway, when I was six I made people angry in a way that made them laugh, and I did this quiet often for no reason in particular.
As a segue to the next thing I did at the next stage of my life, let me tell you a little about my six year old best friends Dad.
The God Gamer Dad
My father was anti-gamer. He wasn’t big on video games, he was definitely a sports man, and up until my late twenties, I didn’t know that sports were actually awesome.
This gave young me the impression that most Dads were not gamers. However, my best friends dad was an absolutely massive gamer. Which was very confusing.
Breaching their front door and taking a quick left put you right into my best friends Dad’s own personal gamer cave. It had a big ole wood desk, with a huge ass CRT placed squarely in the middle.
Absolutely massive. Just gigantically large. On account of me being a tiny child, but I’m sure it was a decent size. Upon this monitor my eys would stay fixed, sometimes for hours, watching him play the greatest PC RPGs the 90s had to offer.
I peppered him with all kinds of questions “Who’s that guy? What’s that item do? What’s up with those dragons? Why didn’t you fight that guy? Why didn’t you buy that? Why’d you leave that guy behind? What’s in that cave?”
There would be puzzles, and I’d try to help solve them, I don’t think I did, but I remember feeling like I was helping.
One such legendary PC RPG, was Might and Magic. I believe Magic and Magic 6, Mandate of Heaven, was the first of the series I witnessed him playing. Then later, 7, and 8. These games were insane to me, a child who prior to this, had only ever played game boy games.
If you’re not a gamer, imagine you’re playing a game about placing blocks on top of each other in two dimensions. And next to it, you put a game about exploring an open world full of mythical creatures in 3D. Wildly different.
I quickly realized in MM6(Might and Magic 6) you recruited a party of adventures, had a whole ass inventory of stuff you dished out to them, and then just kinda ventured out into the world and found crazy monsters. Monsters that dropped more stuff. Which you used to fight more monsters. And the cycle goes on and on.
My best friend on occasion, also got to play these games. And we played them together, two tiny little dudes, trying to play complex PC rpgs of the 90s. Needless to say, as all kids do, somehow we figured it out and actually played the games. I won’t get into the NES, SNES, later N64, and Sega consoles they also possessed, but know that I probably wouldn’t have loved video games even a fraction as much if my best friends dad was not an absolutely huge gamer of the era.
Diablo 2, Wizardry, and Might and Magic went on to form the canon of what I considered some of the greatest games of all time. All my taste in games later in life, I believe, came from an early exposure to these masterpieces.
Once I knew Diablo 2 existed, an M rated game, I asked for it for just about every single birthday I ever had up until I was 11 or 12.
My parents probably rightfully never bought it for me. Though, I did eventually convince my grandfather, who we called Papu(PAW-POO) to get it for me. Sadly, he got it for the macintosh, because he was a massive apple fan, and I did not have a macintosh.
So instead, and without any idea how, I would routinely find ways to borrow the install CDs from my friend’s house, then managed to get on the internet at school or the library or something, and somehow get a CD key that actually worked.
It would be discovered the game was on the computer, it would be removed, and then the cycle would repeat.
So from the ages of 6 to around 11, what I did was try to play Diablo 2.
But in 2004, World of Warcraft came out. And my mission became to acquire that game, thankfully(or perhaps unfortunately for my parents), I only had to wait about a year before I got my hands on that game.
Unlike diablo 2, my initial impressions of the game were poor. I actually stopped playing after a few days, due to the fact that I was pretty horrible at it, and my dwarf hunter who did not have a pet and was level 17, was real bad.
Something made me pick it back up, I rolled a troll shaman, and for the next 5 years of my life, what I did was play World of Warcraft.
Now, Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind both World of Warcraft, and Diablo 2, was at this point in my life literally the biggest and most important entity that existed outside myself.
So naturally, what I wanted to do was work there. And in order to work there, you had to have a skill relevant to making games. I loved computers, hated visual design, and thought game design was for losers, so I naturally wanted to learn to program.
Which with the support of my parents, being something that wasn’t playing video games, I was given lots of support towards. Any book I saw at the book store about it: they got me. My mom found summer camps geared towards programming and game creation.
And on my own, I figured it all out from there.
So, while the thing I primarily did from 2005 to 2010 was play World of Warcraft, the other thing I did was learn to code so one day my job could be making World of Warcraft. I suppose there was a third thing I did during that period, which was try to get out of school such that I could do the other two things. I was good at all three things I did at the time.
But that’s where I’ll leave things. Perhaps another day I’ll let you know how I eventually stopped playing World Of Warcraft.