From Gamer To GameDev: Part I

Unlikely Origins

EVERY ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE WHEN I’M IN LA, I’LL REFLEXIVELY HEAD WEST ON THE 101 FREEWAY. If I’ve got the time, I’ll glide off the ramp at Winnetka Avenue, turn beneath the overpass, then join the bustle of traffic pushing up the hill on Ventura Boulevard. On the left there’s Taft High School, looking just as trapped in time as it has for decades. On the opposite corner, a shiny new Chick-fil-A has replaced a Chevron station where I filled up every week. Denny’s restaurant, where I spent many long work lunches talking nonsense with my fellow Okie exiles Kenneth Mayfield and Ron Bolinger, is now a forlorn, wrecked-out ruin. Just beyond it are a cluster of cheap motels, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it right turn into a business complex called Woodcourt that serenely overlooks the Ventura Freeway. Apart from a fresh coat of paint and the fact that the palm trees and pine trees surrounding it have all grown much taller, the former home of New World Computing looks just the way it did on my first day of work here. Thinking about it today, my brain boggles. It seems unthinkable that it’s been thirty-five years ago this month since I first walked through those doors and started my career in game development.

Where My Career Began - A nostalgic snap at the former Woodland Hills offices of New World Computing (taken in November of 2017.) Just behind my head are the windows of the corner office that belonged to New World’s founder, Jon Van Caneghem, creator of the venerable Might & Magic and Heroes of Might & Magic role playing and strategy series.

It’s fair to say that I had no idea what I was in for when I first accepted the position back in 1990. Though I’d seen game designers portrayed in movies like Tron and WarGames, the actual job bore no resemblance whatsoever to what had been portrayed on the silver screen. Even if I’d known in college that I was heading into the game industry, there were no books or courses available— or even vaguely useful pamphlets — that could have prepared me for the job I was taking on. My newly minted college degree in radio, television and film production was helpful when it came to creating the narratives I’d come to be known for, but it was my informal education — my years of playing tabletop and computer games as a kid — that would provide the essential design skillset upon which I would build the rest of my peculiar career.

---

If you were to survey a group of Gen X developers about their early game experiences, you’d likely hear a lot of stories about game nights spent with family, about watching parents playing bridge or poker with friends, or maybe someone would share a tale about an eccentric uncle recreating classic military battles with miniatures. All of these are scenarios that would have been relatively commonplace during the decades when I was growing up. But in Oklahoma, in my childhood home, gaming wasn’t a regular part of my upbringing. We owned Monopoly, and a complete Scrabble set, and a few other tabletop classics, but largely these were left to rot on the top shelf of our hallway coat closet. Occasionally these would get hauled out when my mother went looking for something else, remarked “Oh, we should play these sometime,” and then promptly shoved back into the dark for another decade of dust gathering and neglect. From time to time, my mother and I might play a game of hangman or tic tac toe while waiting in a doctor’s office, but otherwise until I was about seven or eight, our household was a relatively game free zone.

Curiously, there was one game with which I came into relatively frequent contact outside of my home, largely thanks to our long summer family vacations that took us all over the USA. Regardless of what state we were in, I could always count on finding these folksy-looking curiosities on the table of whatever greasy spoon diner my father had dropped us into. While the name and exact configuration of the game varied from one place to another — variously called I.Q. Tester, Peg Solitaire, or Wooden Peg Game — the gameplay was always the same.

While the gameplay was relatively simple, it was the first time that I realized there could be greater complexities lurking beneath a deceptively simple surface. By varying the starting positions of the pegs, I’d be forced into different movement patterns in order to solve the puzzle which meant there wasn’t a single pattern to memorize. It didn’t have the complicating factors of checkers where another player’s movements could be used to block my strategy, but it helped me understand how the consequences of each move could either expand or reduce my future moves, and thus my first real exposure to “downboard thinking.”

PRETTY PEGGY (GAME) ‘O - The gameboard of what many people simply call “the peg game” is typically triangular in shape, but over the years I’ve seen both rectangular and triangular boards. Sometimes an integrated cup is provided to hold discards, and is used for storage of the pegs when the game isn’t in use. From the 60s through the 80s, these games were usually manufactured out of wood, and the pegs were repurposed golf tees. Today these games are still found on the tables of many southern-themed restaurants like PoFolks and the Cracker Barrel. While a commercial version of the game was released in the 1960s by Milton Bradley called Hi-Q, the game is believed to have originated in France during the 17th century during the reign of Louis XIV.

My first real competitive gameplaying began with a neighbor, David Guthridge, who lived just a few houses down and across the street from me. As my agemate and closest friend, David and I had known each other practically since birth, and all through kindergarten and elementary school, we were each other’s constant companions. Every kind of mischief that two boys could get up to, we got into together. Most of our early playing — as was true for most people of our era — was done outside. In the ravines and gulleys of our neighborhood we skinned knees and bruised limbs, fighting savage no-holds-barred games of army, or cowboys and indians, or cops and robbers while armed with makeshift weapons made from sticks or pipes or anything else we could find that was vaguely weapon shaped. It’s frankly a miracle we survived to reach puberty.

YOU DIRTY RATS! - Most of my early knowledge about competitive gaming came from playing with (and against) my old friend David Guthridge (pictured on the right). This third-grade photo snapped in the Guthridge’s front yard (fifty years ago this month), was definitely from a time when we were spending more time outside than huddled over a gameboard on the Guthridge’s kitchen table.

When the weather turned inclement, David and I would have to fight our wars indoors in a more restrained manner, and that’s how I first was exposed to the Guthridge family’s arsenal of games. As with my family, the Guthridge’s had Monopoly, and I can recall several occasions of playing it at their house, but it never particularly held my imagination. I didn’t have any fantasies of owning properties or even amassing fortunes at that time, and really the only thing I liked about it was getting to play the scotty dog. Of the many games they possessed, there were really only three that I enjoyed going back to over and over again.

Battleship was the most relaxing of the three to play, though it had very little long-term impact, and it wasn’t particularly sophisticated. You guess, hit or miss, keep doing that, and hopefully you get all the hits you need before the other player does. Luck and an ability to read the other player’s tells are more important than anything else — but it’s good for playing against a more experienced or more intelligent opponent. Risk, in comparison, was absolute rocket science. I couldn’t just get away with making random moves. I had to think, deal with resources, and be aware of how troop locations affected their strengths or vulnerabilities (remember: stockpile in Australia, never try to hold Kamchatka…). I had to think about how many troops I could generate each move, how I could relocate them, and what the probabilities would be that I could keep particular territories or take others. The last of the “Guthridge Three” was Clue, a game that it might surprise you as being essential on my list of formative games. As with Battleship, the game had very little strategy and was somewhat reliant on luck. The most important role that game played in my future career was that it taught me important lessons about how players could deduce a story from seemingly unrelated facts: a who, a where, and a what. It was my first practical lesson in generative narrative, and it would inform how I later began creating stories in role-playing games. It’s only the tiniest mental hop from solving murders in a mansion in Clue to solving mysterious deaths in a haunted mansion in Call of Cthulhu. More than this, it sparked a general interest for me in the mystery genre which in turn would lead me to one of the most important games of my early life.

GET A CLUE - In 2001, as part of its massive revival of the Dungeons & Dragons brand and the introduction of Dungeons & Dragons 3.0, Wizards of the Coast partnered with USAopoly for a D&D themed version of Clue. Although the locations, characters, items and graphics were all given a decidedly Forgotten Realms spin, the gameplay was essentially the same as in classic Clue, but as an added feature it included a Wandering Monsters deck that could be used to spawn monsters inside the murdered Archmage’s castle. Clearly, I wasn’t the only person who saw a relationship between the two games.

In the 1970s and into the 1980s, Channel 8 in Tulsa regularly aired the Plenty Scary Movie, introducing me to a wonderful grab bag of classic Universal monsters, Hammer horror titles, made for TV so-bad-they-were-good groaners, and also somewhat randomly, an assortment of classic Sherlock Holmes movies alternatively starring Basil Rathbone or Peter Cushing as the titular consulting detective. My favorite among Holmes’ classic adventures was the deliciously creepy Hound of the Baskervilles. But another adventure I remember watching had Sherlock at a chessboard and using it to solve a murder. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen chess being used as a narrative motif in a mystery, but it cemented in my mind the idea that smart people played chess. Sherlock played chess (at least on film), and Spock and Kirk played it on Star Trek. The lesson for me was, if I wanted to be smart, I needed to learn how to play chess.

BY JOVE, WE’VE GOT THE KEY! - Sherlock Holmes works out that the solution to the Musgrove murder in “Sherlock Holmes Faces Death” is related to a ritual that can only be solved by moving people over the chessboard like floor of the mansion.

As I approached my pre-teens, I became increasingly conscious of the presence of chess in my life. My uncles sometimes played matches with my older brother Gene when we were at the family farm south of Haskell, Oklahoma. A chess board had long been in the the Guthridge’s game cabinet, but not knowing how to play, I’d avoided asking David to teach me because I didn’t want to feel stupid with my friend (as it was, he was already a far better gamer than I was in those days). I can’t exactly remember the precipitating event, but finally when I was around nine, I at last broke down and submitted myself to instruction by my uncles.

I would love to tell you that I quickly became a young Bobby Fisher, master of chess, but unfortunately, I’ve never been more than a mediocre player. I didn’t have the dedication to really dig into it as some of my friends did. Many years later my friend Ron Bolinger would throw himself wholeheartedly into studying the games of the grand masters, and our eventual dungeon master James Day could play it at a savant level of expertise. For me, it became just another past time, something that my brother Gene and I would play on those long family car trips, and for Christmas one year, my mother even bought everyone in the family a set, though my father never touched his as he never had an interest in such colossal waste of time.

While I was never a great player, I took away a deep appreciation of chess strategies, and counter strategies, and the whole lexicon of funny words and phrases like rook, and gambit, and en passant. My love for the game would stick with me through adulthood and later shape a major quest for Betrayal at Krondor. Most importantly, by learning that you need different pieces doing different things at different places on the board, I was learning principles I’d later recognize as core RPG party dynamics.