Act 1: Innocence, Zelda, and Banjo Kazooie

I was a child of the 90s, which meant bad board games but cool video games. I encountered Sorry and Risk and Monopoly and the rest of them, but none of them really captured my imagination or attention. Nintendo, however, did. My cousin had a Super Nintendo and I was incredibly jealous of how nimble his Mario avoided enemies and found secret levels. My Mario had leaden boots. I was better at Duck Hunt, but perhaps I was just channeling my Mario anger onto those poor ducks.

I jumped on board with the Nintendo 64 and the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time blew my mind. I adore everything about it. I still listen to renditions of the soundtrack. Zelda was 1a to Banjo Kazooie’s 1b. If Zelda were a nice restaurant, Banjo is some maybe sketchy but delicious street food. Banjo like a candy store, Zelda like perfect tiramisu. Both games presented a massive world to explore and my adolescent mind lapped up every second.

I took a brief detour into the dark world of Playstation (hi Twisted Metal and Hitman and GTA) but nothing rivaled those early Nintendo days. I don’t have enough words to go through the full list. Mario Party, Mario Kart, Golden Eye, Diddy Kong Racing, Donkey Kong, and so many more.

My first few years in college were game-free and I didn’t really miss them. I was much more focused on being awkward with girls, realizing I hated college, studying abroad in ecovillages, still hating college, and finally dropping out and going to live at a Buddhist retreat center. I found my way to the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and recaptured some of that early Zelda joy, except this time as a vampire-alchemist-rogue closing portals into demonic realms. You say tomato I say tomato… hmm, that doesn’t really work written down.

Act 2: The Abyss

After several years living and working at a retreat center in the mountains of Colorado the requirements of living in modern society twisted my arm enough that I went back to school. From my previous 2.5 years of college (which included two semesters in hippy ecovillages abroad) I scraped together 1 year’s worth of credit. 3 more years to go… I can do this.

I sort of did, but not really. I got the degree but I was incredibly depressed and isolated the entire time. I still don’t fully understand why, because I had supportive friends and family and hadn’t experienced anything terrible or traumatic. How I responded to feeling that way was to spend an ungodly amount of time in Lord of the Rings: Online. To this day I have no idea how I didn’t fail out of school. There was the term where I forgot for several weeks that I was enrolled in a class until the day before the midterms. I begged the registrar to not have it be recorded as an “F” on my transcript. Nights became days. I would log on at 7pm, log off at 4 or 5am, sleep for a few hours and then go to class. I completely modded my keyboard to run macros, parsed my damage data, and was very active in my in-game guild and raid groups. I was a Hobbit Warden titan soloing Sword Halls and tanking raids few wardens could do.

The album “Sea Change” by Jeff Beck is etched into the feeling memory of this period of my life. Listening to it now takes me back to the small 3 room upstairs apartment I rented in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I had not yet caught the wave of digital music (in my defense, we were still firmly in the iPod era at this point) and I acquired a copy of the CD and a CD alarm clock. I thought those first easy chords of The Golden Age would be a lovely way to wake up. I didn’t anticipate that I would just stop getting up and work my way up to listening most of the album before finally rousing myself.

The tracks mirrored my mental state. The early optimism of The Golden Age gives way to the self-deception of Paper Tiger followed by the numb sorrow of Guess I’m Doing Fine. By this point in my wake-up ritual I’d be weighed down not just by blankets but also by shame and self-loathing. The slow, morose songs were like vinegar poured in my ears.

Why not just put on different music, you wonder. Well, if you’ve ever been in a similar situation, you will know it is not that easy. Being caught in such a downward spiral created a kind of internal severance and I stood beside myself watching it all happening but unable to intervene. It was like I was rubbernecking a traffic accident only to realize I was also in the accident. I even felt some grim fascination to see how bad I could let it get to see what would stop me, like playing chicken with fate.

Eventually the only thing that pulled me out of it was me. As long as I was convinced that I was choosing to spend my life in an MMO, I could convince myself that I could choose not to. I deluded myself every day that I would make a different choice that evening, but I never did. I was hanging myself by the rope of my own stubbornness and pride. It wasn’t until I accepted that I did not have control that I started to find the way out. I began to conceptualize what was happening to me as a gaming addiction and found my way to On-Line Gamers Anonymous. I was humbled, embarrassed, sad, but, more than anything, relieved. I drew inspiration from how others overcame addictions and worked to stop the core self-enabling behavior of an addict, self-delusion.

As soon as the addiction lens clicked into place it was the beginning of the end for LOTRO. It took a couple years to finally break out of it (with some relapses) and many more years before I could really look back to understand what had happened to me, forgive myself, and begin to move on.

What still bothers me sometimes is that there is no answer to the question, why? Why did that happen? I can explain what happened and trace, to some degree, the causes and effects, but as to the overarching reason why it all happened I draw a complete blank. I think at some point everyone experiences something that challenges the belief that everything happens for a reason. There was no reason I needed to lose 2 years of my life to a gaming addiction. I learned valuable lessons – the importance of being honest with myself, the limits of self-control, the toxicity of shame and the power of self-compassion – and I’ll be content with them as the treasures I retrieved from that dark period.

Intermission

I’ve tried several times to write the last section of this post and finally settled on the above then let it sit for a couple weeks. Then the most interesting thing happened.

I relapsed.

Not all the way to LOTRO, thank god, but I fell face first into Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. It’s lurking in my Steam Library waiting for moments of weakness when I want to just zone out for an hour or two. Or a week. Or two.

Writing about the addictive period of my life activated the lingering bits of shame embedded in my psyche. Shame pushes me to do two things: numb it out and do things that justify it. I am reminded of how complex my relationship to gaming is and how closely parallel my love for board games is to my addictive history and tendencies. Once an addict, always an addict. Why do I need to see if that fire is still hot? I don’t know.

Maybe you wonder why I’ve gone into such detail about my online gaming addiction and what relevance it has to a board gaming blog. Losing so much time to that addiction didn’t dampen my desire to take the joyful and imaginative leap into another world. In a chronologically direct way, I embraced the board gaming hobby because I felt it could provide the healthy balance that online gaming could not. Board games are physical artifacts, they can’t trap you in the same way that computer-generated worlds can. I can be immersed without getting addicted.

Reflecting back on my experience with online gaming also makes me want to write this blog in a way that focuses on deeply appreciating and enjoying board games, not getting addicted to the hobby. The antidote to addiction is appreciation. No addict actually enjoys what they are addicted to. They know it is destructive, but they have to do it anyway.

Play a board game because it makes you happy. As soon as you stop enjoying it, stop. Pretty simple!

Ok, back to the chronological story.

Act 3: Revival

I left Halifax with my City Planning degree in hand but without much of plan for how to use it. I soured considerably on my major after choosing it. There weren’t many jobs available and those that were were not particularly inspiring. I mean, I grew up playing Sim City 2000. I wanted to design my own beautiful city and go bankrupt 18 out of 20 times while doing it. I didn’t want to be an administrative yes man bowing to the political winds behind whoever got elected.

So I set off towards home. I planned to drive my car from Halifax, Nova Scotia all the way back home to Alaska. Even though that was already the long route, I intended to make it even longer: picking up jobs here and there, meandering, camping, and sightseeing. I just wanted an adventure. And I got it, for about 2.5 months, before I ended up back at a Buddhist retreat center first as a retreatant, then hired back on at staff.

I kept playing computer games but avoided MMOs absolutely. Computer games carry some of the same addictive risk as MMOs but they wear thin much quicker without the social interaction that permeates MMOs. Is that interaction immature? Sure. Superficial? Absolutely. But it’s way more engaging than the bots on Sid Meier’s Civilization.

Soon after starting this new job I went with some friends to a board game night where we played Dominion, Puerto Rico, and Sentinels of the Multiverse. It was an amazing and eye-opening experience! I hadn’t played a real board game since I was in high school and these were all so much fun. A housemate played Twilight Struggle and Arkham Horror with me. He told me about BGG and I was all in.

Despite having people around that also enjoyed playing board games I gravitated towards solo gaming. I enjoyed the personal and private experience of gaming entirely on my own terms and timeline. I enjoyed the depth and immersion I was able to experience on my own. My earliest and still most enduring love was Mage Knight, and it encapsulates what I love about solo gaming.

Over the next 3 years I slowly grew my collection. Kickstarter was just picking up steam, and I back such games as Galaxy Defenders, Fantasy Frontier, and Lagoon: Land of Druids. None of which I still own. I’ve come to learn that I get way more satisfaction out of moving on from a game than keeping it around and never playing it. My Previously Owned games are almost as numerous as my Owned games.

At this point in my life, gaming wasn’t about an addictive escape, but a way of spending time with myself and living in an imaginative world. I liked the feeling of knowing something others didn’t, not in an elitist way but as if I had one foot in the real world and one foot in my own world.

This period of my life ended when I changed jobs and had to put all my things (and games!) into storage for about 2 years. Similar to my early years at college, I didn’t miss gaming. Sometimes I browse BGG wistfully, but the job involved a lot of travel so boardgaming was out of the question.

Act 4: New Horizons

I moved to Washington, D.C. in 2017. I still live here, now married with a 2-year old and a second child on the way. When I first landed, though, I was single and able to do all the things single, childless people get to do. Sigh… what I wouldn’t give for 2 weeks of solo vacation.

I unpacked all my things from storage, including my board games, and slowly dipped my toes back in. They felt foreign. I’d forgotten the rules. There were so many new games I hadn’t heard of. My tastes had changed and a lot of the games in my collection were unappealing.

I didn’t have a lot of money or space, so my re-entry into gaming was pretty slow. In retrospect, and even at the time, that wasn’t such a bad thing. I was busy working, going back to “school” to train as a massage therapist, and meeting my wife and building that relationship. Gaming was still part of who I was, but it shrunk in deference to these other important things.

Within a year of buying our house in Silver Spring, I bought a gaming table. It was time. There was ample space in the basement for all my games to come out of the closet and onto an actual shelf where I could see them. My gaming picked up. Not every night because, you know, life, but I went through bursts of interest. Like when I got Imperium: Classics and Legends. Or when I reminded myself of how much I loved Mage Knight. Or Nemo’s War. I’d get a game onto the table and play it several times before tiring and pausing before unpacking the next one.

The main tension I’ve felt these past few years is that I would like to play games more than I have time for. I mean, don’t we all? For the most part I’ve just knuckled down and kept things in their proper place – like not playing games when I should be making dinner for my wife and son – but the one way I’ve slipped is that I got sucked into more Kickstarters than I actually have time to play. And so the shelf of shame/opportunity grew, and along with it burdensome feelings.

Again: play games to have fun. When they are not fun, stop. Don’t buy a lot of new games.

I’ve finally entered the phase of this hobby (now 10+ years in) in which I have accepted the sort of gamer I am (opportunistic and in bursts when kids/life allows) and the games I like (adventure, deck building/construction, thematic), and my collection is maturing accordingly. I don’t get hooked as much into buying new games because “what if it’s the best game I haven’t played yet?” I do a purge once or twice a year and letting go of games I’m not playing is way easier than it’s ever been.

Perhaps the strongest indicator of where I’m at as a gamer is if you asked my wife, who is not a gamer, “Does Byron spend too much, enough, or not enough time at his game table?” She would probably say I play just about the right amount and that I’m a better husband and father afterwards.

Epilogue: Go Wild Board Games

The next iteration of my life as a gamer is finding some way to share it. A game group wouldn’t be a bad thing, but I’m content as a solo gamer. That’s not the problem.

I tried filming long-form playthroughs and uploaded several to YouTube but I didn’t really enjoy doing it. And I’m not convinced they are all that beneficial to the community. Most people seem to want shorter tutorial videos that help them get that game to the table. I don’t want to try to get so good at filming playthroughs that other gamers are spending their time watching me play as opposed to playing themselves (or doing other things they need to do).

So I’ve settled on the concept of a blog dedicated to sharing the appreciation and enjoyment of the games I really love playing, with the hopes that it will help you do the same. I’m curious to see where it goes and I’m glad to have you along for the ride.