I was so unhappy.

Also angry, anxious, ashamed, lonely and other tonalities and harmonics of the negative aspects of Panksepp’s primal circuits. If I try to hear the very beginnings of that song of woe and bother, it probably starts some time around second grade, as just a quiet noodling melody like the beginning (anachronistically) of a Nirvana song. Some of this was down to my father’s alcoholism and my parents’ resulting divorce, some of it was undiagnosed ADHD, some of it was being born a geek into a culture that wasn’t quite ready for us yet, by the time our story begins not a little of it was as unromantic as really bad acne, and some of it was just – well, how I turned out. By the time I graduated high school and wrapped up my first undistinguished semester at an extremely distinguished university, it was a full-band, amplified concert of sadness, rage and self-pity. Like the middle of a Nirvana song. In fact, the world had to invent punk rock and new wave just for me, which was awfully nice of the world, though I’d have settled for getting laid.

This is not going to be one of those happy-fun stereotype-shattering “How I got into RPGs” posts. (Deborah Donoghue has one of those, and it’s delightful.) And yet, gaming was often fun, and I was sometimes happy.

What was your first roleplaying experience? Who introduced you to it?

It is 1979. I am just over one quarter of the way to flunking out of MIT. That overstates! I am one quarter of the way from simultaneously: going on academic probation; taking “time away from MIT.” That’s the exact phrasing of the official document on leaves of absence. Said time away continues even as I write this post!

My longest-serving friend (to this day), MB, is two years older than I, and my fraternity brother. We met in high school when I was in 9th grade and he was in 11th grade, and ended up in the same frat. He swore he did not pull strings. On this winter night, either January of February, he invites me to try this new game, Dungeons & Dragons, that they’ve begun playing at the drug apartment.

The drug apartment is one of three satellite facilities that augments the main dwelling on Manchester Road in Brookline. Each apartment sleeps 6-10 brothers, often in singles. By rule, the drug apartment is the only one of the four fraternity locations where it is permitted to do illegal drugs. Once a semester, the drug house throws a party for the entire frat, with delicious food, plenty of weed, a tank of nitrous oxide in the front of the apartment and a bag of coke at the back. I remind you, reader, it is 1979.

No lie: a dozen years later I ran into one of my classmates, who was one of the drug-house’s most legendary and permanent residents. (Many brothers rotated in and out of the drug house on a semester-by-semester basis. A few were dedicated.) He was doing great. He’d graduated med school, was finishing up his residency, and was about to start his professional practice. As an anesthesiologist. As Seamus Heaney wearing the mask of Sophocles wrote, sometimes hope and history rhyme.

Off we go to the drug apartment so I can try Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons is bizarre! In a good way. It’s these three little brown, saddle-stapled books in a little white box with some godawful line art and a text that seems less like it’s trying to explain something than like it thinks it’s just reminding you of stuff you already know. We’ve been over this. It reads like notes you wrote yourself while overestimating how much you’d remember later. This causes some confusion among the brothers, and it’s not just the drugs. In fact, and what would Pat Pulling and Rona Jaffe have made of this?, I don’t recall any of the brothers playing D&D while stoned – D&D was something you did straight. Maybe, something you did instead of getting stoned. Me, I’m a lifelong sobersides who has never done drugs, alcohol neither. I’m not bragging; unvarying sobriety is one more dimension of my alienation from my peers – like I said, it was 1979. But a family history of alcoholism will do that to you.

I suppose roleplaying games became my drug. Kind of. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sometime between the last pre-me D&D session and this one, they acquired a new little brown book to try to dispel the confusion. It’s called Greyhawk and has purple lettering on the cover. In a dozen years I’ll publish poems in journals that look just like these things, and be secretly amused. Tonight, though, we are playing this game. Dungeons & Dragons. With Greyhawk.

My first character is a Magic-User. Most of my early characters are. Drug-apartment resident NM, who was my Big Brother at the frat initially, is the Dungeon Master. I learn that he has made the official map of the dungeon we’re going to explore. We have a designated map-maker and a caller. We kibitz freely. Shaw, a close friend of MB’s and as much a friend of mine as any of these strange college people, keeps asking if he can play a dragon. The fictive content is . . . rudimentary. I don’t think any of us have given our character’s names, let alone personalities. The focus of play is substantially tactical – what’s the marching order? who will push on the door? when should you throw your flask of oil? is it time to use my one spell? can anyone get Shaw’s fighter out of the front line before he dies? (Hell, my own superhero wish-fulfillment fantasies – in college, as I recall, I am on a Green Lantern kick – have more sophistication of character development and narrative flow; I even give myself subplots!) This being MIT, we are prone to anachronism: someone is always wanting to invent gunpowder or otherwise smuggle real-world technical knowledge into the dungeon. The game betrays what we will come to call “the hobby’s wargaming roots.”

And yet, it is not much like a wargame at all. Not like the wargames I know, anyway, the SPI and Avalon Hill boardgames that MB introduced me to in high school. (I’m a couple of years from first-hand experience of the club-based miniatures gaming that evolved into RPGs.) There is something there. The very lack of a sophisticated fictional surround makes the fantasy of it, the otherworldliness, the I’ve a feeling we’re not in Brookline any more paradoxically salient on that evening and the evenings to come over the next several weeks. It is, dammit, primal. Archetypal.

There is a fountain on the second level with Nixies. (We learn what Nixies are.) They charm away one of the PCs forever. This is not old hat. This is wondrous and strange and frightening. We ended up on the second level by mistake. I can’t remember whether we survivors killed them all after losing our teammate, or retreated.

There is a huge pool of water on the first level, with a concrete apron along the far side and massive, bronze double doors. Bronze. MB can barely contain his excitement. Perhaps because of side conversations with NM, he is convinced that on the far side of those doors we will find Talos, the brazen warrior of Crete. He has to explain Talos to me because I know embarrassingly little of the classics or real literature. Heck, I don’t even know fantasy literature. Science-fiction, yes. Since I was 12. And read my first Heinlein juvenile. (See! Such people exist!) I’ll be following a path from RPGs to Tolkein and Moorcock and Howard and Leiber and Zelazny. But you don’t have to know a ton about the classics to get the thrill of a giant bronze automaton with but a single weakness.

And always, push on the door. Even, weirdly, cooler: listen at the door. On the other side of that door was something eerie and dangerous. And always, check the map. Make sure you know where you are.

Raymond Chandler tried once to explain the appeal of the pulp magazines where he published his early work in the 1930s:

And it takes a very open mind indeed to look beyond the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consommé at a spinsterish tea room.

I don’t think this power was entirely a matter of violence, although far too many people got killed in these stories and their passing was celebrated with a rather too loving attention to detail. It certainly was not a matter of fine writing, since any attempt at that would have been ruthlessly blue-penciled by the editorial staff. Nor was it because of any great originality of plot or character. Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate.

The smell of fear! That was part of it, as ridiculous as it is to contemplate.  Quick pen scratches on graph paper; dudes playing pretend with other dudes they knew; eventually little painted figurines (though these went some way toward ruining the effect). And yet: monsters. Loathsome trolls (“thin and rubbery”). Goblins and hobgoblins. (“The hobgoblin king fights as an ogre.” All Gygax and Arneson meant was that you should pull his stats from the Ogre entry if your players should happen to run into the hobgoblin king, but I love that sentence to this day.) Skeletons! Ghouls! Giant versions of everything: rats, spiders, crabs, weasels. Underground pools, rotting bureaus, slime and loose stones.

Understand that for the most part we didn’t even have video games yet, not even in the arcades. (Galaga; Space Invaders; Missile Command – awesome games but not exactly virtual reality.) And there was Star Wars, but no big-budget fantasy to speak of, not even mediocre scripts indifferently acted. No Ladyhawke; no Conan the Barbarian. Reader, if you can believe such a thing, there was not even Indiana Jones. We furnished our mental gaming landscapes with castoffs from the collective unconscious. We hiked twenty miles to the dungeon through the snow, uphill both ways, and we liked it.

Not that your music is just noise, you kids with your Walls of Warcraft and your Magical Gathering cards. It was compelling and primal and a pure vision of the strange, and we wanted more. Therefore, many of my cohort set about taking over the world, and now commercials use MMORPGs to sell trucks and a body can strike up a conversation with regular people about whether she likes the X-Men better, or Spider-Man, and I’d say, “You’re welcome, young geeks of today,” except I, personally, didn’t do any of that stuff. I just kind of drifted along, playing D&D and Traveller at college, and a couple dozen different games since.

What does any of this have to do with fucking Vietnam, Walter?

Hey, Bryant covered that two y – oh. You meant that metaphorically, as in, “Jim, why can’t or won’t you separate your discovery of roleplaying games from your youthful history of sadness and failure?” and I’m still not sure why. Poorly socialized young white man takes solace in RPGs lacks novelty, as stories go. But I keep picking at that coincidence of place and mood, years ago in poetry, lately in the draft of a novel (but that is a post of its own). I know that in after years I’ve figured MIT itself, with its famously extensive hallway system, including the legendary Infinite Corridor, as a kind of dungeon. Or say, my experience of it. It matters that, after those early sessions at the drug apartment, fraternity gaming relocated to a small room in the basement of our main building. Student gaming happens at all hours, sometimes in a row. We’d be simultaneously exhausted and wired, descending steps into the near-silence of small hours: random pops and clicks as the building settled; sudden roaring from the furnace and sudden cessation of that roaring; the low red light down the hall from the coke machine.

It’s accurate if unfair (to the hobby) to note that my time spent roleplaying correlated inversely with my time spent doing problem sets. I didn’t have the word “hyperfocusing” then, but I had the experience. The glib and possibly even correct thing to say is that if it hadn’t been gaming, it would have been something else. I am uncomfortable pushing that claim too hard. It’s too much like those “defenses” of free speech that rest on the assumption that speech is harmless, without power. (“No little girl was ever ruined by a book.”) But if speech – the free communication of ideas – were truly inconsequential, it wouldn’t be worth defending. We value speech because it has enormous power, and power always comes with danger. Roleplaying games, as I hope I’ve shown, are powerful stuff. Creators I love and admire have nigh beggared themselves for the sake of them.

How did that introduction shape the gamer you’ve become?

I kind of hoped I’d have an answer by the time I got here. By many measures, that early gaming bears little resemblance to the kind of gaming I enjoy now – your artsy-fartsy pretentious gaming, thank you very much. Last year I had the most fun playing Fiasco and Nobilis. I flirted with taking up “old-school gaming,” specifically Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but didn’t because I decided I probably wouldn’t like it. I played nothing but Amber DRPG for about five years.

But I still love mimesis in gaming. Back then, the rules were so sketchy you had to interact directly with the fictional material on the level of the fiction. Today, I prize games like Fiasco that help me do that. I still love the experience of a small group co-creating for nobody but themselves, the power and the pity of that. (The pity is what makes “let me tell you about my character” so painful.) If I’m honest about it, I tend to play characters who could have many things but are afraid to choose any subset of those things for fear of losing out on the rest. Since RPGs really are, among other things, wish-fulfillment fantasies, these characters tend to eventually conquer their fear and choose.

But that last has nothing to do with my gaming back then. That was his life.

NOTES:

* Title stolen from the classic column in Different Worlds magazine.

Reverb Gamers and the January master list are a production of Jessica Banks and Michelle Nephew, on behalf of Atlas Games.