Saving My Progress: How I Traded XP for Word Count
How I became a writer
Until the age of forty-four I spent most of my free time playing games. Mostly video games.
I’d been obsessed with computers ever since the TRS-80 came out in 1977. A friend of mine had one shortly after they were released, and eventually I found a used one for myself and took it to college. It ran on level I Basic. It used cassettes to run programs, and it had some interesting text only games.
My college roommate bought an Apple IIe, a major upgrade. We played some early computer games on that with actual graphics, even though they were crude by today’s standards. I remember playing a lot of Lode Runner, came ut in 1983 and there was no save game function. We would race back after class to get on the computer and play until we died, then it was someone else’s turn. That got rough when we got into the hundreds. When someone reached a new level they would call out and we would all gather around and watch until it was our turn to try. I bought SunDog: Frozen Legacy, published in March of 1984 and it was hailed as the most impressive and absorbing game to come out. It set a new standard for complexity and ease of play, setting the stage for more to come.
A few years later, after I finished flight school and having gone without a computer for more than a year, I bought a Tandy TX1000 in 1988. It had the first hard drive for a personal computer, a whopping 20 megabytes. I had a 1200 baud modem, baud is bits per second, and a dot matrix printer to go along with it and it cost me more than two thousand dollars back then. The games got better, and the computers got faster and more powerful.
In the mid 90s, I was fairly savvy at building my own computer rig and tried to keep up with the changes in language and the new Windows program. I gave up around 1999. I was too busy with three kids at that point and working a lot, and the programming was changing so fast.
But there was a game on America Online, by this time we had doubled our speed to 2400 baud dial up, that was the first multi-player game. It maxxed out at 100 players. Neverwinter Nights was a version of the AD&D gold box PC games. It was 2D, the graphics were very simple, and the gameplay was limited, but we supplemented the gameplay with writing about our characters on a forum for our player guild. That was my first foray into writing creatively.
From there I played Meridian 59, Ultima Online, Everquest 1 and 2 and World of Warcraft. There were others of course; but those were the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games that took up the bulk of my time.
I was an instructor pilot in the Air Force and Air Force Reserves, and I basically spent my time playing video games when I wasn’t working or doing something with my wife or kids. The kids grew up on my knee, watching me play games. My eldest son got a degree in game design, and both my boys are following in my footsteps, as they spend the majority of their free time playing video games, much to my chagrin.
All of that to say I reached my mid-forties and felt like I had nothing to show for my efforts. Did I have fun playing all those games? Yes, but ultimately playing games no longer satisfied me. I wanted to have something tangible for the time I spent. I wanted something more.
I had never been a car guy. I didn’t know how to play any instruments. I thought about woodworking, my stepdad has an incredible woodshop, with a lathe and a planer, a table saw, and a jigsaw, all the tools needed to make anything. But I had very few useful woodworking tools and no space for a shop.
I made the pivot to writing. I had no idea how to start or what to write but I was going to do it. I was going to write a novel.
