Your Host
So here’s the story.
I got into gaming in junior high, in the mid-80s. My friends were the artsy crowd in school, smart outcasts, and it gave us a way to tell our own stories and work in our own artwork, to make (as TSR said) “products of our imagination.” My grades slipped later in school; I was bored out of my mind. The games were taken away, so I promptly began designing my own!
As nerdly as it is to say, storytelling games have enriched my life in so many ways. I met my beautiful wife through gamer friends. When I returned to college, time spent gaming became a treasured reward for myself when I did well each week. Gaming sharpened my interest in writing, math, science, history. And applying my technical skills to gaming, via web and desktop publishing, has sharpened both.
I’m proud to be a gamer, and a game developer. In the Hallmark production of “Arabian Nights,” an old storyteller says, “People need stories more than bread itself,” and I think any competent psychologist would agree that the stories we tell ourselves about our lives can be empowering and heroic, or dismal and gray. They can move us to compassion and courage, towards positive action, and enable us to overcome any difficulty; or, if we let them, they can flagellate us, until we settle for a meager, lackluster, pale version of ourselves.
It’s our choice; why not choose to be a hero, the hero of your own story?