In Days Of Old When Kids Were Bold...

 I'm now in my 40th year of gaming, and I spend a lot of my time reflecting on this or that.

Gaming has never been 'just a hobby' to me, well maybe for the first 12 months or so, but it's also not been an obsession. No, it's been an intrinsic, inseperable part of me. It's defined me in some respects; it's propelled me forward and in some ways, held me back.

I was a very introverted and shy kid, and in fact I still am. If you've met me, you'll probably say 'yeah right'. 

If you are a friend, you'll nod knowingly because you'll know that I'm not gregarious, I am sparing with my sociability to non-friends. Oh sure, I can be professional and courteous, but if you are not a friend, you'll never cross my threshold . If you don't resonate with me, then the chances are I'll just blank you if we meet, as a few have found at conventions when they have tried to insert themself into my reality or tagged along with a group of friends.  Sorry, but I'd be wasting my time and yours, diluting the time I have for people I want to be around.

Anyway, gaming gave me something to immerse myself in. I was always interested in art and in Sheffield we had some brilliant galleries until in the late 90s, they were dummed down and much of the art space turned into show and tell nature tables and interactive dress-up areas for kids. (Note to self: write to Sheffield City Council and ask them where all that great art is and why we have such second rate galleries.)

There is a code to all art, and back in the day, it seemed to me that gaming had codes and patterns; secret language which once learned, opened new vistas for you. Finding my first miniatures in Hopkinson's Toys gave me a hint that there was something out there which was calling to me, but it was not going to give up it's secrets readily. Redgates (look that place up folks) gave me a few hints, with it's small and esoteric range of TSR and Chaosium products, and then Beatties, with it's seemingly extensive and arcane selection of TSR, Chaosium, Standard Games, SPI - and other - products, tucked away in glass displays, anonymously at the back of the store where the radio contolled cars were, nourished my hunger for more.

Some time after that, along came Games Workshop to The Moor and all chances of me being like my dull and uninteresting school friends were off. I'd been going n there for 8 months or so before I felt comfortable with reaching up to the top shelves at the back of the store and taking down White Dwarf, Space Gamer or Different Worlds. And when I did, it was my own personal Rosetta Stone. It was about this time that I also found historical gaming in the city via Steve Roberts and so I walked dual paths of esoteric and arcane knowledge Remember that back then gaming was a truly underground, almost subversive activity. There was no internet, enquiries by telephone were expensive and the norm was to send a self addressed envelope to an obscure P.O box to get catalogues etc.

I wrote fan letters to Citadel Miniatures, with illustrations of miniatures I'd love them to make, and received a brilliant letter back after asking for autographs (back before gaming stardom was a thing) explaining how busy those gaming gods were, but here are some Troll's fingerprints (some enterprising mail order troll took the time to stick their fingers on an ink pad and add them to the letter. Priceless stuff that to a 13 year old, connected them to something larger. They did not have to do that, and probably enjoyed a giggle at my expense, but the fact that they took the time to humour me, told me that I had arrived in a place I could not, would not leave.

When I wrote to TSR UK they sent me a big envelope full of posters, flyers, mini modules and goodies which connected me via invisible umbilical cord to Lake Geneva, WI. Truly I was part of something.

I submitted my hobby interests to the ITV series 'Madabout' and received a letter thanking me but saying that it was basically too exclusive an interest, but I did get a brilliant 3D plastic Madabout badge for my troubles.

By 1984, Christian Fundamentalists in the U.K were actually trying to fan the flames of the Satanic Panic, handing out those scathing little booklets by Jack Chick, warning parents of the peril their children were in:

 

 

Trust me, they were not going to get much support from my group of mates. We were already into the occult and we knew that roleplaying games were not a threat. That said, I did almost lose my gaming collection after an article in the local press, had my parents confiscating it all  and grounding me for three weeks. It would have been 4 weeks, but after three weeks of me not speaking to my parents at all and sitting stiff in an unresponsive in an armchair all night, they broke like matchwood.

 

But all of this, was pretty much going on in the shadows of the everyday world of the 1980s. It was a sort of secret war of sorts. Whilst the popular kids at school were fighting and playing football at lunchtime, about 6 kids out of 1000 in the school were in a chemistry lab or Craig Stainrod's house playing D&D, Mystic Wood or The Cleric's Quest, listening to The Clash, Marillion, Duran Duran   and downing beans on toast (9 slices prepared and served in under two minutes from a cold start was the record), using every minute to escape to imagined worlds.

 

By late '84 I was gaming all over the city 6 to 7 days per week, in organised and informal clubs. I knew every and I mean every place that had any connection to gaming, no matter how obscure. My little book with numbers, names and places was full, and the connections and friends I made were more important to me than getting ready to go into further education or engage with the mundane world.

 

At 14 I was earning more than I did when I left school at 16 and it was all down to my hobby.

 

where I differed from my peers was I didn't hoard stuff. I bought it, used it and sold it. I may buy a game, read it, decide it was not for me and sell it to a mate to fund my next 'must have' item. It's something I still do, to a degree. If it's of no use, it's a waste of resources and must be parlayed into something of 'worth and value' (intellectually, not fiscally).

Back then we had to collect everything and I had a 5 foot high pile of just RPG core rules at the side of my bed, toolboxes full of painted and unpainted miniatures and a small but esoteric collection of music at a time when everything seemed to lead you to other worlds, places less mundane than the Labour dominated normailty of 1970s Sheffield, with the imminent threat of nuclear annihilation always looming, riots a reality and some seriously good art instalations right there for the experiencing.

I met 99% of my friends via gaming, in many cases via the noticeboard of Games Workshop, where Lisa, one of the GW staff, offered her services as 'The World's Worst Figure Painter' and where despite the strict rules on advertising stuf for sale, we still did brisk business, in an underground network which to this day, makes me think of the first episode of Blake's Seven. I met Roger through that board, other gaming buddies from either I or they simply interjecting themselves into a conversation or omenting on something someone had taken down from the shelves. Maybe you met at one of the many clubs, perhaps the kid next to you in Redgates was buying a similar model kit.

Of course there were some freshman gamers such as Darren, who having joined the club whilst you were on forced parental initiated sabbatical (IE: being grounded - again) would brashly upon your return to the bosom of your gaming family announce 'Ah, a new boy! Let me show you the ropes...' Only to realise that you knew all about the ropes and were likely put them to some use on this Jonny Come Lately.

4 decades later though, those two lads are firm friends, albeit on opposite sides of the globe.

All of this was without the internet or the kind of big business promotion which for my part has taken some of the magic from it all. Back then a a kid with a cantilever toolbox on a bus was probably a gamer. Hearing two teenagers talk of hit points, could with a bit of judicious, semi Masonic signalling get you into yet another gaming circle. 

It was time where helicopter parents were a rare thing indeed. If you kept your nose clean you could literally go all over the country for weekends of gaming. My friends like me had strict parents, who could smell bullshit a mile away, but they also realised that whilst they may not understand what the hell their kids were talking about at the dinner table, it was making them more rounded and well read, and they were mixing with other mild mannered kids and even adults who were having a positive (yes, OK we were in pubs drinking under age and dropping porn mags into the briefcase of the great John Armatys - who beat us at our game with his unflappable nature, by thanking us for the magazines and locking them in said case) effect on their development.

This is no longer the case (are Escort and Razzle still published?) and I really feel for those kids who will never experience the world the way we did. Until you have sat by the letter box for 17 mornings solid waiting for that catalogue or rulebook, living every second in a state of heightened anticipation, you've really not truly known the pure and simple pleasure of this fine hobby. 

 

Until you've seen a display game where massive starships made from funnels, ball cocks and imaginative paint work can take breath away, you've not lived. I mean this sincerely.

To have to decipher a set of rules, produced in black and white on a typewriter, with a simple card cover and no illustrations, to have to go to a library or ask older more experience gamers for uniform details, or learn a game by playing it rather than watching a Youtube video presentation by some 30 year old pseudo-Viking living in his parent's basement by choice - they are all things of the past, but things which, added piquant spice to the gaming experience.

I am very fortunate in that I make my living in the hobby, but equally unfortunate because ionce you take coin for something the hobby element evaoparates like a wraith in the dawn. I do however, keep conventions sacred. I don't trade at shows, and I will generally avoid talking shop, unless by prior and unavoidable arrangement, thus maintaining a portion of my hobby, exactly that - a hobby; something I can immerse myself in and luxuriate in the simple pleasure of being with a few good and trusted friends.

I often remark to my wife that I wish I could trade a week of my life to be able to take her back to 1983 and experience a day in Games Workshop. We met in 1988, by which time the world was changing, indeed so was I for a decade or so. I'd have loved her to be able to experience those people she has come to know so well down the last 3 and a half decades as they were back then... Young but so old, brash but so shy, wise but at the same time so naive, the best people in the world at their very best. To stalk the city for a day, talking games and films, arguing about uniforms and the result of a game, whilst stuffing your face with a chip butty on french stick from a backstreet sandwich shop, off the beaten track. 

You can wax lyrical about such things, but to have experienced them was to have been part of something so very unique...