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I've been gaming my whole life, and I probably have my brother to blame for it. There are a lot of tools people can use to explore the world - ships, cameras, telescopes - but one of the least appreciated is the game.

Since ancient days when students of strategy honed their minds in contests of chess, games have been used to explore the possibilities of the world in an environment where they risked nothing for the chance at insight. My dad was an excellent chess player, and when I was younger he would play against my brother while spotting him a rook or a knight, and never lost a serious game. In turn, my brother could beat the pants off me while hardly trying. He'd spot me a rook and a knight, or occasionally his queen, and trounce me while reading a book.

I can't say I have the patience for chess though. My brother Mack and I have the same father but different mothers, and something I picked up from my mothers' side tipped the balance of my psyche in favor of adventuring before planning, which is fatal for a good chess player. I've never been able to think more than three or four moves in advance. Well, I guess I'm able to, but I don't want to. I have to fight my nature to do it. I sort of want to be surprised by what happens and to react to it rather than control it. It makes me an excellent Lieutenant rather than a General, and gives me a better appreciation for athletic and dynamic environments that can sometimes paralyze the 'planners'.

I was born in 1969, two months after the first moon landing. I have very few memories of my early years, and my mind didn't really start creating permanent memories as a result of my environment until I was about 7. At this point, several things were introduced that changed my life to define who I am.

• Star Wars was released by George Lucas. Say what you want about the man's skills as a movie director, he got the story to the screen in my rural Minnesota town and it changed my life. From the opening phrase "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away" I was blown away. He showed me possibility that I didn't realize existed.
  
  
• I had endless summer hours and the freedom to be outdoors, and a giant sandbox. I could take my toys and Star Wars figures out there and create castles and rivers and houses and roads and battles and feasts and daring rescues and entire worlds made of sand. I had a couple of buckets of legos also, but sand was fungible and as infinite as my imagination.
  
  
• We raised chickens on our little hobby farm (mostly white ones, with the occasional araucana). There is something about the character of a person who has been responsible for life that is absent from others. You're changed forever when you have a pet, more so when you live with livestock, and much more so when you have children. You learn the consequence of inaction, you learn the randomness of life, you learn that some decisions are permanent.
  
  
• Mack got the box set of Dungeons and Dragons for Christmas, and he recruited me to join him in an imaginary world where I was no longer a scrawny farm kid with a bowl haircut, but instead a powerful warrior wielding a sword and torch through a dark dungeon haunted by monsters jealously guarding their treasure.

The result of all of this was a rapid expansion of my own imagination, and the desire to create things - worlds - full of excitement and adventure. At first, the only real option was role-playing. We rolled the dice in the original D&D box set until they turned into marbles, and kept going. My brother played games with his friends - tactical games like Blue Max and Squad Leader - and I played more RPGs, where world creation was unlimited. Traveller, Champions, Vampire, anything that gave me a taste of a different world where possibility was unlimited.

While I was growing up with games I was also growing up with computers. We moved to Milwaukee in 1981 when my dad went to work for IBM, and the PC entered our home. I've never lived without a computer in the house since then. We had a copy of Adventure that ran from disk on an Imsai 8080 that my dad & Mack put together as a 4-H project, and an Atari console that we played tank combat on, but the PC had an allure to it that the console was missing.

For one thing, you sat at a desk when you used it. Desks were for serious endeavors, when you played the Atari you were slouching in a bean bag chair in the den. The PC also communicated to you with words, and was eloquent and exact. And when I fired up a copy of Zork and it told me that I was likely to be eaten by a grue, I knew this was a serious danger and I needed a source of light, pronto.

The early PC was an excellent business machine, but the developers failed to see how much more people wanted to do with it. Apple was sporting color graphics and sound, and we had a 4-color monitor and beeps. I tried to explain to my dad that the Apple was the better computer and he was terribly offended. He tried to tell me about the components of the machine and the capabilities, and I tried to explain that the person who would be sitting at the computer didn't know or care about these things and just wanted to communicate with it. I was taking AV in school, and it was plainly obvious that the PC lacked audio and had limited video, so what kind of presentation would that make?

The AV gap is gone now, but thanks to 25 years of playing catch-up many graphics studios still use Apples. However... the games are designed for PCs first now (or consoles). There was a time in there where I couldn't wait to visit my cousin at the holidays to see all the computer games he had that our green-screen PC couldn't play, like Castle Wolfenstien and Choplifter.

But the computers didn't have the same feel as role-playing did, and I continued to do them separately. Over on one side I would be playing Red Baron as a WWI flying ace, and on the other side I'd be hosting six-pack Champions games with heroes battling villains for interactive glory. But soon after the internet arrived, and it changed everything.