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I'll start this page with a bold statement... I'm a gamer... yeah, that's right, I'm a gamer.
Hehe, I say that with both pride and hesitation. Pride because gaming can be great fun and challenging but hesitation because it's a sad fact that gaming can lead to a retardation of social skills... it has a lot in common with Star Trek that way. It's something that I've tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid though I can say that I've been successful enough to have never worn a Klingon costume.
I started gaming during my first year of high school. I'm not sure why or how it caught on but I found it an excellent tool for giving my imagination a workout. Back then, I drew fairly often and my subjects were characters from games or from the comics I read... oh, I forgot to mention that I'm also an avid comic collector. Yeah, there's two strikes against me.
Honestly, the magic of imagination, as any gamer, comic reader, or sci-fi fan knows, allows one to reach beyond the laws of physics. In the mind of imaginative, anything is possible. I'm often surprised sometimes by how limited in imagination some people are. I can't help but smile when I hear someone tell a child, "You can do anything you can imagine!" The words are usually used to encourage a young girl to become an astronaut or something equally unlikely in today's society but when I hear them, I think to myself, 'What does that mean to people like me who can imagine flying through the heart of a star with no form of protection or propulsion beyond their own will?'
I suppose it means even more to someone who practices magick for a living. For the most part, when I'm finished consuming (be it through reading, watching or playing) a piece of fantasy, I detach myself and return to earth. I imagine it's the same for most people. However, sometimes I wonder. Sometimes, fantasy leaks closer to reality through stories of psychics or genetic engineering. Sometimes, reality leaks closer to fantasy through reports of spoon-bending or quantum teleportation. Sometimes, I wonder if there may not come a day when a Charles Xavier will rise to teach people how to use the gifts they've developed. Sometimes, I wonder if there may not come a day when sorcery and quantum mechanics share the same model and magicians become more than just a bunch of eclectic social outcasts. If you can do anything you can imagine, what happens when you flip back and forth between fantasy and reality until you find that very blurry border between the two?
...and now a message from my inner sceptic: in a choice between the wondrous and the mundane, the world will always follow the path of the mundane because money makes the world go round and money always follows the easiest and cheapest route.
My current games of choice include the D20 line, particularly Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not sure if the d20 system is the best but it was a huge improvement from the previous editions of DnD, not that difficult a task. DnD was already a system open for customization; everyone had their own races, classes, spells, character kits, etc. I think that making the d20 system an openly available system was a masterstroke for Wizards of the Coast. The market has since been swimming in new games, new adventures, and supplements written by other companies for the d20 system.
Case in point, Silver Age Sentinels, a d20 game written by a Canadian game company called The Guardians of Order. It's a superhero game that pushes to maintain that 4-Colour feel of the comics of the 70s. Frankly, every once in a while, I can't resist that urge to return to childhood. On the digital side of things, I'm currently enraptured by a game called Freedom Force. Like Silver Age Sentinels, it brings out the kid that loves big smash 'em ups. However, it focuses on the heroes of the 60's, the brainchildren of comic industry heroes like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. I've grabbed the Web Kit for Freedom Force and am working on a few side pages for it.
Speaking of comics, I've been an X-Men fan for many years now, ever since I was a teenager. I'm also a Doctor Strange fan but he seems a character that Marvel has a hard time marketing; he's constantly getting cancelled and resurrected in mini-series. My first love was The Flash. I remember, as a teenager, the book store where I went to buy comics, I was known only as "the Kid who collected Flash". Back then, I was a serious speed junkie. I rode my bike at breakneck speeds and ran until my legs screamed and my lungs threatened to burst... at the tender age of 14, I could imagine that if I just ran fast enough I'd break some barrier and kick into lightspeed.
Although, I don't collect his stories, I have a soft spot for Superman. He's the icon of North America. Joe Shuster was a Canadian whose first images of Metropolis were based on his impressions of Toronto. He met Jerry Siegel when his family moved to Ohio in the 1920's and together they created a legend with the strength and naive morality of North America. However, to me, he's like a modern day sky god and King of the Superheroes, Zeus, Apollo and Hercules rolled into one.
What brought me back to DC comics from my early teens was the recreation of the Justice League by Mark Waid and Fabian Nicieza. They disintegrated the humour comic that was the Justice League, assembled DC's big guns and handed the result to Grant Morrison whose gift for characterization and complex plotting catapulted the new series to the top of the charts. Recently, I've taken an interest in the Green Lantern... a young artist with a ring that allows him to create anything he can imagine.
Comics can be boring and predictible and juvenile but with the right artist and the right author, a comic can be fuel for the imagination and one of the best adventure stories. In many ways, superheroes express archetypes for me and I often feel like a priest of a pantheon consisting of the sun god, Superman, the god of the forge, Green Lantern and the fleet-footed King of Rogues, Flash. Sounds strange but perhaps the gods were born from tales of the exploits of superhuman heroes told around campfires thousands of years ago.
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