Five times four questions

(ed. these will migrate to the questions page soon, I promise.) 

From Jiyu

 

1. I like geography as a first question. Why do you currently live where you do?
 

If the question is directed at Seattle, it is because I absolutely love this city. It has culture, the arts, sports, and enough people to make me feel urban, and small enough neighborhoods to make me feel comfortable. I could do without all the trees, and their nasty spores, molds and fungi.  Otherwise, it’s nearly perfect.
 

This town is just poised to explode sometime in the next few years, and living here for the last 10 has not caused me to change this viewpoint at all.
 

  2. When you think about the games you like to play, what do you find most rewarding, the rules (ie, the gameplay) or the social interaction? Why?
 

Rules and challenge, first and foremost. And that’s for everything except roleplaying games. As a highly competitive person, I like to win, and win big. When a game presents itself to me, I look for ways to exploit its strengths and weaknesses, developing a razor strategy that should serve my gaming needs.
 

I also like to lose. And by lose, I mean , face challenges that I cannot overcome. Yet. When I find an aspect of an online game (a format I do enjoy) that stymies me, I bulldoze my way at it until I can find an optimum strategy. Very seldom is it that I will call in an airstrike, but I feel happy that I can do so when necessary.
 

So let’s talk about social interaction. I don’t like it. Not one bit. People are horrible things to inflict on people.  So I seek out said interactions, and gaming is one of the ways I do so. I am continually fascinated by the interplay between people, and how they approach Play tells me a lot about who they really are.
 

  3. You have held many higher-level management positions over the years. What do you find most challenging about those positions, and do the rewards outweigh the downsides?
 

I like to win, as noted above. I like to make decisions, and have people take actions based on those decisions. I like to design, enact, and finish projects. I like results.
 

Most of these things can be accomplished by management roles. Out in the world, I am frequently presented with managers that are not able to any of the above, having fallen victim to the Peter Principle.
 

As to rewards vs downsides, that’s somewhat of a mixed bag. I am massively underpaid for the work I do. I know what I could be making were I to sell my time to a different company. But the hobby gaming industry has a lot of advantages to it, the first of which is the ”fun” factor. Next is the cross-section of people with which I interact, and otherwise would not be exposed to (I say this with the open statement that I hate almost everybody). Offering just one more example of industry goodness, most of the people in it are my age. It leads to an interesting community of people that are all about the same level of competence, education, and life experience. There are usually people about ten years behind us in terms of career and experience, and some ten years ahead from which we ourselves can learn.

 

Simply put, I like my tribe.
 

  4. I have speculated many times on the similarities of sports fans to gamers. Do you find this to be an accurate equivalency?
 

Nope. And it’s a source of continuing distress. Sports fans are the exact type of customer I’m looking for in my business, and those sorts of people have already selected their passion before they come to me. There are plenty of people with irrational fervor for the adventure gaming industry, but I seldom see someone paint their face or shave their head for a gaming session, nor do I see fellow enthusiasts willing to drop $200-300 on a single event, after making an initial investment in the thousands just to get into the building.
 

But if they were…
 

  5. Are you ever surprised by changes in yourself, either mental or physical?
 

Constantly. It makes every day, or even parts of the day, a wonder. Of late, I’ve been experiencing a spiritual “opening” that I’ve found particularly rewarding.
 

From LLyne
 

1.) Where do you wish you came from?
 

I often wonder what my life would be like if I had been born on the reservation, or if my mother’s family had not left Europe at the beginning of the last century. But really, I’m fine with my early years and the experiences they brought to me. Where I’d like to be from is really a concept, rather than a place. I would have liked to have had a “traditional” family upbringing, with a two-parent household and/or siblings. But I dealt with those longings some time ago.
 

Mostly.
 

2.) What was your first con and how did you find yourself there?
 

Game Faire 88, in Spokane Washington. A tiny gaming show held in a community college. I met most of my “adult” friends at that show, and was introduced to it through my friend Brady, who was one of the first adult gamers I met after the exodus from CA. At that show, I met John Dalmas, the first author I ever met on my own. (my mother worked for a publishing house during our last years in San Diego, and I met plenty of professionals there).
 

3.) You list Ancient Egypt and mythology among your interests – Who is your favorite Egyptian deity, and why?
 

I’m rather fond of Horus. But the pantheon as a whole is simply fascinating, since it has been interpreted, re-interpreted, and re-assigned so many times that even a “simple” bibliography takes many citations and notes to express. There are so many similarities in all of the “ancient” religions that it’s fun to view them all as one group of Ur-beings, identified and related to by first a superstitious populace of proto-humans, then advanced humans, then “civilized” peoples. Watching the mythologies evolve over a few thousand years of a single culture is a fun bit of armchair anthropology.
 

Plus, his “eye” is cool, and may go on my body sometime this year.
 

4.) What’s your favorite electronic game from before you hit 20?
 

Tough call. Very tough call. My initial response is to say Mattel Handheld Football (http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Mattel/FB.htm), but I’m pretty sure that the answer is MegaMan 2 for the NES
 

5.) Have you sworn off beloved songs if they’ve been connected to a relationship that ended unhappily, or do you keep listening to them? Ever have one you “reassigned”?
 

I keep listening to them. Most every woman I interact with on any meaningful level gets a song. No, nobody gets to know what it is, and no, I never tell. It’s not the song’s fault. Plus, one relationship garnered the entirety of James Taylor’s Greatest Hits, and I’d die inside if that album was not available to me. It kept me from eating a bullet in 1990.
 

 I rarely reassign them, but I’ve been sorely tempted to re-issue “Tainted Love.” I may do so anyway, since it’s a specific version that I want to re-issue, and not the 12’ mix (with the “where did our love go” interlude) that’s in use now.
 

 

From Dave Gross
 

1. I don’t remember most of what you’ve told me about your past relationships because we were drinking out of cups the size of our heads, but I do get the sense that you’ve got some commitment obstacles. What are they? And how’d you get them?
 

You may have asked the one thing I will not answer in an open forum, specifically this one. If we can agree that I have them, and am working on them as best I can, we can move on. I will allow you a 6th question for the evasion.
 

  2. How have you noticed your increased fitness changing the way people we both know respond to you? Give an example.
 

I keep hearing how good I look from just about everyone I deal with on an ongoing basis. Since this implies that I did not look good before, it sometimes bothers me. But then again, I was a gigantic fatass. A devilishly handsome fatass, but a big guy nonetheless. Given a few more months (and a new form of permanent identification), I think that this reaction will pass. It does make re-introducing myself a pain now and again, but I was used to that before. My cultivated air of indifference actually works for me in this case.
 

 

  3. When I met you, you were a sergeant type, but you’ve had positions of increasing authority. How has the greater power at work changed the way you deal with people outside of work?
 

I’m still a sergeant.
 

When you met me, I had just left a career in which I was a very successful leader of people, and it took me a year or so to get back to that level of influence in the Hobby Gaming industry. The lessons I learned prior to WotC about management and interpersonal interactions are still just as valid, and are the ones I still use today. I’m more or less the same person, minus some anger issues, but there is a necessary remove from Work Scott to Home Scott. When we were co-workers, you probably did not notice it as much since we did not directly interact.
 

  4. What’re three things that would keep you in the Seattle area if offered a tasty job elsewhere?
 

How tasty? I was packing my bags to leave in 2004, and was prepping to do the same if necessary a few months ago. My “personal” interactions with folks are such that I can maintain quite close relationships with little to no direct physical contact (I’ve not seen one of my “brothers” in 16 years, and we still talk on the phone very regularly), but there are a few individuals that I would miss a great deal were my career to take me somewhere else. I love this town, and almost everything about it. But living here is drastically affecting my health. Were I to be offered equivalent (or greater) compensation to work elsewhere, I would give the offer serious consideration.
 

  5. What the hell happened to your mustache?
 

Still trying to find “me.” I did shave off 5 days of beard last night, and considered leaving it on to check it against the thinner face. Maybe later this year.
 

From Bibbit
 

1. What exactly do you do for a living and how did you get into doing that?
 

I make games. All kinds (toys, cards, board games, miniatures games, electronic games). It was a sideline move into the publishing industry that involves a 30 minute story. Up for some rum beverages tonight at Casuelitas?
 

 

2. If you could do anything you wanted and get paid for it, what would be your dream job?
 

Hands down, I would like to support myself as a professional author. The urge to write and share experiences has been with me all of my life. This is not a life that lends itself well to creature comforts, so I’m pretty sure I’ll keep selling my soul to the corporate masters for a few more years, until I am “comfortable” in my finances.
 

I do plan on finishing another book this year, one that I think will sell.  No, I won’t tell y’all anything about it, but it is a work of fiction. There are two others that I need to “re-write” (even longer story), and a non-fiction piece (semi-autobiographical) for which I am unsure if there is a ready market. Think Dave Barry, but angrier.
 

3. Do you have any weird obsessions or things that you get fixated on?
 

Do I ever. I am down with OCD (yeah, you know me), and I deal with it in a variety of ways.
 

 

4. What is your favorite season and what do you like about it?
 

I love Summer. Mainly because it is warm, but also because of what it does to people. They are happier, freer, and open during warmer months. Plus, most of my allergy issues are concentrated in wetter, more floral seasons.
 

5. Do you have a favorite holiday and/or what holidays do you wish would go away and never return?
 

I have a few rants regarding Holidays. More than a few, really. I am a man of faith, but not an especially pious man. So the organized hypocrisy of most Western “religious” observances drives me up the freaking wall. I far prefer days of remembrance like President’s Day, Independence Day, Memorial Day, and Veteran’s Day. However, I am very much in favor of Hebrew observances such as Rosh Hashanah, Chanukkah, and Yom Kippur. I also observe solstices, in a private way.
 

As a native American, I think that Columbus Day and Thanksgiving should be explained in particulars to young children. Of course, both of those days carry an NC-17 rating when viewed objectively (even though Thanksgiving is a complete and utter construct, and I agree wholeheartedly in the sentiment presented).
 

My basic theory on Holidays is this. You should live every day as if it was Christmas, carrying that feeling of goodwill and fellowship for your fellow man into all aspects of your life. If you want to give someone a gift, give it. If you want to receive a gift, give one. But don’t wait 364 days to be nice to someone.
 

Just be nice.