I’m turning back to a post that died in the drafts. There are 23 of these posts–stubs that were written, never published or subject to some strange glitch in the matrix, and moved on from when I wrote a second post forgetting I wrote a first. Here is the text in question:
I started playing Shadowrun sometime around 1990. I was a freshman in High School and a lifelong friend showed up one day with this weird game. We were D&D guys. It was all I ever wrote or wanted to write. Yet here was this world slightly removed from our own that argued that Dragons could co-exist with technology. I was hooked.
When I was offered the opportunity to write the history chapter for 6th edition I was honored and I was stoked. It gave me the opportunity to pay homage to a game that reshaped my writing career. I wanted to start with a character who reflected the sort of ‘different’ I was familiar with–someone who was looked at as an other, but someone who could still stare into the sky and wonder ‘what if?’ So, I started with what I believe makes shadowrun unique amongst cyberpunk, transhumanist, and other future gaming. I started with Dragons.
I can tell you know that SR6 drops this month at GenCon and I got the chance to write the intro: The Life You Have Left. Pick it up. Flip through the pages. Absorb that history that is a reflection of everything I have seen and felt in reality and beyond over the last 29 years. It’s been a long road and we’ve still got running to be done.
That takes me back to a time when I was really reflective about Shadowrun and when 6th edition was just about to drop. 29 years is a long time ago and a long time to be doing anything–especially playing a game. When I really sit back and think about it, I’ve been playing games my entire life. That life is based around games of one form or another and I gamify most everything in my life. Even love is sometimes viewed as a Zero Sum game where there must be a win or a loss involved. I think I’m losing at love lately. It is heavy on my heart and mind, but that game is yet to be called. I’m winning at writing, but it isn’t the blowout victory I hoped. I’m not rubbing elbows and exchanging tales with the King family or spinning them with Gaiman. No, I feel at times that I may have topped out in my craft if only because of dilution of effort. Maybe I’ll get to the point where deliberate practice is more than a pair of underlined words on a messy whiteboard and is engrained in my soul. Then again, I’m 48 and as of last post I’ve come to recognize that my control is limited.
Perhaps it is a mood or a phase or a phase of a mood or a phase of the moon. Be it internal or external, that bright boy from what should have been post 4.19 is a dilution of who he intended to be. This isn’t a moment for the better. It is clearly the other thing.