Monday, May 15, 2006
the picture what I wrote
I've been an avid gamer for many, many years.
I was cursed with being shy during high school. Breaking the ice with someone new would have neccesitated me waiting for global warming to catch up with me. No, I was the weird kid who went red and mumbled something before running away.
On Friday nights, I'd babysit my cousin while my sister came to visit my mom. He was annoying but at least he had an imagination.. one night he didn't bring any toys over. So I improvised; I found a dice that had fallen out of the compendium of games that lived on top of my mom's wardrobe (we weren't allowed to play with it unsupervised in case we ate the tiddlywinks or drew on the ludo board). As I rolled the little cube under my fingers, ideas came to me. I started concocting scenarios; one the first was that my GI Joe figure had to cross a valley and fight his way through the terrorists (in those days, terrorists were either Angolan or Mandela & his cronies...yes, boys and girls, Mandela is still a filthy little terrorist in my book) but anyhoo....
The rules were simple. Guv was GI Joe. He'd roll the dice to see how many steps he took. Then I'd do the same for the terrorists. And if they got into hand to hand, a five or six would kill the other guy. And that was my first step. I started making up lists of bonus items he could pick up from the bodies.... machine guns, knives, grenades, etc.
Which brings me back to where I was. Shy. Yet, somehow, gaming drew me out. Its a very social hobby (read: obsession) yet at the same time its 'safe', since you're not being you, you're being Mustafa the camel thief, or Vorpulus the Legionnaire, you know?
I became a DungeonMaster (a.k.a Games Master a.k.a Referee). I'd plan and run the games for a motley collection of fellow nerdlings.. the bug didn't just bite me, it savaged me with sabre like teeth the first time I took the rickety lift to Wizard's Warehouse up in the dingy corridors of the CTC building in Cape Town. The point of this is that, being a DM, you have to paint the story in your players imaginations. You don't tell a story of high adventure and courage with words, you do it with pictures.
When I designed a dungeon or enemy lair, I could see it in perfect clarity in my minds eye, and it was glorious. The trick was to bring the players into the same vision.
Skip forward to this year and the book on screenwriting the missus gave me.
I've been reading it slowly, and the more I read, the more it seems to click. I love the idea of telling a story in pictures, rather than in words. Worth a 1000 words and all that. I'm enjoying it so much I'm thinking of giving it a serious go, to sit down and share all these hundreds of stories, quests, terrors and cataclysmic struggles that live in my head with Joe Public.
Hey..
Got a light?
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