Jess Banks schools you.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #6: Describe your all-time favorite character to play. What was it about him/her/it that you enjoyed so much? (Courtesy of Atlas Games)

I am terrible at picking favorites. That may make me a better mom, but it makes me a terrible blogger, and at the moment, it makes me an especially behind-in-posts blogger. I’ve been positively paralyzed with indecision for days now over this question, and there’s no way I’m ever going to be able to settle on a single favorite, so I’ll just write about two characters I enjoyed immensely.

The USO dance from "Memphis Belle."

Little known fact about me: if I could go back in time for one night to any period of history, I would go back to 1942 for a USO dance. (No, not the Middle Ages; I know so much about them that I’m quite sure I would be miserable back then.) I love the ’30s and ’40s–the fashion, the movies, the music, the architecture, and the general sensibility. Sure, I’d ditch the sexism and racism, and I know from direct testimony that the Great Depression sucked immeasurable ass; I’m not wishing things could be exactly like that again now, like some weirdly myopic nostalgic folks do. But I’d give a lot to check my hairpins and Max Factor red lipstick, straighten my stocking seams, and go swing dancing in an airplane hangar for one night (preferably with Capt. Jack Harkness, but I’m not picky).

As I’ve mentioned before, I also really love theatrical, over-the-top, seat-of-the-pants adventure roleplaying, and when pulp action games are at their best, that’s exactly what you get. So when the Darling Husband announced his plans to run some pulpy goodness using his own house system, I was all in.

My character was mild-mannered housewife Rosemary Rogers. But at night (you knew it was coming), she became a masked vigilante, determined to rid the streets of crime. She was…

The Cleaner!

No, this isn't The Cleaner, but it's in the ballpark.

Yes, with her matched shotguns Spic & Span, she patrolled the streets on her trusty Rinse Cycle, red raincoat snapping smartly behind her as she scoured New York City!

And she did kick unholy amounts of ass.

I don’t remember a lot of specific events, to be perfectly honest. She did fly a plane (or was it a pterodactyl?) through the window of a museum to escape some thugs, long before Ben Stiller did. And we had many fine confrontations with Mexican badguy El Suerte (later revealed to be criminal mastermind El Muerte) and his stubbly henchmen, led by the mountainous luchador El Toro.

If this all sounds terribly cheesy, you’re absolutely correct. That was the point. The puns, the one-liners, the ridiculous stunts–the only thing we didn’t have were giant primary-color speech balloons reading “POW!” and “BAM!” There was no deep angst, there were no wrenching decisions, there wasn’t even any meaningful character development. I’m not saying that those things don’t happen in good pulp/noir fiction or games; I’m just saying that we weren’t in the game for that. Personally, I was in it for the moments when I described the most outrageous, over-the-top stunt I could think of, earning a squint from Cam and, in a highly dubious tone of voice, these words: “Roll it.”

And somehow, far more often than probability math supports, I did.

I played in other fantastically fun pulp games over the years, most notably a one-shot of Silver Age Sentinels on one of our trips to California, in which I played a Judy Holliday-style ditzy blonde bombshell, exposed to an atomic test while visiting the troops in the Pacific, leaving her with flight and light powers. I called her The Hollywood Starlet, and I chewed gum and talked like Marisa Tomei does in “My Cousin Vinny.” While I did a number of heroic things in the game, I best remember tormenting Fred Hicks’ inscrutable Atlantean character Deep Blue by asking repeatedly, in that squeaky Brooklyn accent, “Deep blue what?!”

None of these characters are worth more than a few panels in a yellowed comic book, but for sheer untroubled fun, it doesn’t get much better.

Ironically, catching up with work at Atlas Games has put me behind on Atlas Games’ blog project, Reverb Gamers. But it’s a quiet afternoon at work, with no big restocking orders today and my bosses home with sick twins, I’m taking a moment to get up to date.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #3: What kind of gamer are you? Rules Lawyer, Munchkin/Power Gamer, Lurker, Storyteller/Method Actor, or something else? (Search “types of gamer” for more ideas!) How does this affect the kinds of games you play? For example, maybe you prefer crunchy rules-heavy systems to more theatrical rules-light ones.

This question refers to basic archetypes offered by game designer extraordinaire Robin Laws. If you’re not familiar these terms, he says most players fall into one of five categories, as summarized in an excellent blog post:

• The Power Gamer: Get more powers and use them often and efficiently.
• The Butt-Kicker: Enjoys combat and pwning NPCs!
• The Tactician: Like to beat complex situations through thought and planning.
• The Specialist: The one who plays a <insert character type here>. Ninjas and Drizzt clones are popular.
• The Method Actor: Likes total immersion in a character’s assumed persona, whatever the costs!
• The Storyteller: Enjoys exploring a story unfold around a character’s actions and choices.
• The Casual Gamer: Shows up to be with friends and share the social energies of the group.

(These are also the character types in the fantastically entertaining movie The Gamers: Dorkness Rising.)  Of those, I’m clearly The Storyteller: I love telling stories with my friends around characters. I explained this more fully a little earlier.

But I’m quite taken at the moment with a different set of classifications, offered by my dear friend Rob Donoghue:

• The Connector: Plays for story; rules are of negligible importance.
• The Evil Muppet: Creative, whimsical, engaged, and in it for a specific kind of interaction: he wants the GM to bring the pain.
• The Swooshy Giant Brain: Super-smart, but mostly just wants to stab things for fun.
• The Rookie: Enthusiastic, rules savvy, in it for fun, but with not as much experience to draw on.
• The Wildcard: Somehow both the most inspiring and most maddening player at the table, with a creative, twisted mind and enough rules know-how to take the whole game offroad.

These categories don’t make some of the assumptions that Robin’s do, the most problematic of which being the incompatibility of technical and creative emphases. Rob’s archetypes are patterned after mutual friends, which makes it personally fun, but they’re also more easily combined to reach a personal description.

In this system, I’m about 70% Connector, but at least 30% Wildcard; these proportions vary depending on my mood. It’s still all about the story for me, but some of my choices have been known to derail entire chunks of planned adventure. What can I say? It’s a gift.

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #4: Are you a “closet gamer?” Have you ever hidden the fact that you’re a gamer from your co-workers, friends, family, or significant other? Why or why not? How did they react if they found out?

I was surprised at how negatively some respondents took this question, so let me clarify. It’s pointing to the fact that some people feel that they have to hide their gaming, not suggesting that anyone should feel that they have to. And sure, if you’re writing a public response to this prompt, you’re probably not closeted anymore, but many kids had to dissemble with parents and teachers about what, precisely, they were doing with friends, so it’s not as alien a notion as it seems.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate in a number of ways that have prevented it from ever being necessary to hide my love of gaming. While very devout Christians, my family is the liberal, Methodist, God-is-love kind of Christian, not the kind that’s threatened by imagining worlds where other powers are possible. To their minds, we were kids who were reading, doing math, telling stories, and not committing crimes–what’s not to love? My work never made an issue of it, either. College is all about exploration, and I was only a lowly TA or adjunct, so nobody cared enough to be upset about my hobbies. And now my hobby is my work, at least for the time being.

All this being said, I know at least two good friends who do not want a word of their participation in gaming breathed outside the confines of the houses where the games take place. Both of them feel strongly that being “outed” as a gamer would be a liability to their careers, and I’m inclined to agree with them. Yes, it’s unfair, yes it’s silly, and yes, attitudes are changing. But they haven’t changed all the way, and some fields are more conservative in their expectations and acceptances.

So it’s still very possible to know these people. You may even game with them. Just something to be aware of when you go naming names in the posts about your weekly game. They’re not just being silly, and it’s nobody’s decision but theirs to let those around them know what they do for fun.

Me playing Gloom with some kids at the Student Council Game Day last May

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #5: Have you ever introduced a child to gaming, or played a game with a young person? How is gaming with kids different than gaming with adults?

The short answer is yes. I used to pack my copy of Kill Doctor Lucky when I went to substitute teaching assignments, and at some schools, kids would come up to me in the hall and ask whether they could sign into my study halls to play whatever I’d brought that day (yes, they asked a sub. Take a moment to absorb that.)

Now I have my own kids, and they’re finally at the ages (9.5 and 5.75, as of this moment) where I can enjoy playing organized games with them. I’ve also been doing this more for other people’s kids over the last year: I helped the Student Council at my boys’ school organize a Game Day, and I taught games at last fall’s Youth Pride Festival in Anoka, MN.

I’m not a particularly patient teacher of game rules, though, and I’m married to Cam Banks, a vastly more experienced GM with the skills and creativity to roll with whatever wacky plans the kids come up with, so I’m usually only in charge of teaching board and card games. That being said, it’s been unexpectedly fun, just over the last few months, to try out new finds and old favorites on my sons. They’ve really arrived at what I consider the earliest optimal age for games. Yes, I know they can play at much earlier ages; you don’t need to convince me. I just have this aversion to one particular feature of gaming with kids (or anyone): the complete devolution into silliness.

I love joking and kidding and having fun at the game table as much as the next person, but both the mom and the Aspergian in me absolutely lose it when kids start making the pawn figures knock each other around the table, and going up chutes and down ladders, and stealing money from the bank, and drawing cards until you get the one you want. Yes, I need to relax, and yes, more play teaches them play etiquette faster. I’ll be the first to say that my reaction is more a matter of me being annoyed than them being annoying. But it’s a barrier to enjoying games, and it leads to the urge to knee-jerk refuse requests to play something.

These things aren’t as much of a problem with RPGs, but sitting down to roleplay with kids requires a level of attention,energy, and uninterrupted time that isn’t always available in the day-to-day chaos. I really enjoy roleplaying with kids sometimes; we had friends’ pre-teen son at our games for several years, and it was just fine.

Gaming with my own pre-teen son is an astonishing experience. He thinks in storyboards, and he’s had an amazing grasp of narrative since he was two (no lie), so his capacity for character-driven drama and decisionmaking is far beyond his years. He’s also got that kid-gift for lateral thinking, which makes him a real Wildcard (see earlier) sometimes.

His Asperger’s brings its own blessings and challenges to the gaming table. His volume control goes away when he’s excited, which is most of the time when he’s having fun. He’s happiest when he’s the center of attention, so he’s not good with extended cut-away scenes that don’t involve his character (Cam does an awesome job of managing game flow to minimize this). And he gets really frustrated when the rules or chance won’t let him do what he’s picturing in his head; he takes it very personally when he can’t bring those visions to fruition. But his attention to detail, steel-trap memory, and typical Aspie fixations mean that, once he’s decided to master a system or if we’re playing in a world he knows and loves, he brings a level of sophistication that is frankly astonishing.

There’s nothing like gaming with kids to blast apart all the stodgy, preconceived notions experienced gamers bring to the table. As with everything else, they’re seeing it for the first time, and their perspective shatters the jaded accretions we’ve picked up over time. It’s good to be reminded of the wonderment we all experienced the first time we discovered the power to build worlds.

***Reverb Gamers is a month-long blogging project for RPG, MMORPG, and LARP players. Each day in January, there’s a prompt that explores our experiences in gaming. You can find more information, and links to the participants’ daily posts, on the Facebook page for Reverb Gamers. This project is the genius plan of Michelle Nephew and me, on behalf of Atlas Games. Join in the fun! ***

Reverb Gamers 2012, January 2: What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?

I game as performance art. Not freaky David Blaine performance art, but when I’m roleplaying, I’m creating something new so that others can (hopefully) enjoy it.

It scratches three itches for me, each distinct, but all intertwined.

The first is social. I’m loud and extroverted and chatty and gregarious. Roleplaying is the perfect activity with both good friends and new acquaintances. With good friends, there’s history, and all the joys that brings: in-jokes, running gags, the accretion of collective memory. You’re loose and comfortable, so risks don’t feel as risky. But even with folks you’ve just sat down with at a con table, RPGs break down so many barriers. You know you share a hobby, and common tastes, and probably a lot of cultural references. And the act of picking up a character sheet gives you license to put yourself out there a little more than you usually would with strangers, knowing you can always take cover in the shadow of your character.

The second is performance. I’m a performer at heart. I’ve sung in choirs since I was five, acted in countless plays and musicals. I stood in the middle of a football field playing a solo in marching band. I read aloud to my kids’ classes. I give sermons in church. I taught university classes for 15 years, and my teaching style is as much showmanship as it is preparation. Roleplaying is improv, and I’m very good at “Yes And…” I love putting on voices and accents, the postures and gestures of strangers. It’s wonderful, intimate theater, with infinite possibilities.

The third is fiction. It’s taken me a long time to come to the conclusion that I’m probably not destined to write a novel; I can’t do plot very well. So many writers I know say they’re just scribes to the scenes playing in their heads. That’s not me. I feel more like a medium, when I’m roleplaying. My characters regularly shock and surprise me, and I’ve found myself saying or typing something for them that I didn’t see coming. If I have a gift for roleplaying, it’s a gift of reacting well. It’s not as admirable as being able to create story whole-cloth, but it’s given me a lot of good moments over the years.

This is the first installment in an ongoing series about my history with games: what I’ve played, when I’ve played, who and with whom I’ve played. As such, if all this prompts a question, please ask — it’ll help me figure out what to say in later episodes!

I’m a gamer girl. I have been for my whole life, in one way or another. And even on the nights when I’m home with the kids while my Darling Husband is gaming with his group, or working at a convention like Origins or Gen Con, I am decidedly NOT a gamer widow.

But things get complicated almost immediately after that statement of basic identity.

For one thing, I don’t play video games. I really don’t like them. Sure, they’re clever and shiny and all sorts of other great things, but similarly to my problem with Boo, video games give me all sorts of nervous system problems. I can’t play any game for more than about two minutes before my anxiety levels start rapidly ramping up, and before long, every muscle from my scalp to my waist is wound tight as a bowstring, and my stomach is churning out acid like the mother in Alien. No matter how good your game is, it just ain’t worth it for me.

But my gamer credentials run deep, starting with my mom and grandparents, whose favorite way to pass an evening was over a game board or a deck of cards. Aggravation, Yahtzee, and Uno were staples of my upbringing, but our real speciality were speed card games. To this day, we’ve got a strict “no rings and watches” policy around the card table, because we play so fast and furiously that people get cut. Trust me — it’s hardcore.

Part of why I’m such a fanatic for using games in the classroom is because I really started my adult gaming journey with my fifth and sixth grade teachers. Mr. Boisvert was a brilliant teacher, truly dedicated to the craft and vocation of teaching. His walls were covered with colorful, detailed maps for the games he employed as teaching tools. Wizard was a fantasy land through which you moved by doing spelling homework and tests, and each day brought a new Fate Card (beware the dreaded Booga Booga!). The Social Studies year was divided by three different roleplaying games: Discovery, in which you were a colonist trying to survive those first difficult months on the American continent; Pioneer, in which you were a homesteader headed for Oregon with your wagon train; and a cross-country car race game whose name escapes me entirely at the moment.

Sure, these games drove us to complete more work, more creatively, and work more cooperatively than you can imagine 10 year olds doing on their own, and that has had a huge influence on me as a teacher and a parent. But, for all that, what’s most remarkable is that I still know my pioneer character’s name and everything that happened to her. She was Sarah Hoskins, and her 11 year old daughter died of scarlet fever in Colorado. She tripped and fell into a campfire, burning her hand (I had to wear a sling for three class days). And when her wagon train got snowed into a mountain pass when winter came early, it was one miraculous shot with a whiffle ball — into a trash can at the front of the room, with my back against the chalkboard at the back of the room — that saved her life and let her cross into the Oregonian valley where she and her husband settled.

That, my friends, is what every game designer is trying to achieve — game immortality.

Mr. Held, my sixth grade teacher, deepened both my experience and love of gaming. He set up his copy of 221B Baker Street, a mystery-solving board game based on the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, when the high reading group finished its first unit, and we took to it with such passion that the space between those flimsy paperback readers grew longer and longer as we played more rounds of the game, then watched the Jeremy Brett episodes with a rapt attention 11 year olds don’t usually lavish on Victorian literature.

World History was punctuated with games, too. For Ancient Rome, we watched the chariot race in Ben-Hur, then played Circus Maximus — first for speed, followed by the mandatory heavy chariot round dubbed the “Hamburger Rally” for our gleeful overuse of the wheel spikes. For World War I, it was dogfighting airplanes over France with Fight In The Skies (later, Dawn Patrol). How many sixth graders do you know who can identify the silhouette of a Sopwith Camel, and know why pilots were more likely to have a brick in the cockpit than a parachute? Yeah, me neither.

By the time the guys in my church youth group invited me to join them on Sunday afternoons for AD&D, I was already a dedicated gamer. Sure, the only roleplaying I did for most of my teenage years was defending my female characters from unwanted sexual advances. But I was well-equipped for the future with the clear and certain knowledge of what games could do and be — a source for characters and stories to rival anything literature had to offer. The real revelation was finding those things in my own mind.

It’s my 15th wedding anniversary this Wednesday, October 5th. And there are many other things I want to write about my amazing partner in the sublime and ridiculous adventure we’ve undertaken together. But before I get to that, it’s worth laying down a little groundwork.

Fortunately, I’ve already done this — rather eloquently, in fact, if I do say so myself. This essay was first published in the August 2010 issue of RPGirl zine, but I thought I’d repost it here as well, for all those who haven’t enjoyed that esteemed publication. This is the astronomically unlikely, stranger-than-fiction story of how Cam and I ended up together. Enjoy!

* * * * *

I met my husband online in 1993. Back then, Internet marriages were still the stuff of The Jerry Springer Show; they were viewed by the general public with about as much trust as prison pen pal marriages. But they were startin to happen more often, and while “We met online” resulted in universal gasps and exclamations of disbelief and lurid curiosity, the real secret behind our marriage wasn’t where we met — it was how. You see, my husband and I met through an online RPG.

Before RPG meant “Rocket Propelled Grenade” to the majority of Americans, it was better known to gamers by a different set — an altogether more contaminated set — of initials: D&D. And if couples formed on the Internet were viewed with the expectation of imminent failure, well, couples formed through the unholy bonds of D&D were viewed as if they’d joined the Heaven’s Gate death-pact cult.

Only gamers really understood that D&D wasn’t the only RPG out there, but even gamers didn’t quite believe that women were in the gaming community to stay. Gamer guys expected women to date at least one of the party, in and out of character; if they weren’t willing, then they could play a guy or bring food. To gamer girls, online RPGs, which were still entirely text-based, represented a chance to play without wondering where a guy’s eyes were during each scene — wondering where his hands were would come later, but could at least be ignored, except for the typos. Though many women still felt they needed to play male characters online to be taken seriously (while many men chose to play female characters, willing to be taken in any way they could), good scene-writing was respected online, and women (not shockingly) wrote women’s parts with remarkable insight. Gamer girls were starving for respect, and provided they could write passably well, they found that respect in the nascent online gaming world.

Most of the women in online RPGs came across the games as part of their experience in the computer world — many of them were already programmers or employed in the Internet industry as technicians or support personnel. As such, I was the odd bird — I was persuaded by my then-boyfriend to create a character on AmberMUSH because I’d enjoyed the novels by Roger Zelazny, on which the game was based. I had absolutely no computer skills beyond a 100 wpm typing speed and good word-processing abililties, established by my busy schedule as a French and journalism double major. Neither of us had a computer of our own, so if I wanted to spend time with him after he began playing, it would have to be at one of the computer labs on campus; and if I wanted not to be bored, then I’d better have a character of my own.

Within a year, I’d established myself both in character — a six-foot warrior woman with a pet lion, shamelessly ripped off from a Mercedes Lackey character I admired — and in the online gaming community, which shared a parallel out-of-character site called TooMUSH, with only the few they deemed decent and “real” enough to call friends. Among the TooMUSH family, I was the newbie. There I met geniuses who coded the first online RPGs based on their love of RL (“real life”) gaming; many are now highly respected faculty, independent consultants, supervisors, and engineers. There I also met gaming devotees who introduced me to systems and worlds that fundamentally changed my idea of play. There I met virtuosos who dazzled me with their writing ability in scenes I’ll never forget; several are now New York Times Bestselling authors [NB: The NYT just recently published an article on AmberMUSH as the successful incubator for so many successful writers, including dearest friends and my own Darling Husband; it’s well worth the read.]

Me, I was just happy to have been entrusted with one of AmberMUSH’s “features,” the characters from the books which were handed out only by application to the board of “wizards” who were combination coders/referees/justices of the peace. I had applied for and won control of one Julia Barnes, a character in the second quartet of books in Zelazny’s series, a UC Berkeley computer engineering designer and up-and-coming sorceress. To her, computer coding was the effort to impose her will over an environment through the skillful application of elegant and efficient orders; sorcery was the same thing, just on a more challenging and satisfying scale. In the books, she meets Merlin, prince of Amber, narrator of the second series  and son of Corwin, prince of Amber and narrator of the first series. He shows her a good time and the secrets of the universe. While not of Amber blood, and therefore not eligible to “walk the Pattern” and gain control over “shadows,” reflections of the infinitely varied images of Amber, the ultimate Order, or Chaos, the ultimate Disorder, Julia gained and maintained control of a “Broken Pattern,” one of the flawed reflections of the original Pattern of Amber.

It was through this in-game prop, and through one of those up-and-coming authors (the guy with his picture in that NYT article. Yes, him.), that I met my husband. He’d started with an “unblooded” character and wanted access to greater powers and, probably more importantly to him, access to better players and better scenes. Since feature characters were screened, there was a greater, though not perfect, chance of higher quality play, and I certainly took my obligations to give access to the powers I controlled — the Broken Pattern and my online availability — very seriously. When my friend recommended this new player to me, I arranged to have my character “bump into” his at the game’s common watering-hole/fight-starter. As our characters hit it off, we started talking behind the scenes, and before long, he’d made a good enough impression on enough of the influential players to merit an invite to TooMUSH.

Our biggest obstacle turned out to be the time difference. You see, I lived in Kansas; he lived in Auckland, New Zealand. A 19-hour gap is decidedly awkward to schedule around. But as my hours in the computer lab had grown exponentially as I acquired more characters to play and more friends to visit with, and he had little care for a minor thing like sleep, we managed to meet in and out of character with surprising frequency. Our online scenes coincided with the mutually simultaneous meltdown of our offline relationships, and we provided each other with sympathy and distraction. One summer evening, he confided to me that he had developed romantic feelings for one of the women he knew online. Understanding yet totally failing to understand, I asked, “Is it Adrienne’s player?” His blunt response still strikes me as if I’d heard it, not read it: “No. It’s you.”

This revelation came only a month before my departure for a year of study abroad in France. I resisted his appeals to try a long-distance relationship, though we began exchanging the kind of care packages essential to an online romance in the ’90s: letters, photographs, graphic novels, and mix-tapes. On the one hand, I felt deeply for him, and my own laptop and a 12-hour time difference greased the skids for communication. On the other hand, the Telecoms of France and New Zealand would end up costing us the equivalent of a family-sized car.

But love won out, and when he flew to the UK to meet me for the first time in person, it was with an engagement ring and a plan. The plan, to propose at midnight on New Year’s Eve at a Scottish castle, was ultimately wrecked; it was finally in flannel pajamas in an Aberdeen B&B where he popped the question. And I insisted on working out the finer points of “where” and “how” before I would even open the ring box. But obviously, I said yes.

“Where” ended up being Lawrence, Kansas, in October 1996; “how” was thanks to my mom and a K-1 visa — and with a surprising number of our Amber/TooMUSH friends in attendance. If I’m not mistaken, we were one of the first AmberMUSH-originating couples to marry, but we certainly weren’t the last. And if we wanted to show our two sons where we met, we’d have to do something unusual: look up an IP address. But first we’d have to explain to them about roleplaying games.

In the fall of 1997, we made our first RL visit to good friends from AmberMUSH, the online RPG where I’d played for years and met my husband and most of my very favorite people in the world. Naturally, Sunday was spent in an all-day gaming marathon with other Amber friends in the DC metro area. I had three friends with babies due in the space of about six weeks, so I crocheted while I played Helga the Wonder Nurse (don’t ask). Our hostess summed up her first impressions later by saying something that  flattered me to the tips of my geeky toes: that Cam was as zany and brilliant as advertised, and Jess “knitted rainbows out of thin air.”

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m not very good at stillness. When I talk, I move a lot — gestures, charades, extravagant expressions — and even when I’m supposed to be sitting still, I like my hands to be busy. Could be an Aspie thing, could be a Protestant work ethic thing; who knows. But I’m not a fidgeter, or a doodler, so I make things. All kinds of things, with all kinds of techniques. I crochet, I knit, I cross-stitch, I work with beads and wire, I sew a little, I play with paper, soap, and candles. I am a craft geek.

This was certainly not always the case. I’ve got a very strong creative streak, clearly: obviously, I enjoy writing, and I’ve already detailed my long history with music. But my motor skills have never been what anyone would call reliable. I could not draw anything well enough to save my life or my country. My efforts at origami rapidly look like a receipt that’s gone through the wash. And I feel like the other art supplies I would mess up could be put to so much better use by others that it would be inconsiderate to waste them

I blame most of my crafting impulses on France. When you’re not in school and you’ve read all the books you brought on study abroad and you have a limited income, France gets boring very fast (at least, provincial France does). When my mom, a lifelong multi-talented crafter, came to visit in February, she asked what to bring. Once we’d gotten the Pop Tarts and Spaghetti-Os and real salsa covered, I begged her, “Teach me to cross-stitch, Ma. Bring me yarn and a crochet hook and needles and thread and aida cloth and anything airport security won’t take as a potential weapon. I need something that can keep me busy for hours.” She came ready to teach, no doubt having waited my entire life for me to make this request. And I was HOPELESS. Like, E.T. with cerebral palsy hopeless. Never mind the niceties of yarn tension or stitch regularity. There was serious doubt that I had any neurological control over my own damn thumbs. As often happens when one of us is making a total mess of something, we laughed so hard we cried (and maybe peed a little); we actually cleared our entire car on the train from Paris to Brussels with our loud American hilarity.

But gods know I had the time to practice, and I got pretty good by the time I returned stateside. And I soon found that crafting filled a long-standing need: something to do with my hands as I sat watching TV. It worked even better during long roleplaying sessions. And while it made the guys at Gen Con decidedly uncomfortable when I’d pull out the alien apparatus of needles and fibers and dainty scissors along with my bag of dice and event ticket, I soon found that there were quite a few female gamers who enjoyed the same multi-geek-tasking. One of our long-standing gaming groups was a fairly even gender split: Jim and Shannon Butcher hosted, with Jim running Warhammer Fantasy RP one weekend, and Cam running his Elizabethan Cthulhu d20 hybrid on the opposite weekend, with Clark and Amanda Valentine forming the third stable couple; several of my grad school friends were also long-time players. At first glance, the dining table sent very mixed signals: was this a crafting bee with hex maps? a battle with minis, and the bright squiggles of discarded thread meant something? The girls’ rhythm of the game was easy to follow: we stitched until it was our turn, picked up the dice, rolled, announced, “4 hits, 1 crit, for 112 total. I kill it,” then resumed stitching. Jim called us his delicate flowers.

Jewelry making was more an accident than an act of desperation. Wrong store, right time, and I came out $64 lighter with a new hobby. It turned into a business when I got tired of people trying to buy my jewelry off my body in airports and ladies’ rooms, and I dragged two of my best girlfriends into it with me, for craft fairs and bonding. Thread and yarn on the battle mats switched for Soft Flex and beads, but the results were the same: we made pretty things, we killed monsters, the boys learned to comment supportively.

I don’t have a lot of pictures to show you of my handiwork, because I keep almost none of it for myself. Of the dozens of blankets I’ve crocheted, we own two; of the scarves and hats I’ve knitted, I’ve only kept one. My jewelry box is like the lesson of the shoemaker’s children going barefoot: I wear some of my oldest, most crappily made pieces, because the good stuff goes to art shows. But it brings me peace to make, and joy to see in the hands where it belongs. And the skills occasionally put me in the position to pull of the Great Work of Ninja, such as the last-minute bag for the groom’s glass at our friends’ wedding, a rather spiffy feat of engineering and style if I do say so myself, or the ring pillow with a cross-stitched centerpiece that could be detached and made into a decorative mat within a picture frame.

I know craft geeks are legion, and we find each other in the most wonderful and unexpected ways. My favorite craft geek encounter was in the prep for my own wedding. Our baker had asked us if we had a cake topper for her to use, and we bashfully admitted that we wanted to procure two wind-up Godzilla toys instead. She sighed dreamily, and said, “*Oh*, I just *love* Godzilla.” When we returned for the last consult before the wedding, she reached beneath the table, blushing, and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but I got a little carried away …” And another craft ninja gave us one of the best pieces of our wedding day: two wind-up Godzillas, one with a dainty veil, the other quite dapper in a top hat and kilt. [picture forthcoming]