"That F#@%ing Game"

My 30 year LARPing history with Games of Adventure,

On Sunday May 7th 1995, I went to my first game of Games of Adventure (GOA), a weekly high fantasy live action roleplaying game at Ravenna Park in Seattle Washington. That way was, undeniably, one of the most important days of my life, rivaled only by those few other days that define the direction of your life, be it through loss and tragedy, or by gain and change.

For the next 8 years, barring about 6 months in late 1997/1998 (we’ll get to that), I spent every one of my Sundays at the park playing GOA (barring sick days, and obligations I couldn’t get out of), and a good chunk of the other six days a week obsessing over it with my friends because… well, I got hooked, then I got them hooked, then we all made new friends at the game who were already hooked, so most of my social circle was people that I either brought to GOA or knew from there.

And 30 years later, these people are still my friends. Part of this is very much “meeting your people” and part of this was the game’s ability to keep facilitating our friendships.

My story of GOA is, at its heart, a story of friendship.
It’s also a story about damage.

So settle in my friends, especially those of you that didn’t live this story with me, and read the tale of THAT FUCKING GAME!

Chapter 1: How I Came to Quit Playing Magic Cards

On that May morning in 1995, my dad gave me a ride down the street from our house 2-ish miles north of the park, and dropped me off at my estranged friend Tom’s apartment, where I met up with him and our friend Morgan, and together we walked over to the park.

I had, just the weekend before, gone camping with Morgan and his mom, car camping, and in that… I don’t know how many days together… he told me all about this game he’d started playing, Games of Adventure, and we fought each other a bunch with his foam weapons and played Magic The Gathering on the picnic bench at our camp site.

Two things to know.

First, I had seen GOA in action, having grown up very close to Ravenna park. Morgan, also having grown up near there knew who they were, and told me outlandish tales when we were younger about interacting with them.

Second, just a year before, almost to the day, at Morgan’s birthday, I got introduced to the game Magic the Gathering, the competitive collectable card game. My other friends started playing Magic before me, and it took playing it to get interested in it, but I got hooked like all my friends, and before GOA, we all obsessed over Magic.

So I went to the game with Tom and Morgan, and I was instantly hooked, and I realized after that first game, getting my monthly allowance and realizing I needed to spend it on supplies to build foam weapons for the game, that the pricey to stay competitive hobby of Magic had to go.

So there it was, out with collectible trading cards, in with weapons made of plumbing supplies and facial protection made of screen door mesh.

On that day, the first person to kill me at the game, Oliver, is still someone I’m in touch with.
Tom and Morgan? Neither one of them really stuck with the game, and on top of that, we drifted apart.

Anyhow, let me try and sum up (there’s no time to explain, and yes, the game was lousy with Princess Bride and Monty Python and the Holy Grail references) what made GOA so completely captivating for me.

The first part is the fighting.
Fighting is done with foam props that have a PVC or fiberglass core, covered in closed cell foam and made to look like weapons, so, broadly, a sword looks like a sword, a battle axe looks like a battle axe etc. not to be confused with “boffer” weapons, shapeless weapons made of pipe foam that all look likes sticks… sticks with varying degree of decoration.
The basic rules of combat were simple: if you got hit in the chest or the head, you were dead. If you got hit in a limb you. couldn’t use that limb, and if you got three separate limb wounds you were dead.
Hits to the face were off limits.

This meant that combat was, baseline simple, fast, and obvious. The weapons were all designed to be safe, and fast (sometimes unsafe, sometimes clunky…) so the speed of combat was pretty high.
This is compared to other games where you had to shout numbers associated with your swings, and/or where head shots were not allowed.

The fighting was the draw, and the game was at its core (when I started at least), a contact sport with a storyline.

And that brings us to…

Second, it was physical, structured, organized make believe.
The game allowed me and my friends to return to the deeply enjoyable act of physical imaginative play, an activity we were a few years too old to be doing anymore in any other environment.
The game encouraged and facilitated creativity and self-expression, while also appealing to the rampant aggression of early teenaged boys.
It had physical props and consumes, making you into the action figure you played with, allowing you to roughhouse in a safe, but satisfyingly violent way, and it let you explore your imagination with likeminded or at least similarly disposed people in an if not organized, than at least gathered, environment.

Which brings us to the people, the third thing.

When I started playing the game it was normal to have 30+ players a week, many of whom were within a couple years of my age, mostly older, with a smattering of ‘adults’ in the very late teens and early 20s, and a few actual adults here and there too. And yes, the vast majority of people at the game were (and remained) dudes.
In my first month I made new friends weekly, and I saw kids I knew from middle school that I had no idea were secretly nerdy. because there was really no one “cool” that played GOA, and even the cool kids that played were still dorks.

On my third week I got my friend Alex (who I’d known for five years at that point, who was also a friend of Morgan’s and a Magic nerd too) to come along, and before the game even started, he broke his arm as a result of taking a fall brought on by a 20something asshole that was a little too aggressive in a practice fight. Alex wouldn’t be allowed to play for a while, but just like me, he was hooked.

Alex and I got most of our other friends to come to the game, with one of the big exceptions being my next door neighbor Jared… fantasy and make believe hadn’t even been his thing we were young either… and while it did take 6 months, I also got my friend Seth to join the game as well.

When I moved in late 1995, Jared and I drifted apart until two eyars later when he transferred to my high school, but Seth (who I also knew from my old neighborhood) and I still saw each other every Sunday.

If you’re noticing a pattern here, that’s the point.

GOA also really introduced me and my friends to Dungeons and Dragons, at least more than we were tangentially aware of it before that, and got us all to start playing in groups with each other, and with other people from GOA, leading us to hang out and play DnD, and talk about GOA and practice fighting each other.

The game was a lifestyle, something I joked about “taking up at least 1/7th of you life”, and for those 2 years, it was nothing but fun (with occasional frustration and manageable bullshit).

Chapter 2: I’m a Child of Abuse, and That’s Everybody’s Problem

In the first two years of playing the game, I was playing in awe of the experience, and playing with a motivation to get better, to get good, and maybe one day be the best. I was physically in good shape from 3 years of martial arts training (that I had to quit because of knee problems… my knees got better, that’s another multi-chapter story), and I was also just motivated to fight.

There were people at the game that were kind of living legends, the fighters at the top of the pyramid, most of them were in their late teens to early 20s, a few were, unsurprisingly adults, and one of them was a 16 year old kid, Tim, a friend, who was a Junior Olympics track runner and football player.
You fought these people, you practiced with them, you got compared to them, you aspired to be better than them, and to learn from them… well, maybe not everyone did that, but I did, I think my friends there did… we were all competitive and driven by the thrill of mediated, consequence free foam sword combat.

I wasn’t tall, I wasn’t too naturally coordinated or fast, but I worked hard, and I was aggressive. I worked on trying to combine form and aggression, to develop techniques that allowed to me to let my boundless aggression out.
Fighting was intense, and usually joyous for me, and every once and a while deeply disappointing, not when I lost to someone better than me, but when I lot to people I thought I was better than. But even then, there were lessons to learn, and there was that pyramid to climb.

My relationship to fighting, and to the game changed when I both suffered my first heartbreak, and when the game died for a few months.

My very low self-esteem and deep, deep, deeeeeeeeeeep insecurity that came in no small part from a home full of emotional cruelty and verbal and emotional abuse (as well as being the youngest child, and having been a sickly, weird, emotionally dis-regulated and sensitive one with glasses as that… also, it was my dad, it was all my dad, not my mom, and not my step-mom, just my dad) meant that I was desperate for validation and for love… like the kind that comes from having a girlfriend, and from being objectively good at things… things like, oh I don’t know… clearly beating other people.

From the summer through the fall of 97, both the game and the high school relationship (that was far too intense, because… well… it was me…) fell apart, and while I had moved out of my dad and step-mom’s house at the start of the summer, I was not emotionally in a good place.

By the start of winter, the game was dead, and while it would come back from the dead several times, it would never regain the popularity or population it had before its death.
The game died because the person who was in charge stopped showing up, and the politics of who would take over the game and how killed its momentum, but in early 1998 my friend Pat and I, Pat being ten years or so older than I. relaunched the game.

Slowly but surely we got old players to come back, and attracted new players as well, and things were smaller, and different, but in a lot of ways they were better.

But I wasn’t.

While I worked hard to help run the game and do my best to provide fun and entertainment for people over the next few years (as a 16-18 year old), I had a massive chip on my shoulder, and deep seated psychological issues that spilled out everywhere. I mean, I was an emotionally unhealthy teenaged boy in a position of very mild authority… and I desperately needed to be good at fighting.

Over that stretch of years, so you can understand the intensity of all this, I want you to understand that I both started training in martial arts again and got my black belt, and also started weigh lifting and working out all the time, while also continuing to practice foam sword fighting with my friends.

The thing was, everyone that had been at the top of the pyramid was gone, most of them didn’t come back when the game re-launched, so myself and my friends, now older teens, were the top of the pyramid, and the worst thing was…

Okay, let me take a step back.
In my initial time playing, in those first few years, the Gary Era, every 6 months there would be a tournament. The tournament was “the warriors tournament” where everyone (most everyone, there were sometimes other tournaments for the other character classes too, like wizards and rogues, and an archery tournament too) would fight in a one on one double elimination tournament to see who would be the town champion, aka the best fighter at that moment, on that day.

So, during the Pat Era (1998-2003) there was a still a warriors tournament, but the other character class based tournaments also got the focus they deserved… which meant that my friends and I, not all of but most of the best fighters in the game, were not in the same tournaments at the same time.
There was never a decisive all the best fighters going at it tournament, which usually meant that if you were the favorite going into the warriors tournament, you were winning it.

The one time two of us were in the same tournament, I came in second to my friend Seth. He was better that day, and that’s leaving out the convoluted nature of the game’s rules and character powers etc.

So, all I wanted to be was the best, or at least to be acknowledged as good/one of the best, and while it didn’t steal all the joy from fighting, it cast a shadow, and it warped my sense of competition.
It made it so that if I cared and got emotionally engaged with someone, then it became personal. Every win and every loss was something that defined me.

It’s something I still haven’t overcome, I’ve just learned how to not get emotionally engaged…

Most of the time.

So, on top of this need to be the best, there was also the disintegration of trust and friendship between groups of people at the game, including people that were older than me, that I looked up to, that I felt had turned on me, and that my friends and I feuded with for years.

Those older friends?
People I patched things up with, and still see some of pretty regularly.

Anyhow, things got a lot better around the time I turned 18, we all aged, we all talked things out… 9/11 was a strangely healing event for the players of GOA, I’m not making that up, it really was… and while things weren’t always smooth, they were better.

Chapter 3: There Was Still a Problem…

I quit GOA in late winter of 2003, in part because my friends were leaving or had left the game, and because I had to start working Sundays.
In the spring of 2002 my friends Alex and Josh, Alex the one who broke his arm back in Chapter 1, and Josh a friend from high school that I pulled into the game and gaming with us etc., both of whom were people I saw basically every weekend, and not just at the game, left for the Marines, while other friends had left for college, or were just not interested in the game anymore (as it turned out, at that moment, not forever).

It had, in the end, stopped being as fun, or worth my time… more so, I wanted to be someone else… someone less nerdy.

But before I quit, before my friends left, even though things had gotten better, I was still dealing with a reputation… one that had less to do with me, and more to do with my chicken shit friends who never wanted to duke it out to see who really was the best.

(It would have been Alex, probably the single best one on one fighter to play the game… emphasis on game, because game fighting isn’t ye olden times actual fighting, but still, since we’re talking about it in the context of the game, he was the best duelist, better than the guys from medieval recreation and other more ‘authentic’ game systems/styles of combat)

No, you see, my chickenshit friends were also dickheads who believed that their ability to bend and break the rules and get away with it were a testament to their skill and their desire for a certain kind of fun at the game.

So me, Mr. Takes it All Too Serious and Isn’t Wrong But is Just a Dick, I got painted with the same brush. My fighting style was based on being fast, both a little bit faster than most everyone else so my killing blow on them would land before theirs would on me, meaning I won and their hit didn’t count, and being fast with the rules.

Since I was obsessed with the game, my speed of play and intensity was higher than the average player… again, because I cared too much. And since the people I socialized with all the time were, we’ll just say ‘cheaters’, I didn’t get a lot of benefit of the doubt.

Also, to be clear, me, not a good sport.

So, since we’re talking about my insecurity and the interior emotional violence of the game for me, while also being a place of camaraderie, creativity, community, and imaginary expression, you can imagine the chip I had on my shoulder even though I won the warriors tournament 3 times, and finished second once, and still not thinking I was seen in the same light as the people at the top of the pyramid before me.

And the worst thing too, the worst thing was, I was so unmoored that when better fighters would come in to the game from places like the SCA, I couldn’t let myself learn from them, I could only get pissed at myself for losing, for not being the best.

And then when I would win in close, or big, or important (in the context of organized make believe) moments, it was with the asterisk that I was a self-important probable cheater.

Cheating, of course, would have defeated the whole purpose, because the purpose was being better. It was about winning because I was better at fighting and better at the game, and in so being, proving to myself that I wasn’t an unlovable utter fucking failure and loser.

All that said, shit happens, people make mistakes, and our brains do weird stuff, especially when we’re immersed in playing a character and a dramatic moment. My chickenshit dickhead friends liked getting one over on people, I just wanted to win.

While I was still haunted by all of that, and still playing the game, a player from the Gary Era came back to town, my friend Brennan. He remembered me, I remembered him, we reconnected, hit a rough patch, got over it, and thanks to my friendship with his then girlfriend Jenna, another player at the game, he and I ended up as roommates from 2003-2006.
I talk to Brennan once a week on average.

Brennan was really the glue that united all of us at the game and got us all socializing and drinking together, and then playing other games together.

But no matter how much I grew, no matter how close I became with everyone, even after I left the game, that competitive thing was still broken inside of me.

Chapter 4: That Fucking Game

Between 2003 and 2007 I made periodic returns to the game in fits and starts, playing a few weeks then not, then showing up months later, then not… then almost getting in a fist fight with a guy…

This was after my friend Seth died in 2005, and his death did not improve my overall incredible intense disposition…

Anyhow, we all, all of my many many many friends that played GOA loved and hated the game. It was so demanding, and it was such a burden to explain in a pre-nerd culture dominance world, “Yeah, I got to the park every Sunday to play make believe. I wear screen door mesh on my face to protect my eyes, I wear something between a women’s blouse and a figure skater’s top, and I fight people with foam weapons made out of plumbing supplies while throwing tennis balls at people after reciting spell incantations so they know what the tennis ball does if it hits them… also, I’m 25.”

And while I’m talking about how ridiculous the game is, let me tell you about being a Wizard in GOA.

Wizards, known for their mental abilities, and their capacity to change the world with their force of will and their thoughts. Wizards, those rare and gifted beings capable of turning their mental strength into unmatched physical power…

To be a wizard at GOA had to be able to a sprinting target with a tennis ball from between 5-25 feet on average. Also, you had to be able to run to get away, and before you even threw the tennis ball, you had to rattle off some poetry.

You know who is drawn to being a wizard? Not someone with a competitive little league fastball.

Only at GOA was being a wizard equal to being a junior varsity shortstop or pitcher.

It was fucking rough having that in your life as part if who you were, while also desperately wanting to be liked, and known, and thought of as cool, or at least seen as a while person and not judged harshly for the absurd thing that you love and gave you so much.

So, in 2007 when Alex and Josh got back from the Marines and wanted to get back into GOA, which was up and running pretty strong and smoothly, I started making occasional appearances.

It was after their return that I started referring to GOA as That Fucking Game.

It might have been before that, honestly.

This was the Sarah Era, Sarah ran the game longer than anyone else, and arguably had the steadiest and most consistently successful tenure as game master.

GOA was complicated for me, I didn’t feel the need to go all in, I didn’t want to go all in.

Then, in the spring of 2008 Alex, drunkenly and sincerely one night, in trying to convince me to come back said, “Max, you have a beard and people listen to you when you talk.”
He was appealing to the fact I’d turned into an adult, and someone capable of using their authority, and he was trying to get me to help him impose some order on the game, to help direct it, make it into something more.
That got me back in… but it wouldn’t be until late in that summer, seeing a bunch of cosplaying anime nerds outside of the convention center, that I finally stopped fighting with myself over who and what I was, and accepted that I was a giant fucking nerd through and through.

It still didn’t change the competitive side of me though, that was something I couldn’t let out. The times it did, things did not go well.

Soon enough we were getting other older players to come back, and a year later, I had done a re-write of the game’s rule book, my first real, meaningful writing project, that served as the starting draft for a group of us, including a player from the Pat Era who was 3 years younger than us, Lewis.

Lewis, now an adult (like us) hosted many of the editing and workshop meetings for the rules and became our friend, becoming one of my close friends, and I know work at the company he co-founded, and I see him every day.

I (we) also got Jenna to come back to the game, and she and I connected in a different way than before, and in some people’s words “finally” started dating. We gave it a good try, we’re FaceBook friends now.

GOA had its ups and down from 2008-2010, and died out a good bit between the fall of 2010 and the summer of 2011, where I finally took my turn at running the game.

I ran GOA from July of 2011 until, I think September of 2013, with Josh serving as the acting game master while I…

So I kinda King Lear’d this one. We had re-written the rules and solidified the game, and I had laid down what I thought was a concrete definition of the game, and since I had college and didn’t know how much time I’d actually have, I asked Josh to take over running the game weekly, not change the rules or anything…

It was kinda messy, but I was back to fully in charge in the winter I think.

Anyhow, the game came to an end in the fall of 2013 when those of us still playing it all kind of realize that we had finally, fully outgrown it, that it was not going to give us what we wanted, or what we were looking for.

We were also down to handful of players, not because we didn’t try, but because we tried our best to make it what we wanted it to be, not what it needed to change into.

But something happened in those final years when I was in charge.

My deeply unhealthy relationship with competition didn’t change… you still don’t want to antagonize me or shit talk me in a board game or anything else… no, that’s probably never getting better…

What changed was why I played, and what I tried to accomplish.

From 2011-2013, all I wanted was to give back and provide fun for other people. To elevate the game, and the way it was played, to make sure everyone’s fun was of equal value, and that their time and commitment to playing the game was respected and rewarded.

I didn’t try to be the best to ever run the game, I just tried to do it right, and to make it fun.

My life would be unrecognizable without GOA. It is never what defined me, but it was the place I would go over and over again to define myself, to find myself, and to explore who I wanted to be, especially when it pushed up against who I was.

I have a lifetime of friendships from That Fucking Game, and there’s not much complicated about that.