I am a gamer. I make no secret of this fact; I flaunt it, in fact. I consider it a point of pride. But what, precisely, is a gamer? Certainly I'm not a hardcore Penny Arcade-style player of video games, possessed by all systems and fundamentally aware of the flaws and merits of each individual game, big-named or esoteric and strange. Nor am I a rampant roleplayer, though I might wish to be. I cannot remember the last time I took up the nobles arms of a roleplayer -- sword and shield, or in other words, d20 and rulebook. I have never painted miniatures. I have never played Halo 2, or Doom, or Tomb Raider. Why do I call myself a gamer? Why do I cling to the trappings of arcane, arbitrary rules and enforced interactivity?

When I was young still -- though I beg of those older than I not to lambast my statement, for the truth is that I am still younger than many of those older than I, though in fairness I am also older than many of those whose birthdate follows my own. I make use of the term "young" to characterize a dramatic gap between my current existence and circumstances, and those of the past. To wit, I am at this time an adult in my mid-20s -- a statement which is shocking to write -- living on my own, whereas in the mythical youth I speak of I was but a child whose age could be counted on one's fingers, still in primary education and blessed with a complete family.

Get to the point, the reader says, and cease dithering and digression! Poo on you, I must therefore rejoin, poo and double poo! But there is a point to my recitation, and that is simply this: My bed time was, in these nether depths of time, 8:00 PM. The sole exception to this rule, granted with parental wisdom, was the glorious night of Saturday. Unwearied by the burdens of school, yet lacking need to arise at an hour considered unnatural by the youthful body, I remained awake and alert an entire additional hour! Now, certainly this figure is laughable to we of greater age and less innocent mind, but an hour is far less of our lives than it was to the me that once existed. But musings on the nature of time are far less relevant, if perhaps far more entertaining, to the searching of my gaming soul, than the means by which I spent the extra time alloted to me. I'm certain you've long since figured it out, and indeed wandered off to watch the badgers animation some time ago. But for the sake of completing this, ironicallyt, foresaken essay, I'll spell it out clearly: the Saturdays of my youth were game nights.

And what games we played! My parents and I ventured across many broad spectrums of board- and card-based entertainment. A cabinet full of Milton Bradley products never failed to produce a fun activity. We sought to obtain a Monopoly; we lived the game of Life, where no Risk was too great. Times like those truly qualified as some of the happiest I can imagine.

When my parents divorced, and we moved across the country, such games ended. Though on rare occasion my mother, sister, and I would come together for a brief game of "Careers" or an occasional round of Tripoly, such events had nowhere near the heart of our old family games.

Do I need to go into depth on the effects the separation had? Or can I rely on your surely rich imagination to fill in gaps and make necessary assumptions about the psychological toll it took? I trust in your capability; I trust you can understand why I took such an interest in games, particularly those of the roleplaying variety.

So when I obtained, by coincidence and happenstance, the rules to AD&D 2nd Edition, what realistic course of action could anyone expect? The true surprise is not that I began to play, but that I found a group of others willing to play. Nate, best friend, easy convert, diehard dwarf; Pete, steam-venter, always willing to play a fighter or warrior class; Kostya, the Russian, picked up by freak coincidence in a social studies class, probably best DM of us all save for his crippling inability to prounounce key words such as "peasant", "wand", or "village"; Danny, off-and-on player who was in it for fun; Josh, perverted powergamer who taught us all to beware the rules lawyer; Alex, forever making crude jokes and jumping into danger; Baby Alex, the other Russian, who shall forever be remembered best for the many times he reacted to his own foolish mistakes of sheepish embarassment.

If you have never experience the kind of camaraderie a good game fosters, I cannot begin to explain it to you. The combined creative power of several minds bent to one unified purpose makes even the process of random number generation thrilling -- by which I mean that any fool can sit and roll dice, and cheer himself on for gaining a specific number, but the shared enthusiasm and sheer thrill of rolling a natural 20 at a critical moment, bringing your group salvation, is unparalleled.

To be continued.