Hobbies

Music

Music has been a big part of most of my life. My degree is a "Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Education, Grades K-12, with an Emphasis on Band and Orchestra Instruments" (what a mouthful!) from Miami University (class of 1978, Kappa Kappa Psi and Phi Mu Alpha service fraternities). My major performance instrument was the trumpet, and I still play trumpet and cornet, though not as well as I used to. I also can scratch out some music on the piano, though I've never come as close to mastering it as I did the trumpet.

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Gaming

Acquiring the Habit

I grew up in a gaming environment, so to speak. My parents played bridge with other couples and relatives, they taught me and my siblings a number of card games from War to Gin Rummy to Cribbage, and we went through various board games from Candy Land to Life to Monopoly to Scrabble.

In college I started adding new addictions for wargames (especially the board games from Avalon Hill and SPI) as well as the grand-daddy of role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons. After college I developed a group of friends who were into wargaming with table-top miniatures, yet another black hole sucking money out of my wallet.

The Computer Revolution

The advent of the PC brought a new way to play games. To me it has been a good news/bad news situation: it allows for the gamer to play when no one else is available to play "face to face", but it lacks the social benefits of getting together with one or more other people for some friendly competition. (Also, most computer opponents become predictable after a time, making the game less interesting.)

The Internet has added some of the social factor back into computer gaming by allowing opponents to compete against each other in real time. Though not generally as rewarding as a real face-to-face encounter, it still is an improvement over predictable robots. An interesting offshoot of this is the "massively multi-player game" in which many players (hundreds or thousands) game in a virtual world, for instance World War II On-Line.

Some Gaming Support Tools I Created