I played Dungeons and Dragons in the late 1970s and transitioned to computer games since there have been computer games. It started on a mainframe at West Point playing Adventure. Did you know if you run seven versions of Adventure at the same time you can crash the mainframe? Trust me – you could.
I continued on my Apple II GS with DUAL floppy drives (I was so cool) playing games like Ultima, Wizardy, Dragon’s Lair, Dungeon Master, and 3d Chess. While I loved the Ultima series and would play all versions of the game, Balance of Power by Chris Crawford was my favorite game and so far ahead of its time.
I transitioned to a Gateway PC in the late 1980s and continued playing such games as Half-Life, Quake, Myst, Star Wars, Age of Empires, Diablo and Doom. In 1994, I started one of the first experiments in the world in serious gaming – using gaming to educate and inspire university students. A couple of cadets (Eugene Gregory, Ben Ring, and Janette Gregory) helped me take the Doom gaming engine and they wrote code to modify the underlying data files to give quizzes. id Creative donated 50 versions of the game to support the endeavor and volunteered to do anything to support the experiment. Group-based quizzes in my course became a legend at West Point. If the students passed the quiz, they gained access to a complete replica of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with all the sounds and music replaced. It had to be the hardest level of Doom ever created. It was brutally unfair and the cadets loved it. They took the quiz over and over again to get to the last level and try to beat the EECS department professors. The cadets and I published a paper in 1995 and 1996 highlighting the effectiveness of the approach. Serious gaming in 1995 was ahead of its time and received only modest support externally to West Point as death by PowerPoint was the new and wildly lauded educational approach. My bosses loved it.
My first exposure to massively multiplayer online roleplaying games came in 1997 when I was asked to be a beta tester for Ultima Online. I was immediately hooked and worked to become a grandmaster archer/master mage. In a game where everywhere is a player versus player kill zone, I partnered with another player where we would sucker I mean lure idiots I mean other players to attack us. I was dressed as a peasant lumberjack and my partner was invisible. We never attacked anyone. But if they attacked me, they were dead in about 10 seconds from two grandmaster archer/master mages. This often served as a catalyst for some large scale pvp battles as everyone would escalate and involve their guilds.
Everquest 1 would come out in March 1999 and I joined the game in the summer of 1999 as my brother (player name Golean) asked me to come join the game and the Warlords of Wrath guild on the Rodcet Nife server. The guild was never in the top three on the server but always in the top ten. It was mostly drama free and maintained a grant loot system for most of its history. I would be the last guild leader of the Warlords of Wrath before we merged with the Avatars of Might. I played a paladin because that is my class despite how horribly designed the paladin class was initially. My name – Valcare – a combination of valor and caring. Golean and I played pretty much every weekend with a druid Stormdancer and a ranger Quintus. We had a host of friends who would fill the last spot in the party. Like many of the online games I have played, I had a good reputation and in Everquest, reputation was everything.
Valcare, the Paladin
Current Games
Diablo IV
Diablo IV is an action role-playing game released in 2023. Having previously played Diablo I, II and III over the last twenty years, I was keenly interested in the release.
My
