I know lots of gamers. As I may have mentioned before, I probably could have been one of them. However, during high school I lived three quarters of a mile off the main road, putting the nearest neighbor a half-mile away. This is great for someone like me, who would grow up to be the nicest misanthrope you ever met, but not so good when you were a kid and you wanted to break out an RPG and roll some dice.

To give you an idea of how sad my gaming upbringing was, picture this. I've just bought Star Frontiers. I have the entire thing spread out, I've read through all the manuals, and I'm ready to play that lame first adventure where you're, if memory serves me, chasing a hydra-like bugger around a neighborhood. Or something. Who's available to play with? My grandmother.

Now, if you can imagine trying to explain Star Frontiers to your grandmother, you'll probably chuckle and bit and shake your head. If you knew my crazy grandmother, you'd laugh yourself under your desk. This is the same wonderful woman who, when I was finally getting a chance to see Day of the Dead on video, decided to sit on the couch behind me and interject, every three minutes or so, "You do know that this is all just plastic, right? It's not real. You know that, right?" "Mamo, shhh! I'm trying to watch what happens to Rhodes."

Anyway, what the hell am I telling you this for? Well, certain events have brought me to the inevitable conclusion that I shouldn't feel like I've lost my chance to be a gamer. Because we are all gamers. Every single last one of us.

The most obvious example would be religious people and other practitioners/believers of paranormal stuff not directly attributable to God, i.e. High Weirdness. Two things led me to figure this out. First, there was the whole Limbo tossed out of Catholicism business, which I snarked about here. Then there was the time I heard two bigfoot specialists meet up on Coast to Coast AM.

I love Coast to Coast. I miss the hell out of Art Bell, sure, but any radio show that gives you numerology, bigfoot, aliens, "shadow people" and other nonsense in one sitting…man, you want to talk about a nice sauce to simmer your brain in for coming up with sci-fi story ideas? It's brilliant.

(And I must admit that I wonder, from time to time, if Art and current host George Noory even believe any of this hogwash or, if like all other entertainers, they're doing what pulls in the check and telling everybody to come see the egress. I do this because George, especially, will interject, out of the blue, with something perfectly logical and reasonable, that's entirely out of character for him. It's almost like he's winking at the rest of us. Much like Phil Hendrie would do when he let it all drop and reveal what was behind the curtain.)

Anyway, so you had Bigfoot Specialist #1 on there. And all of a sudden, Art breaks out this guy who had dropped two Bigfoots in the past. He brings him on the phone and the two sort of circle each other, trying to make their reality-tunnels mesh. After all, they both dealt in Bigfoot, right? It's, if you can imagine this, somebody who's written nothing but DC Earth-2 stories for his entire career suddenly asked to write a crossover with Earth-1. How, like most comic book geeks would, can we work through the differences and get a story going together? It was pretty amazing stuff. They were like any other geek, they were just trying to work through things they actually thought were real instead of, say, the various origin stories for Power Girl.

So I've decided that all of those people are LARPing. Live Action Role Playing. Think about it. Whether it's the Pope or Art Bell, somebody's around to play GM and set down the rules or at least facilitate your playing. The rules change–see the bit about Limbo. And everybody bitches and moans but will eventually adapt and keep playing. It's like an adventure game, though, when you consider you have a goal, whether that's getting to heaven, defeating Satan, or unravelling the Great Conspiracy. You have certain objects of power that help you get to that goal, whether it's faith, a Bible, or a Freedom of Information Act filing. I haven't quite worked out what the equivalent of throwing coins or rolling D20 is yet, but give me some time.

Here's the addendum to all this, though. Those people are obviously playing their own sci-fi/fantasy LARP. But what about a real-time strategy LARP? Well, if you work at a large corporation like I do, congratulations: you're a LARPer too. Aren't you "in character" when you go into the office? Of course you are. Because if you really said and did what you wanted to say and do, you'd be either fired or arrested or both. And honestly, what does working for a large corporation have to do with reality? Things happen that have no basis in logic or common sense that no one, I mean no one, would think was a good idea in "real life." Just getting anything done isn't the A to B thing it should be, it's over the hill, through the dale, then maybe to B after you slay the procurement/executive "dragon".

Seriously: watch what you do during the day. Try to be aware of when you slip into character. And see if, like me, you think you'd probably get more accomplished if you were running about with your Dralasite grandmother, armed with a needler pistol. Or whatever that stuff was called.