Game Soloist
I'm writing pieces of my new game, listening to music on random play. A song by Dead Confederate just came on, 'It was a Rose' off the Wrecking Ball album. Something about the singer's piercing high voice gave me a flashback to a moment from a GenCon gone by.
I'm not sure what year it was. Maybe 2002. I was pretty new at Wizards. I'd been to several GenCons as a freelancer or working for Daedalus or shortly post-Chaosium.
WizKids had just put out MechWarrior as a clicky-base game. They were using one of the ballrooms as a sort of training/staging area where volunteers in blue shirts were demoing the game to small squads of other blue-shirted volunteers. People clustering around tables and marshalling at various training posts, other blue-shirted officials breaking open cases and spilling product on the tables.
There were between 100 and 200 people in the room. That crowd-number worked for me, because I wasn't supposed to be in there, the general public was being kept out of the room, the demo-space was just for WizKids employees and volunteers. But I'd drifted in while the people at the door were distracted and I kept using groups as cover, moving around the room with the Exhibitor badge turned down to avoid giving me away.
I wasn't trying to steal secrets. Nothing bad on my mind. Just catching the vibe.
I'm not sure that I succeeded in catching the vibe. But as I wheeled around the room, what I caught was a performance. Standing on a chair near the center of the room was an elfin girl with sandy hair and a high piercing voice. Chapter by chapter, section by section, rule by rule, she was chanting out the MechWarrior rules, a cantor calling to the elect.
I didn't get the sense that there was anyone paying attention to her full-time other than the guy who was holding the chair so she didn't take a tumble. People came and listened for a moment and then went back to their tasks. And in any case she wasn't focused on whether anyone was listening, she looked straight ahead, chin high, intent upon calling the rules with perfect diction, crystal enunciation and a strong pure tone that stayed with me on my circuit.
I might have been her best audience. I kept her in view my full pass, gleaning precise rules for troops dismounting from vehicles, with special considerations for drop ships. When I got back to the door I'd come in, I stopped and guessed that I hadn't learned much on my circuit. My mind had been blown by the MechWarrior cantor. But I decided that I had learned something: that the game was complex enough that someone felt that it required a Rules-Caller. And so I took a last moment to appreciate the view of the elfin cantor on her chair, to fix her voice in memory, then returned to the world beyond.
I'm not sure what year it was. Maybe 2002. I was pretty new at Wizards. I'd been to several GenCons as a freelancer or working for Daedalus or shortly post-Chaosium.
WizKids had just put out MechWarrior as a clicky-base game. They were using one of the ballrooms as a sort of training/staging area where volunteers in blue shirts were demoing the game to small squads of other blue-shirted volunteers. People clustering around tables and marshalling at various training posts, other blue-shirted officials breaking open cases and spilling product on the tables.
There were between 100 and 200 people in the room. That crowd-number worked for me, because I wasn't supposed to be in there, the general public was being kept out of the room, the demo-space was just for WizKids employees and volunteers. But I'd drifted in while the people at the door were distracted and I kept using groups as cover, moving around the room with the Exhibitor badge turned down to avoid giving me away.
I wasn't trying to steal secrets. Nothing bad on my mind. Just catching the vibe.
I'm not sure that I succeeded in catching the vibe. But as I wheeled around the room, what I caught was a performance. Standing on a chair near the center of the room was an elfin girl with sandy hair and a high piercing voice. Chapter by chapter, section by section, rule by rule, she was chanting out the MechWarrior rules, a cantor calling to the elect.
I didn't get the sense that there was anyone paying attention to her full-time other than the guy who was holding the chair so she didn't take a tumble. People came and listened for a moment and then went back to their tasks. And in any case she wasn't focused on whether anyone was listening, she looked straight ahead, chin high, intent upon calling the rules with perfect diction, crystal enunciation and a strong pure tone that stayed with me on my circuit.
I might have been her best audience. I kept her in view my full pass, gleaning precise rules for troops dismounting from vehicles, with special considerations for drop ships. When I got back to the door I'd come in, I stopped and guessed that I hadn't learned much on my circuit. My mind had been blown by the MechWarrior cantor. But I decided that I had learned something: that the game was complex enough that someone felt that it required a Rules-Caller. And so I took a last moment to appreciate the view of the elfin cantor on her chair, to fix her voice in memory, then returned to the world beyond.