It's All Fun and Games!

This is another brainchild of the blogfest behemoth: Alex J. Cavanaugh! I don't always have time to take part in Alex's incredible ideas, but this one sounded easy, and I couldn't resist talking about games.

Okay, admittedly, I did it to Alex, again, missing the actual festival by a day, but he's used to it by now, and Alex is very understanding, as well as being the nicest guy you could ever meet.

Let me get to my three favorite games:

There is no game in my entire life that has influenced me more than dear old D&D. I first started playing in like 2nd grade, with my best friend Bill, and his 7 older brothers. Okay, not all of them played at once, but it did make for some big parties.

D&D did more to expand my vocabulary than any other game, teaching me words like contingency, illusionist, paladin, cleric, claymore, flail, morning-star ... I could go on. D&D also taught me to love language. Some of the original modules written by Gary Gygax were full of purple prose, but he also had a flair for description and for clever naming conventions.

And, of course, finally, it was D&D that led me to my love of all things Fantasy. Well, technically my dad read LOTR to us kids at night sometimes before I started playing, but it was D&D that led me to Anne McCafferty, Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman, Terry Brooks, David Eddings, The Forgotten Realms, The Call of Cthulu (which used be a horror RPG, in addition to the incredibly creepy short story by H.P. Lovecraft).

My family's favorite "board or card game," or basically the only game we really play together on a regular basis is Apples to Apples. This is a simple, but hilarious, word association game with several variations the never cease to fill the room with fun, language, and psychological hijinks. If you aren't familiar with this game, please run out and get it.

You won't be disappointed.

But the game I've been having the most fun with lately, whenever I'm drunk and bored, or just have some free time, is playing around with hashtags on Twitter. If you don't know what a hashtag is, I'm probably not the one to school you, but if you do know, then by all means, read on.

One of my favorites lately was #LovecraftPictureBooks. My best tweet during that round of hashtag madness was probably "At the Mountains of Madlibs." Get it? Do you see how this works? Credit for this hashtag goes to @ShaunieDarko.

Another favorite of mine was a few months ago, #BetterFirstLines. That search is apparently too old to yield any results, but my favorite (of mine) from that round of hilarity was "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to the Bravo channel." Okay, technically that's not a better first line than the awesome opening line of William Gibson's Neuromancer, but it is funnier. Sometimes that's the point. Credit for this hashtag goes to @SimonCLarter, at least as far as I know.

Then there is always the venerable #ZombieProverbs, like my best "A brain in the hand is worth two in the bush ... nom, nom, nom." See? Such fun!

I could give you more examples, but I imagine you get it by now. If you'd ever like to play hashtag madness with me and my wild friends, you know where to find us (on Twitter, wink, wink).