Former baseball star, now gaming mogul Curt Schilling (Image: 38 Studios)
I'm always pleased to see when conventional
wisdom is turned on its head. When prevailing
stereotypes prevail, well, only for a time.
Take Curt Schilling. You may know him as a super-successful, do-or-die, game-winning baseball pitcher for the Boston Red Sox and the Arizona Diamondbacks. He's the guy who pitched through a ruptured tendon — even when the sutures began to bleed, he kept going to win key games. Tough guy, and major league competitor.
So I was surprised as the next person when I learned that Mr. Schilling is a big geek. As I write in my story for the New York Times, as a teenager in the 1980s, Schilling played computer games like Wizardry and Dungeons & Dragons on his Intellivision and Apple computer. As an adult, he went on to play online role-playing games like EverQuest and Ultima Online in hotel rooms in between stints on the mound (pitchers have a fair amount of downtime to fill). When he retired from baseball, he founded a video game company called 38 Studios (named after his jersey number). His company's first game, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning comes out today.
From the title, you might guess the game is not set in the wide, wide world of professional sports. Nope. Reckoning is a fantasy role-playing game for the home console. You control an avatar who wanders a Tolkien-esque world, completing quests and defeating monsters.
Schilling may be a sports hero, but he gets excited about being a hero in a different realm: fantasy.
Point being, just 'cuz you're a super-jock doesn't mean that you can't be a gamer. Times have thankfully changed since the more rigid 80s and 90s, when it seemed like sports nuts and computer dweebs were mutually exclusive sub-cultures. All those fantasy sports leagues certainly attest to the fact that jocks and nerds can co-exist. Heck, even NBA superstar Tim Duncan plays D&D.
Jocks and gamers, they geek out on the same stuff: stats, power, levels, winning. It doesn't matter if you wield a broadsword or wield a baseball bat. It doesn't matter who's on you team: a former Tiger, Cadinarl, Yankee, Diamondback or Red Sox, or a dwarf, elf, mage, rogue or barbarian.
Besides, when you think fo it, baseball is really an abstracted war game. Same with football, basketball, hockey and any number of other sports. My tribe versus your tribe, locked in battle, on a field, fighting for possession of territory.
That baseball or football may as well be a Holy Grail, that basketball hoop is a magic ring. Heck, when you make a buzzer-beating 3-pointer, that is magic.
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. He can be reached at www.ethangilsdorf.com.
