All my life I’ve been a gamer. I remember being five years old and my parents taking me out to Service Merchandise to buy me an Atari 2600 and a pile of games for my birthday sometime in 1980. At eight, I was already interested in role-playing games like STAR FRONTIERS and DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and throughout middle school I spent an inordinate amount of free time running elaborate RPG campaigns, playing through any number of classic NES games, or sitting around an eight hour game of AXIS AND ALLIES with my friends.

And so it was that my very first Cracked LCD column began here at Gameshark.com- one hundred articles and two years ago.

I was thinking about a couple of different concepts with which to commemorate the centennial edition of Cracked LCD. My first impulse was, of course, to run a clip show where we’d all sit around and reminisce about all the great times we’ve had together. But then I realized that Cracked LCD is not a TV show, and I have too much integrity to blow Editor Bill Abner’s microscopic budget on a rehashed “greatest hits” article. Then I thought about running a “100 Best Games of All Time” feature but then I realized that would make a better series than a single article. Or maybe a book, for that matter.

But what I really wanted to write about to sort of mark the milestone was writing itself, and specifically writing about board games in this column. So I guess this show is really more of a behind-the-scenes thing than anything else but it’s also something from the heart, which is where I always get what I feel like are my best concepts for articles in the first place. Whenever I’m stumped for the week’s column, there’s no new games out to review, and I’m not cheesed off or disgruntled about something going on in the hobby, I almost always sit down and just start writing. There’s usually this almost physical “click” I feel when the heart links up to the brain and the brain links up to the hands. The audience may be divided on what my better columns are and present with a vastly different criteria for what defines the really good ones, but I know when I’m writing from the mainline.

Writing about board games weekly for two years and coming up with something new to express every time is no small feat. When all is said and done, a collected volume of Cracked LCD columns would probably be somewhere around five and six hundred pages- and that’s with Abner’s judicious editing cutting out Crom knows how many excessively long lead-in paragraphs. (It would fill another Volume. – ed) Add in all the writing about the hobby I did in various places- in forums, retailer websites, blogs, a print magazine, and so on- prior to getting the call-up from GameShark and I figure I’ve probably written into the thousands of pages on the subject.

It’s funny because when I started writing about board games years ago, I never really felt like most of the reviewers, writers, and pundits at the time were writing from the heart. I still feel like that when I read some of the other material that’s out there. I see a lot of mechanical descriptions, half-hearted and tentative opinions, and a general sense that everything is just fine. There are a lot of respected hobby writers and advocates that quite frankly, are probably better suited to writing grocery lists than anything approaching criticism. Sometimes I read game reviews and I just want to take the writer by the throat and scream “write from the heart!” All too often a “board game review” means a recap of the rules and a general admonition that some people may not like it. If you’re rating by numbers, slap a noncommittal “7” on it and err on the side of a positive review. But don’t hurt anybody’s sensibilities, and don’t be direct whatever you do. No feelings, please.

One of the first pieces of feedback I ever got from a reader was for a review of ATTIKA I did for an online retailer’s newsletter (they paid me in store credit). The reader complimented my review and said it was great to read a review that really imparted a sense of what it actually felt like to play the game. I don’t remember who it was that wrote that, but it really inspired me to stick to that model.

I try to write with as much emotional investment as I can muster- a concept that may seem insane when we’re talking about boxes full of paper and cardboard. And come to find out, not everybody likes that style. In fact, in some quarters it is outrageously unpopular and smugly frowned upon. That’s fine. That’s exactly how it should be, and I encourage all readers of Cracked LCD to make up their own damn minds about what I write, what I write about, and whether or not I really am just a crackpot for hating widely beloved titles like RACE FOR THE GALAXY or calling out game designers for being boringly anti-innovative during time when more games are being produced than ever before. Or for actually liking AGRICOLA.

In last week’s column, my point was that games are ultimately about having fun. I wrote that fully aware that I was staking my critical position on the simple fact that I’ve had fun playing some of the worst games I’ve ever played. And there are people in the hobby who believe that writing “seriously” about games is impossible since they’re just for amusement anyway. But I do believe games of all types are a valid creative medium and as such I have always felt that it is entirely possible to write about games in the same way that a critic may write about a movie or a record.

I’ve always tried to contextualize games among a larger cultural field like that, sometimes in subtle ways. Hell, I ripped off the opening line of Cracked LCD #1 with a GOODFELLAS reference and I titled each “There Will Be Games” installment after a song lyric- just like in WATCHMEN. I think the aesthetics and barometers of quality are hugely different between hobby games and other mediums, but when a game is particularly cinematic or is as stripped-down and raw as a Stooges record, I think it’s a way to demonstrate that there are qualities in the medium that deserve to be observed, considered, and ultimately written about. In that sense, I feel like I’m more influenced by writers like Pauline Kael, Harlan Ellison, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus than any of the board game writers who have come before me.