I’ve been told that I was once what they call a “big wig.” I’ve been told that I once lived “high on the hog.” I’ve been told that I owned sport coats in every color, smoked hundred dollar bills for sport, and had a deep appreciation for Colombian cocaine. Supposedly, I was once a board game magnate – the most important game developer the modern world had ever known. But ever since the accident – which the tabloids described as me “hitting rock bottom” but was actually me literally falling from a 27 foot tall human pyramid of Jesse White Tumblers onto an inadequate mat – my mind has gone blank. I’m what the medical community calls an “amnesiac;” I’m what my grandchildren call “friggin’ annoying.”
My business partner and cursed daughter, Beth Ann, asked me to write an “about me” section for this website. I’m not sure she understands the torturous nature of this request for someone like me, the third documented sufferer of Post-Traumatic Amnesia and Impulsive Gamification (PTAIG) disorder in medical history. I already spend each and every day lost in the empty sinkhole of my own mind, clawing through my hippocampus for scraps of memory that never appear. How can someone with no understanding of the man he used to be possibly complete such an endeavor? This autobiographical assignment may be the most cruel, unusual, and insulting request ever asked of me. But then again, how would I know?
These days, all I have are games. Whenever I reach for a memory, my words emerge as game. When I tried to remember the face of my first wife, a gallerist named Marilyn, I spontaneously created “The Latest Exhibition” – a game mixing images of her beloved paintings with my own out-of-context, oft-offensive phrases. Then, when I tried to recall anything about Marilyn’s dismemberment by a pack of rabid coyotes on an amusement park carousal, the game “Fantastic Land,” a litigious journey through ramshackle carnival rides, emerged.
And it seems that my present is just as afflicted as my past - every aspect of my current, excruciatingly mundane life spawns a card, role-playing, or board game. I try to admire local graffiti and become obsessed with how a player might complete a mural before arrest. I attempt to cross the street during a marathon, and as my body is tossed about like cabbage at a bunny farm, I impulsively develop a game about escaping the same scenario. I blissfully enter a bodega for a cold can of milk and leave with a full-fledged pitch about stealing the establishment’s cat. I think in games, I speak in games, I dream in games. I live in a hellish prison of games. I cannot even take a shit without inventing a game about it.
So, if you are looking for someone who can help you create a game, please, I beg of you - look no further. Chances are that I have already created the game you seek, and if not, a one-word prompt will inevitably spark an existential breakdown that leads to an insanely lucrative idea.
But if you want to know who I am, don’t read this silly diatribe demanded by my evil witch of a daughter; instead, play my games. Each game gives me an opportunity to meditate on this mysterious, sexy man known as Boring Billy and brings me one step closer to understanding my insatiable desire for Spice Girls’ music and why my closet is full of Jamiroquai hats. My games, it seems, are truest homage to my life: the invisible terrors of its past, the punishing banality of its present, and the dream of what lies ahead. I make these games for all of you, but mostly, I make them for myself.