For a good 10-year period from my mid-teens onwards, I was heavily into play-by-mail (PBM) gaming, a postal form of role-playing in which player and GM exchanged written 'turns' by good ol' fashioned snail mail. At its best, this was a wonderful hybrid of role-playing and creative writing (in fact, there was a move to rename it 'interactive fiction', particularly with the rise of email). As well as drooling, Pavlov-fashion, at the sound of the letter-box, I used to write for Flagship, the main hobby 'zine, attend conventions and spend hours on the 'phone to people with strange names and even stranger personalities.
One thing that used to intrigue me was people's tendency to enjoy playing the same character types again and again. In particular, I was interested in what motivated those people who always played characters of the opposite gender to their own. In some cases, this seemed to be a transparent ploy to get the GM to write dodgy 'adult' wish-fulfilment pap: busty blonde 'lesbian' warrior-women were, it seemed, a recurring motif.
Some people, however (and, inevitably, I can only think of males), seemed to choose opposite-gender characters for more complex reasons. By way of example, let me tell you about Ken...
I first encountered Ken in one of the long-running grandaddies of PBM, a straightforward swords 'n' sorcery romp called Saturnalia. I was playing *cringe* a naive young paladin-type (with leather armour and an increasing penchant for bondage); Ken was playing an abnormally intelligent 18-year-old thief with a petite build, long flowing hair and a name ending in 'a'. We both had extremely fast turnaround (the speed at which we replied to individual turns), so engaged in some mutual adventuring. It turned out he had at least three other Saturnalia PCs, of different professions, but all abnormally intelligent late-teens females with petite builds, long flowing hair and names ending in 'a'.
The PBM scene was relatively small, and many of us corresponded even outwith gaming turns. I had characters in a lot of role-playing PBMs, but it turned out Ken played even more: whether the genre was fantasy, space opera, cyberpunk, vampire, he maintained at least one PC in each game - and, you guessed it, every single one was an abnormally intelligent late-teens female with a petite build, long flowing hair and a name ending in 'a'.
Ken and I took to 'phoning each other, to coordinate specific actions in this or that game. To the pisstaking amusement of my fellow medical student flatmates, he would introduce himself as "Ken from Cybernation" or somesuch, in his comedically Croydon accent. It turned out he was a fortysomething IT worker, single, who really really liked PBM, and seemed to spend all his time creating and writing for a vast array of characters, all of which were abnormally intelligent, blah blah fishcakes.
Eventually, I attended one of the monthly London PMB meets, in a dank, depressing pub in a railway station somewhere, commuting down from, for fuck's sake, Aberdeen. Met a whole load of interesting-in-differently-geeky-ways people, including Ken, who looked and dressed like an accountant who hadn't quite made the grade: six foot five, rake-thin, incongruously almost-smart shirt and tie, waistcoat and anorak, glasses, side-parting. Seemed a nice enough guy if a little overexcitable. Incontrovertibly straight, he lived with his mother.
I used to attend these pubmeets every two, three months. During one such gap, Ken mentioned he'd got a new girlfriend (a surprise, as I hadn't imagined there had been an old girlfriend) called Antonia. Antonia was apparently quite the '80s club kid, and knew Boy George, Mark Moore, etc., etc. So far so Odd Couple. Anyway, Ken bragged that she'd helped him change his 'look', and the next time I saw him I wouldn't recognise him.
He wasn't kidding. In the space of four or five months, he'd gone from Failed Accountant Living With Mum to Short-Sighted Goth-Woman's Michael Hutchence. He was squeezed into perilously tight black leather trousers and matching waistcoat, floppy black poet shirt, Cuban heels, loooads of silver jewellery; his hair had grown out to past-the-collar length, and he'd subsituted contact lenses for his glasses. Antonia was a striking looking black girl from Sarf Lahndahn, not unreminiscent of Grace Jones, almost as tall as Ken. Loud, but nice.
More to the point, Ken had moved out of his mother's place, into a shared flat with Antonia ("Mum wasn't happy"). I visited a couple of times, once to see a Morrissey gig in Croydon, once because Ken offered to take me to Heaven (I'd just come out as gay, and wanted to see the superclub - an anticlimax). Despite successfully snagging himself a woman (making him the envy of many of his fellow geeks), Ken's PBMing continued unabated. One room of his flat was lined with bookshelves crammed with full box files, as well as numerous rather crappy drawings of curvy females with long flowing hair. By this stage, Ken's own hair was long and flowing, and taken to wearing stilletto-heeled thigh-boots a la Sigue Sigue Sputnik.
The night we went to Heaven must've been only a year or so after my father died. I was talking about how that had been the impetus for my reevaluating my sexuality and deciding to come out. I remember Ken muttered something along the lines of, "yeah, there's stuff I should look at too" - but, to my subsequent regret, I never probed further.
A couple of months later, and he was apparently falling out more and more frequently with Antonia. A couple of months after that, I 'phoned him and an unfamiliar voice, his brother, asked who I was, then told me Ken was dead. No details. Talking with a few other PBMers, it transpired that Ken had taken an overdose of analgesics. No-one was very clear whether this was deliberate or accidental (he had back problems, had a load of painkillers in the house, and drank moderately heavily).
I'm still undecided about the overdose, but I do think Ken was transsexual, and I think his primary mode of living as a female was through PBM - and, latterly (and perhaps paradoxically), gaining the confidence to begin dressing in unisex style through gaining a girlfriend. After his death, I became aware of other males who consistently played female characters, and wondered how many people use gaming - particularly remote forms of gaming - as an arena for the expression of and experimentation with gender. In many ways, PBM could be seen as the forerunner of MUDs and even message-boards...
Anyone come across this? Thoughts? |
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