Last evening, some gamer buddies and I met at a Stockholm pub.
An unfamiliar forty-something man approached our table and asked me: “Are you Anders Blixt?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, shook my hand and walked away.
Such encounters happen rarely, but to me they are diamonds.
I have designed role-playing games for more than forty years. It’s a mundane and solitary profession: I spend hours in front my computer trying to turn my visions into gameable texts. All the action, so to say, takes place at a closed screening inside my mind. When my part of a product is complete, after much commenting by others and many revisions by me, I hand it over to the layout artist. With some trepidation, I assure you. I may be a veteran designer, but I still write occasional duds.
Creating role-playing games has not enriched my bank account. Nowadays I am retired with a state pension that pays my bills. Earlier I had to do muggle jobs. But my writing games has enriched the lives of thousands of people. Many times, I have heard comments like: “My adolescence was miserable, but your games made me endure it.”
These days, when I am in the Indian summer of my life, I look at what joy my toil has kindled and I feel contented. I have used my talents and endurance to encourage and strengthen others. That’s what counts. Or to paraphrase the Norse poem Hávámal: “We are all mortal, but our deeds will be remembered.”
Deyr fé,
deyja frændr,
deyr sjalfr it sama,
ek veit einn,
at aldrei deyr:
dómr um dauðan hvern.
The Dream Forge 