Breaking the Fifth Wall

This post is going to be very personal. I think it’s important to express my experience and views as openly as possible so that my audience can know the real me.

 My name is Cavin DeJordy, and I am a gamer. My life has been a tumultuous one, to say the least. I have lived from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, to Groton, Connecticut, and eight other locations all around the United States. I have been married, divorced, in the military, worked in an office, a warehouse, at a restaurant, in retail, and am well on my way to a business degree in Entrepreneurship from the University of Cincinnati. I have spent countless hours sitting in hobby stores, running or playing in games, and questioning the shop's owners, employees, and customers. Every day I try to make time to learn about a new game, or dig deeper in to a complex one. I have lived in many worlds, from MMO, to Virtual World, to only those which exist in my mind and the minds of my Players and Game Masters. I have done all this with one singular purpose: to know the experience of as diverse a swath of humanity as I possibly can so I can, in turn, produce and direct compelling entertainment experiences and design the systems needed to support those experiences.

From all this travel, networking, inquiry, and analysis I have determined some universal truth. We all share a plane of existence, but not two of us live in the same world. We can all use our senses to reach out and experience our shared space, but our observation of those spaces is shaped by our past experiences, which not even the most identical of us share completely. Once I came to this realization, my whole life changed.

When I was growing up, I wanted everyone to be like me. As a kid who enjoyed reading encyclopedias, constructing things out of building toys, doing statistical analysis, mastering web research, and crafting role-playing modules, that wasn’t necessarily a realistic expectation. Once I learned to accept and study other people instead of trying to convert them, I have been a much happier and open-minded person.

To me, creativity has no bounds. I analyze multimedia games, board games, RPGs, collectible games, and other forms of art with an open, inquisitive mind. My goal is to revolutionize the way we all play, compete, and collaborate, and I will participate in any playtest, panel, discussion, or observation thrown my way. The Fifth Wall, in my opinion, is the wall that separates creative people from each other, and I am to provide the wrecking ball that opens a floodgate of art on to the status quo of the gaming community at large.

So here I stand, at the table of the Internet, ready to make a business out of supporting creativity, performance, and community interaction. In future posts I’ll be talking about Stronghold, my embryonic business, and my experiences with real life and online gaming communities. I look forward to feedback and collaboration in the future with some of the more established bloggers and Internet personalities. Also, if you live in the Cincinnati area and are interested in forming or allowing me to join your semi-monthly or monthly gaming group, be sure to contact me. If you would like to share your own story, please respond to this post and I will not hesitate to break the ice.

Gamers United!

Cavin “Pox” DeJordy