J. Hunter Johnson

Everybody needs a geek from time to time, and I am a serial geek. That’s rather like a serial collector, except I have less obvious clutter—the clutter is now mental.

I was first a math geek, which morphed easily into a computer geek, with Apple IIe at school and Commodore 64 at home. Those circles enabled my gaming geekery, starting with D&D and other TSR games in high school, and branching out to GURPS in college. I got a “geek of all things” degree in college; the USC Honors College calls it a Baccalaureus Artium et Scientiae. While I was in college, Usenet enabled my GURPS geek cred to catch the attention of Steve Jackson Games.

That lead to a broadening of my gaming geekdom, from GURPS to the sophisticated board games catching on here from Germany, to Magic: The Gathering, to Cheapass Games, to Advanced Squad Leader, to a bunch more. Through that arc I was also able to write a couple of GURPS books, translate some rulebooks from the German for Mayfair Games, playtest or review a myriad of good and bad games, and design both the Bruno! expansion for Button Men and also gToons, a collectible card game for virtual play on CartoonNetwork.com.

While still active with gaming (my con services are most recently in the service of World Wise Imports / Iello Games), I continued to build on my computer skills, and those are my real depth, although it yields much fewer name-dropping opportunities. Most of the stuff I feel I can make interesting from this side should end up in blog posts. Database, Perl, and the-care-and-feeding-of-computer-geeks stuff, I expect.

Along the way, I’ve also delved into comic books, English grammar, classical music, Protestant theology, WWII history, wine, genealogy, local food, beer, social media, Dayton’s professional networks, hiking, and tech gadgets. While I’ve gotten riveted to the occasional computer or console game, I don’t think I’ve really gone geek with video gaming; my wife may dispute that claim.

And of course I read constantly, but paling in comparison to the people I consider book geeks.

You can read more about me on Wikipedia, or if you can read French, GROG.

—jhunterj