Welcome! This website is a living book of my growth and development. Each decade, shown in reverse chronological order below, represents a new chapter in my life containing new adventures, experiences, and knowledge gained.
2020s
Life Is a Role-Playing Game
By 2020, I realized that my past experiences in building communities online around video games (such as MMORPGs like World of Warcraft) were helping me to use role-playing games and Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as playful allegories to understand growth and development in life, thus allowing me to integrate everything I had learnt in my life in a transdisciplinary way. I’m now in the process of articulating this allegorical framework, so that I can help others “level up” and hopefully make it my primary work for the rest of my life. Strangely enough, my life is beginning to feel like it has come full circle now. I’ve come from playing within imaginary worlds to imagining a much more playful world(view).
2010s
Creativity / Vertical Development
By 2010, many companies were talking about the future of work and a few were even embodying aspects of it. However the question of how to get to this future in the present lead my research into understanding adult growth and development, as well as the creative transformations that occur from it. While I continued to do odd jobs and freelance web work, my amazing experiences on Google+ made me realize that many people, including myself, wanted to transition into doing work that would actually help transform work and society as a whole.
2000s
Work Isn’t Working / The Future of Work
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2001, I seriously began to question the conventional concept of work, leading me on a quest to research a newer way of working. Finding work was extremely difficult at this time, so I took odd jobs and began doing freelance web work. After working remotely for Squarespace for a short time, I shifted to doing freelance work for customers within its community.
1990s
Web / Communities / Culture
After meeting my wife in 1990, I worked for the federal government for a while but became fascinated with the potential possibilities of the Web, especially for remote work. By the mid 1990s, I was playing computer games across the Internet and building communities online around these games, often creating positive cultures within them compared to others communities. By the late 1990s, this personal passion evolved into professional work, building community hubs for some of the largest video game publishers at the time, like Sierra, Activision, and Konami.
1980s
Computers
Some of my most memorable moments in high school were playing role-playing games like Dungeons & Dungeons with my friends. However, computers soon became my primary interest, so much so that after graduating high school in 1983, I attempted going to university and later a community college but both never panned out. Content with playing games and creating music on my Atari 520ST computer, I eventually worked alongside my sister in the provincial government as a records clerk before finally moving to Vancouver, BC in 1988.
1970s
Gaming
While I loved growing up on an acreage outside Edmonton and exploring the fields around it with my dog, I soon found a way to begin exploring with my mind. The sci-fi Star Wars movies, as well as books like the Lord of the Rings, got my imagination seriously going, so when I discovered the Dungeon & Dragons role-playing games I was hooked, as it felt like being immersed within your favourite movie or book. Also at the time, my older brother let me play some of the first computer games on the mainframe computers at the University of Alberta and because of my fascination and interest in them, my dad bought me a Radio Shack TRS-80 micro computer. However, due to its limited capabilities, it wasn’t much more than a novelty at the time.
1960s
Nature
Born in Manitoba, I grew up in the wilds of it, as my parents were effectively pioneers at the time. My dad owned his own construction company, helping to carve out and build roads in the northern part of the province, while my mom worked in our cafe / gas station. While I don’t remember much at this young age, I loved growing up immersed in nature, as often our family went camping or canoeing on the many nearby lakes. I do remember our move to our new home and acreage north of Edmonton, Alberta in the late 1960s though, where I got to experience the joys of nature in a whole new way.