What's life without a little risk?

When I was little, my best friend Jacob and I divided our "games" into two styles, which we termed "As We're The Guys" and "As They're The Guys."

In the former, we would take on pretend roles for ourselves. We would become explorers in Jurassic Park, the command crew of the fictional USS Merteer in Star Trek, or (in one of our most creative developments) two avatars trapped in a virtual video game world, where the rules were about as well-developed as those of CalvinBall. (We once actually tried to play CalvinBall; this resulted in much resentment, and probably a fist fight.)

The latter style involved the use of Action Figures, usually either Lego or Star Trek. We would take turns choosing which characters we would control and represent, as if picking Kickball teams, and would work together to construct an exciting story. I also once referred to video games--an element conspicuously absent from my childhood, and conspicuously present in my adolescence and (pseudo) adulthood--as falling in to the "As They're The Guys" category. Since even girls had me beat in ownership of Sega and Nintendo products, I would always want to play video games at my friends' houses, and they would always want to do something else.

It should be obvious that our adventures As We're The Guys carried significantly more physical risk than our games As They're The Guys, whether from falling out of trees or from good-natured play turning into a brawl. Jacob's dad was particularly furious when he caught us playing "Cowboy Shootout" in the garage by throwing actual live bullets at each other. "Those could have exploded!" he shouted, and for the next several hours I had a mental image of their garage erupting in a giant fireball.

Though we may have risked more broken limbs in our exploits As We're The Guys, it was while playing with action figures that we put our eternal souls on the line. As we oversaw an episode of Star Trek As They're The Guys, the Enterprise (since our action figures were Picard, Riker, et al., they crewed the Enterprise, not the Merteer) was boarded by a band of particularly dangerous pirate-like villains. Some character--I forget who--said something like "Oh God," or "Thank God," to which the boss villain responded, "We don't believe in God. We believe in Satan." Yes, as atheism, Moral Therapeutic Deism, and plain hypocrisy were foreign concepts to us, it made perfect sense that good people followed God, and bad people followed Satan.

As someone who would go on to be a writer, actor, and habitual devil's advocate, I had no complaint with this expression of a "bad" viewpoint. Jacob, however, immediately stopped the game and, speaking aloud, reassured God, "We don't believe that, we're just talking for the bad guys in the game."

"God knows," I told him.