The gaming conundrum
As an addendum to that last post… I miss role-playing. Maybe I shouldn’t, because it doesn’t bring out the best in me, in a lot of ways. But at its best, it always lights up parts of my brain I rarely use otherwise.
Over the years, the pool of people I game with has gotten whittled away. Many of them moved out of the area. The rest of them got jobs and got busy and got hard to schedule and understandably protective of their free time. The last remnants of my gaming crew get off work much earlier than I do, so they start games on weeknights at a time when I’m still in the office. And we can’t often game on weekends, because everybody’s busy with something else, me included. It doesn’t help that the big games my friends are into are D&D 4.0, which is crunchy past my ability to remember rules - I am never going to be a casual stat-head - and Exalted, which I have a strong personal aversion to.
So gaming for me has dropped from an obsessive hobby to an occasional hobby to a barely even occasional hobby. And frankly, I’d mostly stopped thinking about it. Playing a couple of interesting games at a con earlier this year reminded me what I like about good RPG, so I recently tried to run a game of my own. But of my four chosen players, one spent most of the year out of town and unavailable, and one professes vast interest in the game every month or so but then entirely disappears and responds to no attempts at contact. I tried starting up the game with two players, but one was disengaged with the setting and was openly, aggressively rude about it, and the other was perfect in every way but suddenly got caught up in vastly time-eating familial obligations.
So I’m back to the usual square one, which is “I need to meet some new gamers,” which is pretty much a mantra I’ve been chanting - along with all the other gamers I know - since college. The problem is that I need to meet new gamers like me, which is to say people who are more into role-play than into systems-crunching and munchkining up rule-sets. And in my experience, those people don’t spend all that much time hanging around gaming stores or gamer-seeks-gamer websites. Like me, they’re at home being shy and playing with the same small group they’ve played with since college and wondering where all the other gamers are. I’m sure they’re findable somehow, it just takes an effort. And probably two weeks from now I’ll be caught up in something else and will have forgotten what I like so much about gaming in the first place. The Finding New Gamers project may well just go back on the Stuff I'd Do If I Had Time list. At least until the summer is over. No matter how much I enjoy gaming, I'd rather be swimming outdoors while that's still possible.
Over the years, the pool of people I game with has gotten whittled away. Many of them moved out of the area. The rest of them got jobs and got busy and got hard to schedule and understandably protective of their free time. The last remnants of my gaming crew get off work much earlier than I do, so they start games on weeknights at a time when I’m still in the office. And we can’t often game on weekends, because everybody’s busy with something else, me included. It doesn’t help that the big games my friends are into are D&D 4.0, which is crunchy past my ability to remember rules - I am never going to be a casual stat-head - and Exalted, which I have a strong personal aversion to.
So gaming for me has dropped from an obsessive hobby to an occasional hobby to a barely even occasional hobby. And frankly, I’d mostly stopped thinking about it. Playing a couple of interesting games at a con earlier this year reminded me what I like about good RPG, so I recently tried to run a game of my own. But of my four chosen players, one spent most of the year out of town and unavailable, and one professes vast interest in the game every month or so but then entirely disappears and responds to no attempts at contact. I tried starting up the game with two players, but one was disengaged with the setting and was openly, aggressively rude about it, and the other was perfect in every way but suddenly got caught up in vastly time-eating familial obligations.
So I’m back to the usual square one, which is “I need to meet some new gamers,” which is pretty much a mantra I’ve been chanting - along with all the other gamers I know - since college. The problem is that I need to meet new gamers like me, which is to say people who are more into role-play than into systems-crunching and munchkining up rule-sets. And in my experience, those people don’t spend all that much time hanging around gaming stores or gamer-seeks-gamer websites. Like me, they’re at home being shy and playing with the same small group they’ve played with since college and wondering where all the other gamers are. I’m sure they’re findable somehow, it just takes an effort. And probably two weeks from now I’ll be caught up in something else and will have forgotten what I like so much about gaming in the first place. The Finding New Gamers project may well just go back on the Stuff I'd Do If I Had Time list. At least until the summer is over. No matter how much I enjoy gaming, I'd rather be swimming outdoors while that's still possible.