Back when I was first gaming, in the early 80s, there were a fair number of gamers. Not too many, but they were around. When you met them, you knew you found someone with at least an overlap in interest. I didn't necessarily connect up with them all, but they were special. I still remember a teacher of mine gloating about how he killed off his brother and his brother's friends party with a pack of halflings (!). I always remembered him as a killer GM, but also a good teacher who taught me how stocks worked and probably who is direct-line responsible for me learning how to invest.
As the years went on, I generally stopped discussing my hobby with others. Very few, if any, people played the games I played. For a long time, gaming was synonymous with being on the outside, socially. I rarely played with people I met who gamed but I did talk to them about it, even as shy as I could be as a younger person.
Now, I still have that habit. Yet I'm surrounded by gamers. Our sub-group supervisor at work? She players D&D, presumably 5th edition, with her son and her husband, and others. My BJJ buddys' kids, who I generally submit with triangle chokes and Kimura armbars? They play D&D. Heck, they missed open mat the other day because they had a D&D game. I noted that I game on days not conducive to rolling on the mats.
They're not the only people I work with, roll with, or otherwise interact with that game. It's become just a generic hobby. I still hold tightly onto my friends I gamed with them it wasn't just a normal hobby.
I don't have any deep point here. Just a thing to note. People I know for no reason to do with gaming ask me about gaming, or just casually mention playing D&D. It's a different world than the one I grew up in. For the better in my opinion. But it's different regardless of how I feel about it.
This more or less matches my experience. In the '80s we could identify tentatively other gamers (as opposed to the many guys [almost always guys] who had merely tried D&D and decided not to continue) through tell-tale signs. Then you'd put out a subtle feeler and might receive acknowledgement: yes, I play RPGs, too. It was regarded as an antisocial activity with an edge of deviance, risky to reveal.
ReplyDeleteNow my kids' schoolteachers are occasionally gamers who tell their students about their games. My kids know of many other groups of kids who play D&D. Some of my daughter's friends in her activities (which are in no way game-related) have D&D games they play: groups of girls, which I'd never heard of once in the '80s. I have heard of several distinct D&D groups in my kids' school in their grade alone. The parents of my son's friends are grateful that my son runs his game because it keeps them off of video games and YouTube and puts them in a social situation. What was once seen as antisocial is now regarded as sociable in a positive way.
It's a different world, for sure. Forty years and the internet will do that, I guess.
It's become commonplace. I still have to explain it to some people who haven't heard of TTRPGs, if I'm inclined to do so . . . but the ones who know about it generally say, "cool!"
DeleteIt's, oddly, a change back to when I first started playing, in a way. Then it was trendy and popular and exciting, and everyone was playing it seemed. We had multiple gaming groups running at the same time in elementary school. A few years on, there was just a handful of uncool holdouts. It's back to being everywhere . . .
You're lucky. It's still very rare where I live. Among the people I live around.
ReplyDelete"Oh, you game, too? I'm probably not going to say anything about that anymore."
ReplyDeleteDitto, but for very different reasons. I don't mind talking gaming, like rules, genres, stuff like that. But I kept running "That Person". You know the one, who once they get a hint you game can't shut up about their awesome character and all it's awesome adventures and how it toppled the political structure of what-sit, and blah-blah-blah.
I hate that stuff with as hot a passion as I hate people who tell me every niggling detail about movies or shows I want to watch, or books I want to read, but haven't yet.
Don't ruin the plot of movies and don't tell me all the details of your PC's adventures in a game //I wasn't in//.
Now, you want to catch me up on a game I'm in but have missed stuff in? Or reminisce with me about games we've played together? Sure, let's do it.
But I absolutely do not want to hear about your Character's drow S.O. nor how you undercut the monarchy with a spoon and a portable hole. I don't care.