Friday - Random Gaming thoughts

Friday I'll talk about games, this will be anything from D and D stories, to random thoughts on gaming culture, to video games I like, today I am burned out from playing Magic for the last four hours so I I might be a little loopy, but I want to talk about what brings people into social games like D and D, the good and the bad.

Running the store, we had two weekly RPGs: D and D encounters, which happened on Wednesdays and was run by Whitney, and Pathfinder Society, which took place on Thursday and was run by Ash, of the two, Pathfinder tended to be more popular, and we attracted mostly decent folk, but as with most groups, there is always one guy... this guy. We called him stinky, because he was stinky, I think he was in his 50s and didn't know how to wash. He had numerous other problems, cheating, not paying attention to the DM, just sorta being irritating to everyone in the store, whether or not they were playing Pathfinder or trying to mind their own business, but the odor issue was why we finally asked him not to come back.

I felt bad about it, gaming weekly was clearly the high point of his week, I don't know if he had anything else to look forward to. But it was hurting the store to have him there, people were literally not coming in because he smelled so bad, and after warning him he never managed to clean up his act.

He may have had a legitimate mental illness, but there are many out there who are just as much trouble, and they can linger in a group for much longer than one would think. There is a cool article that talk about these topics called Geek Social Fallacies, and I think it is pretty accurate, especially for the older members of our hobby, and by that I mean people who started playing in the early 90s or earlier when it was still a "nerd thing". Time was if you were an awkward kid, the gaming group may have been the only group of people to not treat you like shit. The fantasy world you played in every Friday would be the only way to escape from your daily life, and the others in that group often had the exact same problem, they understood you in ways no one else could, and that support group didn't care if you were weird or smelly... for the most part.


For most people in this position, gaming was a great escape and the healthiest social interactions they had, but what happened to one of these groups that attracted someone who really was a problem? Who needed more help than 4-5 similarly awkward strangers could provide? Well for the most part they continued to be accepted anyway, in some ways this is admirable, but the root cause of the acceptance was often fear, people worried that if they complained about someone and asked them to not come back, it meant that others could ask it of them, and they didn't want to open that door, so they convinced themselves that remaining quiet and not criticizing was the right thing to do. But healthy criticism is the only thing that actually helps people change, and when no one calls you out when you are annoying or disruptive, or gross, you get full grown men like Stinky who were never told by anyone they respect that what they are doing is wrong.

Honestly it is probably a contributor to how geek culture was, and continues to be, insular and sexist. Though it is changing, the old guard perceives gaming as "theirs" they were ignored by the women and "cool" kids back in the day, so they view them with disdain and if we are honest, fear. Rather than look at it as the hobby they like is being accepted into the mainstream, and them with it, they are seeing it as the mainstream is trying to take their hobby away from them, which would be ridiculous, except they are also discovering more and more people who are unwilling to spend four hours trapped in a basement with someone who hasn't showered for a week, and women are playing more too, and beginning to speak up when sexist jokes are spoken at the table, an they want to play the barbarian, or the wizard, and aren't particularly interested in being their love interest, on the table or off of it.

But rather than changing, accepting the new and rejoicing in the fact that they have the unprecedented ability to welcome new people into their hobby, to help them explore the worlds they have spent the last several decades creating and discover new adventures, they retreat back into the insularity that once was what protected them, but now it isn't doing that, it is strangling them and the poisons they release as they die kill gaming groups and drive people away from the hobby.

For the most part these people aren't evil per se, or even mean spirited, but they are harmful to the hobby that is bigger than them now, gaming is the mainstream, they won and they don't even know it.