Mar
4
Electronic Kitchen Tables
Filed Under Games
Over the winter, I played in a Warmachine miniatures league. This was all part of my return to the fantasy gaming of my adolescence that began with a trip to GenCon last summer. It was fun and challenging. And humbling.
Aside from my crushing defeats, I was most surprised with the changes technology has brought to the gaming table. Part of this league involved writing battle reports for the online forum. I’ve never been much of a forum guy, but I enjoyed this. It was fun to write up my stunning and humiliating losses each week. And once I was on the forum, I found myself drawn into lively discussions. (It’s always good to know a guy is not alone in having his ass handed to him.) So, even though this game has been largely a solitary endeavor for me, I still find myself part of a social community.
Fantasy gaming is a fringe activity in any incarnation. Maybe it’s a skirmish miniatures game. Maybe it’s old school twenty-sided Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe it’s a furry-theme live action role playing game. No matter your fancy, there’s probably a game written precisely for you. This is what I truly love about this world. There’s a freedom in these games, a sense of exploration. But the drawback is that an already small community is subdivided into much smaller groups. Aside from GenCon, it may be difficult to find a group of six people in your town who wants to join your weekly Vampires and Werewolves simulation.
In my fifteen year absence from fantasy, it seems the Internet helped smooth out some of the time and space issues facing gaming. You can find an active message board and cluster of blogs spinning around any game, giving game devotees a sense of community. And this sense of community is a large part of fantasy gaming.
But technology also threatens to kill off the industry entirely. Namely, I think you’ll find a lot more people playing video games than D&D on any given weekend. Think about it. It’s much easier to log on for multiplayer online action than to meet in someone’s basement every week. But you lose a lot of the novelty,too. Maybe I’m stuck in 1985, but even with a game like World of Warcraft, where the guild system yields a high level of social interaction, the experience is not the same as running an adventure face to face. Playing a role to solve problems requires a lot more thought than equipping the right sword for a hack and slash. This isn’t even to mention the effort involved to create an adventure from scratch.
Wizards of the Coast, the producers of D&D, are working to bridge this gap a bit. And not without controversy. Wizards is going to release the 4th edition of D&D this year. This edition promises not only sweeping rule changes, but also a focus on online content. Namely, the company has shuttered the long running Dungeon and Dragon magazines, moving the content online. The company is also working on a virtual gaming table that will allow people around the world to run and play in campaigns. For a fee, of course.
There is a lot of controversy over this, especially from die-hard D&D players. Complaints range from dilution of rules to requiring monthly fees for a game that has been free for thirty years. While not every player likes these changes, I think it’s interesting to think about this move by Wizards of the Coast in light of the entire industry.
I’m interested to see how technology will change this. Will the 4th edition make D&D more competitive against video games? I hope so. And I hope other game makers follow suit to shift the paradigm of fantasy gaming. We have enough kids sitting plugging into a video game console for a little passive entertainment. I think they deserve something a little better, something that will teach them a little more about the world.
At a minimum, maybe writing up battle reports will improve their writing skills a bit.
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