Mar
4
Electronic Kitchen Tables
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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.
Jan
24
The Games We Play
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At some point, around sixteen years old, I chose a path, a path away from twenty-sided dice and angry orcs. Sixteen years later, at 9am one Saturday morning, I found myself sitting around a table at GenCon Indy playing a Dual Dungeon Duel.
Likewise, after years of relative video game disinterest, I found myself last week on the receiving end of an ass whipping via Wii Sports Boxing from my loving wife.
I’m not one to believe in fate. Our lives take wandering paths via everyday decisions. For instance, not studying for a Calculus 2 exam my freshman year has ended up with me sitting at this table writing these words. Had I done a little better on that test, I may not have switched schools. Had I not switched schools, I would not have made the friends who pointed me toward my first real job. Had I not taken the first job, I would not have moved to the second job where I met my wife. On so on. Because small decisions (at the time) yield much larger impacts in our lives, it’s hard for me to swallow that I am part of some great cosmic chain spinning toward my True Destiny.
After all, what kind of cosmic chain would want me to spend time painting tiny pewter steampunk miniatures?
When it first recurred, I was a little ashamed of my proclivity for geekiness. Mind you, this was before Sci Fi became cool again via Lost and Heroes. I thought of my hobbies and interests as childish, immature. Decidedly unmanly.
Slowly, I understood that my hobbies weren’t rooted in the cosmos, but rather in cultural artifact. They say a man’s physical condition in his twenties directly impacts his health in his forties. The theory is that our body somehow takes a benchmark in our youth that influences, how it will age. (Full disclosure: I am not a doctor. I don’t have any doctor friends or neighbors, either. It’s not that kind of neighborhood.) I think our minds take a similar snapshot of interests at a more innocent time, and this snapshot determines our hobbies at a later time.
So what was I doing at 14? Playing Dungeons and Dragons and Nintendo. What am I doing at 33? Playing Dungeons and Dragons and Nintendo.
This is not to say I’m about to start sneaking beers after halftime at the football game, but some things stick with us. Other hobbies, such as hiking and camping, I can trace directly to my days as a Boy Scout.
I think of my father and his friends who have much more manly pursuits involving old cars. My dad came age in the Days of Sheer Unadulterated Horsepower, so it follows that he would spend his time working on and showing off cars. I’d like to see demographic trending data on hobby participants. Who is building model railroads? Who is restoring old cars? Do these hobbies wax and wane over time, or simply disappear altogether?
Perhaps it’s self-preservation. We start aging and our minds kick us back to the things we liked to do in youth. We forget about the intervening years and tolls on our failing bodies.
It’s hard to think about getting old when you are busy fighting off a band of angry orcs.
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