It is a reoccurring thought; how did I get here? Unlike most who lived through its inception in 1974, perhaps grew up in and around gaming stores or were maybe ushered in by a friend or family member; how did I come to implicate myself in what is very much niche hobby, particularly one enshrouded in such secrecy? This post will be the symbolic nail in the coffin of my subsequent shift in gamer identity and the subsequent mass deliberation of how to spend my 'me' time. Apologies for the length.
As a teenager I was never exposed to D&D. I never found myself within a games store more than a handful of times, the RPG section of which are often obscured from vision by curtains or hidden in the basement. Given the fact that the role-playing section is hidden away like the 'porn' department of a DVD shop, I find it easy to forgive my own adolescent ignorance. I had several run ins with Games Workshop stores and products, but they never seemed to hold my interest or translated in appropriate terms, my wallet. Going in to a GW always felt more like being fleeced by salesman than having a fun day out and this was when I was 13 or 14 years old.
My young life in respects to gaming took form in online virtual worlds, most notably Sosaria and Ultima Online. Not since my ten or so years of Ultima had I been able to rekindle the accessibilty or availability of a tangible fantasy world. As limited or empty as it may be as a standalone game and social tool, it remains one of the best. Given my relative successes and addiction to UO, taking myself as a gamer heavily implicated in the MMORPG genre I accordingly fancied myself as largely involved in that particular movement and followed it through a wealth of titles to it's fruition in Blizzard's World of Warcraft. WoW's launch and the subsequent months would rival the best there may ever be in online gaming and were exciting times, but short lived. The dawning of a weak yet growing maturity did far from kill gaming for me, but simply reiterated my reason d'etre for participating in online video games and made it clear to me that those goals had long been absent from anything I had been involved in.
The years which followed may be dubbed the 'grumpy' years, years in which I came to loathe many things within the genre for no other reason than misunderstanding my own disenfranchisement from it. This being the case and to use a poor analogy, if you keep digging, soon enough you'll find yourself digging up and out the other side to pastures new. As if through relentlessly seeking and questioning my own objectivity, I came to start second guessing my own thought processes as if becoming a target of my own twisted bitterness and loathing; what did I discover?
I don't like massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. Not at all.
Spending a large chunk of your youth, energy and passion in a single hobby was to me quite literally a ball and chain on my own progressive thinking. It were as if admitting this new found reality had to be avoided at all costs should I wish to avoid a cataclysmic collapse of identity. It may sound silly to speak of gaming this way, but say you have been an artist for many years and one day realise that you've just grown to hate it? It's a slap in the face of your own inner self image; you were internally wrong about something as personal as your own hobby, an activity of self pleasure, a facet and integral feature of your very existence. Shame on you.
The upside of this is of course both obvious and refreshingly limitless; what to do? I began to look back and extract elements of gaming which I truly enjoyed and sought to find a new activity which shared these features. I began going back to older singleplayer games, RPGs specifically, with a fresh perspective and attention to detail I'd never before applied. Mynameisnotlilly's YouTube channel was a real inspiriation for this and I strongly recommend you check out his videos. I think I've previously said, Let's Play videos are a pet hate of mine, but the creative process in making them, paired with the potential for narrative and storytelling, a great deal is offered in producing a new and exciting perspective for gaming. I intend to put out some Lets Play videos of myself playing Baldur's Gate, incorporating fore mentioned aspects of role-play to which I will keep you all informed as to when and where these will surface.
This new angle was the catalyst to a strong revival in past interest in fantasy fiction (Gemmell, Tolkien, Wolfe) and was coincidentally followed with a timely introduction to a show called I Hit It With My Axe. Zak's show had a profound effect of bursting my 'only social misfits play roleplaying games' bubble. In hindsight, I never really thought that of RPG players, yet given a life time total of perhaps 5 seconds of consideration to the hobby, that preconception is a common assumption of those who never posed themselves the question. I also find it somewhat ironic that Zak's show would have the effect of making me consider the reality that normal people play D&D, when in fact his show is about playing D&D with perhaps the least likely group; strippers & porn stars. Following Zak's series and his unique take on playing old school Dungeons & Dragons (I highly recommend his city running kit Vornheim), I dived head first into the blogging community, more specifically those involved in the Old School Renaissance (revival of original or 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons). I learnt very quickly that D&D was not another dislocated wargame or odd hobby, it was many wonderful things.
Exit D&D prejudices, enter uncontrollable excitement. I guess I should explain what the game means to me as, much like my uninformed self, I failed to grasp precisely what D&D and roleplaying games were about. I enjoy fantasy fiction, enormously. Literature, film and video games offers large windows into these worlds and are widely accepted as the delivery systems for this genre of entertainment. Role-playing games simply offer a medium to which one may apply their imagination to tangibly interact with these worlds, including the potential to engage in the creative process of designing, crafting and giving life to such settings. A close friend recently made fun of me asking if I wanted to be a wizard (a mage irl? where did he get that idea!); the question warranted no answer, but were I to answer I would say "of course not"...but do I want to be engaged in a shared creative process of developing an original story in a rich fantasy setting which blows our collective mind? Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings was epic, I just want more. That is the core of 'my' hobby and that is failing to mention the quality of the written fiction, art and aesthetically stunning books available, not to mention all the other toys and shineys.
In hindsight I still look back and think 'How the hell did I become a role-player?'. The information above offers quite clear indicators that I might enjoy the hobby, yet it still strikes me as odd as I found myself gorging myself on publications and relevant blogs, perhaps before I even knew what it was I was exactly getting into. It simply appealed to me on so many levels that I'd made the jump before I had even seen where I was going to land. The online community for the hobby, be it YouTube, forums, blogs or indie writers/publishers, is phenomenal. I have been welcomed in many circles to what strikes me as a warm and welcoming community of gamers and it certainly feels a lot like home.
I've ticked a box on my personal check-list of 'Things I Should Know About Me', lets hope I was right this time!
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