How has gaming effected your life?

[Todd Bogenrief]

Have any of you ever lied about your gaming hobby to get a job?  a date? respect?  anything?

,Matt G.

I've been lurking here a while and rarely chime in, but I will this time.

I have found that it is best never to mention gaming when going on a date with someone that doesn't know you very well, or who is not a gamer.  I have gotten some very strange looks if I accidentally mention gaming, so I do often lie about my hobbies when on a date(gaming becomes reading/writing)

At work it's not so bad, all of us programmers here have some strange and diverse hobbies and most of the people I work with have some passing idea of the concept so it's not too big a deal at work.  

Just my .02 dollars

Todd

[Mike Holmes]

Wait, wait, wait, Matt. Gaming didn't make Ralph less able to discuss his hobbies. The society around Ralph makes him less able to discuss his hobbies. But this is no different from the guy who works two cubes down from Ralph who's hobby is bonsai trees. He has exactly the same problem. If he wants to go to a bonsai convention (and I checked such do exist, see here), he's going to have to make up a story as well.

Why do I make the distinction? Well, you're making it sound like we should be ashamed of what we do. That we're bad because we're gamers, and people are right to be bigots. I'm sure you don't mean it that way, but that's how this whole thread is coming off.

Mike

[Le Joueur]

Have any of you ever lied about your gaming hobby to get a job?

I'm also interested in how gaming has effected your life in a good way....

I actually found my way into my favorite social groups upon moving to Minneapolis/St Paul, MN at the University.  I hob-knob with published novelists and former members of Gygax's gaming group because of my hobby and the conventions I've been exposed to.  Eric Wujick [sp] came up to me after a panel I gave about my old gaming model and shook my hand (at the time I had no idea who he was - by name).

I believe I got my current job because I'm pretty open about it; the manager of the department 'next to' the one I was temping for, is also of the conglomeration of socially active groups I ply (I found out I was hired when my agent off-handedly mentioned my contract had been bought out - I hadn't even been offered the job yet).  When she was promoted to Regional Vice President (the 'president' of the region), she offered me the assistant's position.  When she left, I kept the post.

Did I mention I was born under the sign of the trickster?  (My bad luck ended when I left rural Minnesota.)  How's that for 'blowing the curve?'

Fang Langford

[Valamir]

Mike is absolutely right of course, its a society thing, or rather a segment of society thing.  Although it is, I believe, a little more gaming specific than he implies.  I feel quite confident that if my hobby were bonsai trees it would not be a problem at all.  After all that's close enough to gardening to not seem too bizarre to our clientelle and likely having the patience and care to do it would be seen positively.

No gaming has very specific negative connotations to it that most other obscure hobbies don't.  It doesn't help that just this week on a Discovery channel special on demonic possession throughout history that one of the talking heads pointed to Roleplaying Games as opening a doorway for possessions...as evidence he presented demonic artwork found on such classic roleplaying items as Magic the Gathering Cards (I hate clueless people).  I know many of my clients watch the Discovery Channel with relish.  My boss would frown on us losing a client because they suddenly discovered I was a "devil worshipper" and they know that I am because they saw it on TV.  Doesn't matter whether that's fair or not when its a hit to the company's revenue larger than my salary.  Even blood spewing, rat head biting Ozzie is now a mainstream pop icon.  Tech geeks at least have a bit of silicon cool to them.  Not role playing.  

That said, on the whole its been a fantastic choice of hobby.  Matt I agree completely with the benefit I gained with math skills that came from mastering game probabilities.  I've often been praised at my job for having superior oral and written communication skills which I know for certain came more from communicating ideas across a gaming table and writing notebook after notebook full of game text than any English class I had in high school.  I also know a TON of (to me) really fascinating trivia on a wide variety of topics, primarily motivated by my search for cool and realistic background material for my gaming.

On an anecdotal level I once had a client who was a Lt Colonel who was impressed in our opening chit chat that I knew who Clausewicz was, and that I had met the author of one of the DoD papers he had with him (because I hung out with him regularly at the Origins War College).  Knowledge in both cases that was driven initially by gaming motivations.

But as long as my primary source of income is a career which prizes tradition and conformity over individual self expression, I'll play my hobby quite close to the vest.

[John Kim]

Have any of you ever lied about your gaming hobby to get a job?  a date? respect?  anything?

I don't think so, though there have certainly been times when I have avoided mentioning it.  On the date front, though, I have had the opposite experience.  Offhand, I think the majority of my girlfriends have played RPGs, including my wife.  My wife wasn't actively roleplaying but she had done some in the past, and played other stuff like Magic TCG.  I got to know her when I met her at a party (she was a friend of my sister's) and some time later invited her to join the campaign I was running.  Even aside from that, I think RPGs are very important to my social life.  Many of my friends I have met and/or gotten to know through role-playing.

[ThreeGee]

Gaming is life...

[ThreeGee]

Hey all,

But seriously, I have been designing games since I was a very young child. Since I discovered roleplaying in secondary, I have spent more time gaming, studying roleplaying, designing, etc, than just about anything else. That definitely includes class, but might not include tinkering with computers. I have one degree so far and (in better times) marketable skills in several fields, but gaming is the hobby that keeps on giving.

I rarely bother to explain roleplaying to people, unless they ask. Folks my age know what D&D is; everyone else at least understands mystery theatre/improv. I call my hobby game design, which most people interpret as electronic game design, especially considering I my proficiency with computers. I would not say that I am in the closet, but that I prefer not to waste time explaining things over and over. My mother still refers to it as 'that fantasy thing,' in spite of having boys over every week to play huge games of D&D, etc.

Later,
Grant

P.S. On the other hand, I almost never use gaming terminology in normal conversations, but I generally avoid jargon, even among roleplayers, unless I need to convey a technical matter. Too much time spent teching normal people's computers, I guess.

[clehrich]

Valamir wrote:

I know Ron will frown a little at this because he's a proponent of being more open about gaming, but thats because he's in the academic world where people are supposed to be tolerant of diversity, and a bit eccentric.

Sadly, my experience in academia is that RPGs are more strongly associated with "geeks" than elsewhere.  My friends in other professions tell me that so long as they don't mention their hobbies, it seems to be generally accepted that what you do off company time is your own problem (unless you turn out to be a Satanist, of course, as Valamir points out).  In academia, the faculty are simultaneously very aware and very wary of student-type hobbies, and while everyone's supposed to be open and eccentric, they're really only allowed to be so in quite narrow ways.

As an example (which has its positive side as well), I'm pretty sure that I got deeply interested in the history of magic and occultism because of my love of fantasy, and particularly fantasy RPGs, as a kid.  So in that sense, RPGs helped me discover the nature of my own profession, and have significantly shaped my life.  But until I have tenure somewhere good, I will never honestly answer the question, "Magic?  Interesting.  How did you get into that field?"  See, everyone thinks the idea of studying the history of magic sounds interesting --- if extremely eccentric and perhaps a bit freaky --- but god help me if they found out why.  

It sort of reminds me of a distinguished professor who revealed, at age 60 or so, that he was also a highly successful romance novel writer (under a pseudonym).  Everyone agreed that this was a wonderful eccentricity.  But a lot of people also agreed that if he'd admitted this when he was 30, he might never have gotten a job.

[contracycle]

My favourite RPG-habit to observe is "instant character adoption"; making a remark in a characters voice.  This was my favouriote entry in as list of things that identify roleplayers - well two really:
- we switych between referring to yourself in the first and third persons
- ... and your friends don't find it confusing.

[Ian Charvill]

I can offer very little beyond general hobby stuff: I've had a lot of fun and met a lot of great people through it, including the forming of friendships that have totally transended the gaming part of things (which amounts to a high-falluting way of saying I've met people through gaming who I'm still friends about a decade since we last gamed).

Also, a counter-example to the 'don't mention gaming on a first date' tendency.  A while back a woman I wasn't interested in had a painfully apparant crush on me.  At one point I tried to put her off by geeking out.  Didn't do a damn thing to affect the way she felt about me, and I was kind of over the top about it.

[Meguey]

My own favorite / common use of gamespeach is "I failed my DomTech roll; can you open this jar for me?"  Of course there are others too; naturally it's part of my lingo after 25 years.

Part of this is about circles we move in as well. In certain circles, my speech becomes buried in quilting/fabric/textile stuff, in others it's an alphabet soup of UU/UUA acronyms, in another it's all about fringe and sequins and drum rythms. I disagee with the take that it's only a way to say "Oh look how insider I am"; I think it's also a logical outgrowth of any interest or activity that has things and events particular to that interest or activity.  The only thing I can think of that we might possibly be able to universally discuss or understand if overheard would be breathing and sleeping, and I *know* I'm actually wrong, because there are whole methods of meditative breath practice, asthma sufferers, insomniacs and lupus sufferers.

In answer to the other part of this thread, how has role-playing impacted my life, my anwesr would have to be "Profoundly".

As a kid, it gave me out-let for imagination in a TV-dominated social sphere (grammar school); it gave me an activity and a group of friends (four of us, all home-schooled) that I was able to deeply enjoy and feel connected with in a small town of generally unfriendly kids; and it gave me a direction to explore the mythos and archetypes (J.R.R. Tolkein, Greek / Roman / Norse / Eygptian myth, C.S.Lewis, Madelene L'Engle) fascinated me.

As a high school student, it was a haven of non-drug & alcohol related activity. Identifiying with the Drama club scene (about 50 kids), and within that crowd, being part of the talks-about-real-issues-including-politics-religion-and-sex section (about 20), and in *that*, being in a tight knit role-playing game group of six or eight, game me the same benefits as when I was younger, but with more intelectual aspects.  We had something better to do than get stoned/drunk on weekends - we had a whole 'nother rich world where we didn't have to deal with incompetent teachers and arrogant classmates. Instead, we could work on world building, do game-related art, discuss meta-game issues, or even play!

In college, everyone was more open about it, although clubs did exist in high school. The campus Sci-Fi club posted who was running what, and if there were openings in the game, and ran mini-cons too. Some of my all-time best gaming was in the CyberPunk game Vincent ran (still a cause for gaming stories) and in the Ares Magica game I ran (my first time as GM) for two years.

As an adult, gaming has provided an escape, a reason for social gathering, a place of artistic colaberation, and a source of inspiration in playing with our kids. Our experience as gamers has allowed us to more fully enter into our children's 'pretend' and to nurture it and their imagination more fully. There are several on-going 'pretends' in our house, some of which have distinct rules and character creation and task resolution devices. Currently, our 6 yr old's very exacting about "What does your spaceship do(spy, settler, defend, etc), how many people on your crew, what does it look like, and what is it's special power" I really look forward to them growing up in a gaming house.

I'm sure I don't out myself about gaming right away to everyone- that's no more appropriate than outing myself as a Middle Eastern dancer, a Pagan, a quilter with a degree in textiles, a member of the PTO, a Unitarian Universalist or any other part that anyone who becomes my friend will know in time. (All of you reading this are obviously excepted :) )
I've certainly never thought "OH, better not tell them I play RPG's" if it's seemed the natural thing to do and I otherwise would. Especially as a female gamer, I feel some obligation to speak out whenever it comes up. There are times I'd love more t-shirts and such with stuff only other gamers would get, but part of that is just that I like things off center, like me beloved Farm Raised Catfish t-shirt. Don't know where it came from, but I love it. MY current favorite belly dancer, btw, is one who has a dance tape out and at the end she totally outs herself as a Trekkie, shimmying in front of a Capt. Picard cut-out with 'live-long & prosper' hands.

And besides, it's fun.
~Meguey

[quozl]

I work in banking where people are supposed to be identical interchangeable suits.  I NEVER and would never tell anyone in my office my vacation is to a gaming con let alone the boss.  

As a counterpoint, I just wanted to say that I work in banking, as a network administrator, and my boss and others around me have no problem with my gaming.  Also, I am taking a day off to go to Game Storm.  I admit I am still nervous when talking about gaming but I get less nervous about it as I get older.  (I'll be 31 this July.)

[Le Joueur]

I almost forgot.  It completely changed how we handle our money.

Here's what we call 'em now:[list=a][*]$1 coin coin = Gold Piece (Obviously the Sacagawea dollar.)
[*]10¢ coin = Silver Piece (At one point these really were silver¹, weren't they?)
[*]5¢ coin = Nickel Piece (Likewise, I'm sure.)
[*]1¢ coin = Copper Piece (Also.)[/list:o]And the exchange rate is only off by a factor of two.  (Who's seen any electrum anyway?)

Fang Langford

¹ From just looking at it, the original dime, quarter, half, and whole dollar coins have the same ratio of volume (10 dimes takes up the same space as 4 quarters as 2 halves as a whole dollar coin), suggesting a singular composition.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

This thread has drifted a bit into a Profiling-type thing, and I'd been planning on calling people on that, and maybe closing the thread ... but then decided not. Plus I can't help but relate the following anecdote.

Over the years, I've been face-front about my hobbies and life-style in general. It's an admit-nothing deny-nothing approach - when and if I do X, it reveals that I like and do X; I don't worry myself about moderating X for others.

Gaming works great this way; it's how I end up with way more potential players swarming around me than I could ever hope to game with. It's why I regard the near-universal cry of "I can't find anyone to play with!" with puzzlement.

But ... (1) there are other things I do that require a lot of attention and specific social interactions. Hence I don't bring up "Hey, how about that chariot-race in Fvlminata last night!" conversation during faculty meetings, because none of my colleagues game with me and because we're talking about funding or curriculum or some damn thing. Still, if we're hangin' out at lunch, and we're talking about hobbies or side interests, I'll talk about gaming or Adept Press, and everyone's cool with that. Hell, one of my colleagues runs a website for ... well, never mind that.

How does that relate to the classroom? Role-playing references, on occasion, do a very good job of establishing connections for classroom points. For instance, recently, the proportion 1/6 turned out to be an important issue for an experimental procedure, and I referenced that anyone who played D&D knew that it was 16.667% ... and a bunch of people smiled, laughed, and said "Yeah!" ... hence the point was driven more effectively for everyone, including those who hadn't played and merely witnessed the interactions. A good teacher, I think, has lots and lots of these little connection-points in his or her arsenal, ranging from pop culture to literary references to topical issues, and more.

Now for the anecote, which concerns the vestiges of self-moderation that do show up, oddly enough, in the most anonymous situations, rather than in the less-so, acquaintance-based ones. I was on the train just last week, with a stack of tests to grade and several old-school dungeon modules (I'm building a Tunnels & Trolls dungeon and seeking architecture). I'd graded a few, felt virtuous, and was inclined to pull out Blood-Soaked Levels of Iron-Death Fury or whatever it was called for some casual reading for the rest of the train ride ... and then noticed an attractive woman seated precisely opposite/diagonal of me, you know, in that orientation which permits two strangers to occupy one another's full field of vision that sometimes happens on trains. She was not looking at me or paying any attention to me at all, nor did I imagine that any interaction would ever occur.

But I kept the dungeon modules tucked away and returned to the test grading. I don't think I would have done the same if I'd been reading, say, Trollbabe, Universalis, Dust Devils, or similar. There ya go - internalized prejudices and needless self-moderation in action. Who cares what some bint thinks, eh? ... is the proper response.

But I'll be first to cop that if anyone but an attractive woman had been sitting there, I wouldn't have minded at all.

Best,
Ron

[Jeremy Cole]

Whenever my mind wanders, its the first thing I daydream about.  Its possibly the only topic, other than cricket :), were you can be guaranteed my full attention.

And among me and my friends, roleplaying is the source for more in-jokes than most everything else combined (except maybe the Close Combat games).