How has gaming effected your life?

[Matt Gwinn]

I have no doubt that certain people are drawn to roleplaying games and there has always been an association between roleplaying games and geekdom.  Scott and I were driving the other day and we started to talk about how odd we are when compared to other 31 year olds and I started to wonder whether 2 decades of roleplaying has somehow made us different or if playing RPGs is mearly a side effect of us being different to begin with.  

Then I started thinking about different aspects of gaming and how they effect my everyday life.  At what point did watching a man's arm get cut off move from being horrific to filling me with the desire to yell, "It's just a flesh wound"?  Think about it, when was the last time you heard a plumber or your mechanic quote Montey Python as part of a normal conversation?  Or announce that he failed his dex check when he dropped a spark plug into your engine block?

Since I started working on Kayfabe a year or so ago I can't watch pro wrestling without thinking to myself, "he must have made his Clout roll," or assigning Assets and Flaws to wrestlers then enthusiastically announcing it to my girlfriend.

I'm curious.  How has playing roleplaying games effected the way you live your life and interact with other people?  Can you recall a specific moment in time when you did or said something that only another gamer would understand even though there wasn't one around?  How did people respond to that?

,Matt G.

[Valamir]

Heh, when I was back east and surrounded by gamers we'd routinely comment on someone failing their perception check, or suffering a critical fumble on the seduction test, or one of my favorites "When God rolled up his character He obviously went for the full 50-point 'dumbass' flaw"

Now that I'm not around those guys any more, I find myself not making such comments.  But in my experience every specialization has lingo that spreads over into everyday speach.  For example I've heard people refer to someone who just got a blank look on their face as having suffered a "general protection fault".  or "their brain just got the blue screen of death".  Or people who have trouble juggling many projects at once saying "My brain runs on DOS, I don't multitask well".

So the phenomenon isn't just gamers.  Although gamers can be pretty obscure.  Not to many people would know what a cry of "Leadership Casualties on the Quarter Deck" would mean after witnessing someone slink away after getting shot down picking up a girl at a bar.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

Just think about all the sayings we have just from poker and sports.

[Valamir]

"Flag on the play.  15 yards.  Illegal use of Hands"

[clehrich]

Sorry, but I have to stop you, Valamir --- that's game and rubber. :)

[M. J. Young]

Game, set, and match.

I suppose my problem in answering this is that I'm not usually anywhere where there aren't any gamers. It's a big family, and it's full of gamers.

And I think all of us do it.

My kids can hardly watch a movie without a comment like, "That's got to be a 30 GE roll" (a Multiverser reference, meaning that the situation was a "one in a thousand chance disaster"); they also note the good GE rolls, as well. "That was a lucky save" in their mouths means dice, not ballplay.

One of the things I've had to recognize as an author is that there is a lot of "gamespeak" (it's what the editor of my first novel, Places to Go, People to Be's Steve Darlington, called it, at least) that has to be avoided when trying to tell a story. A lot of our modern fantasy is infected by this; you sometimes feel as if the way the story is told reveals some underlying game mechanic. Creating a story that is true to the nature of a game world but doesn't have those mechanics cues in it is tricky for someone who's been playing near a quarter century, even though I was writing before I was gaming. I suspect it's the more difficult for those who grew up on games and started writing after they learned to play.

But, as has been said, metaphor is a key part of expression, and we get it from everywhere and everything. Some people backpaddle or backpeddle when they realize they've overstated something. I've heard courtroom metaphors. Star Trek and Star Wars have contributed here and there. With some people, you can work out their interests from their metaphors. And sometimes don't we all quote song lyrics, which if recognized would tell something about our age, our generation, and our musical tastes? It's just part of being human. Although our lives are compartmentalized, we tend to pull bits out of those compartments and mix and match them with others.

--M. J. Young

[C. Edwards]

Playing games has helped keep me young in spirit.  At least, I think it has.  Hard to be sure when I don't know what I'd be like if I had never played a game in my life.  When I play games I laugh and have fun, tension oozes away and all there is left for a while is the game and friends.

One of my favorite game speak moments has to be when a friend and I went to Taco Bell after a game of Top Secret.  While we're standing in line we start discussing some things that happened in the game and further strategy options.  You know, things like "Maybe if I had killed that dog we could have taken that guard out before he hit the alarm." and "Putting poison in the wine should be easy enough, but do you think hiding those bear traps in the snow will work?"   The looks from the other people in line were priceless.   I'm just glad that we weren't playing, say, Kill Puppies For Satan.

[arxhon]

Sometimes I'll make completely obscure comments that only a gamer would understand. This doesn't happen much, mind you. I do it for the wierd looks, more than anything.

Of course we have the added bonus of truly understanding Martin's (of sompson's fame) proclamation "i have a thousand hit points and maximum Charisma!"

Most of my current references are in wargaming terms (i.e.: my fingertips are Toughness 4).

[M. J. Young]

Arxhon has hinted at another aspect of this. There's a degree to which gamespeak has invaded culture. For example, how many of you saw The Onion article that reported Bill Gates raising his Charisma to 20, giving him three godlike scores? It was complete with a picture of a hand-written character paper including sketch for Bilbo of the Gatekeepers, and included comments from other industry leaders about a candystore DM.

To some degree, our language has infiltrated mainstream.

--M. J. Young

[Mike Holmes]

Um, MJ, I used to play RPGs occasionally with some of the Onion staff back when they were a campus paper in Madison.

I just think that there are a lot of people who have had some exposure to RPGs, and they are now expanding in their roles in society. The mainstream is not becoming hip to us, we are becoming the mainstream.

Mike

[ThunderCheetah]

I usually don't make comments, but I laugh my head off at them. So, yeah ... I've been sitting here in the middle of a conservative college's cyber cafe, snorting periodically, and not haivng anyone to share it with. It makes me feel freakish.

But in a good way. :-)

I think M.J. hit it pretty close to the mark -- I think it's just our nature as Americans -- we like to be identified with what we're interested in. Bumper stickers, logolized coffee mugs, t-shirts, and language all bespeak our quirks. And the way I like to look at it, the more obscure the quirk, the better to show it off!

[Mike Holmes]

Yeah, we like to be associated with our groups. Consider business buzzwords. I've got a friend that uses them all the time in normal conversation. What he's doing is saying, "I'm a member of the business cognocenti. Buisnesspeople would know me when they heard me."

The problem with this behavior is that it's usually done to exclude the listener. The subtext reads, "What, you don't know what a Thac0 is? You don't get my little in-joke? Why you're not a cool gamer like I am. I belong to an exclusive group to which you do not belong. I am better than you."

When done in a group of people from the same culture, it reads, "Aren't we cool, we know things that other people don't. If we are overheard, they'd be confused at best, and maybe even a little freaked out. How cool is that?"

Rarely is there a good reason to use gamespeak in regular conversation. Sure, there's the occasional joke that's really funny. But I've seen people really reaching on occasion, and that's when it becomes obvious and ugly.

Sorry, just my take.

The fact that I do it only points out my own insecurities, IMO.

Mike

[Matt Gwinn]

I think we've covered gaming lingo quite a bit here, but I'm also curious about other aspects of our hobby that might influence our everyday lives.

When I was a kid, my parent's drunken friends would always come up to me while I was working on gaming stuff and ask if I was doing homework (even during the summer).  I would then have to explain what I was working on, which of course went way over their heads and usually resulted in weird looks.

The same thing happens at work from time to time if someone sees a character sheet on my desk or a copy of Kayfabe, but I have become better at concealing that stuff.

Another way that gaming has had an impact comes around every year when I request time off for Gencon.  If I tell people I'm going to Vegas or Niagra Falls for vacation it's no big deal, but I tell them I need a week off to go to a gaming convention and I get weird looks (at least the first time).  I suspect a lot of employers do not consider Gencon to be important enough to warrant time off.  Have any of you had trouble getting time off for a CON?  Do you think you would have had less trouble had you requested time off for a family event?  

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

,Matt G.

[Valamir]

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.  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.  Fortuneatly the middle of the year is not a particularly busy time for us so its not something I've ever had to work to hard to get.  But yes.  If I said I was going to see show girls and lose thousands of dollars in vegas...that would meet with approval (unless I was going every week, of course).  If I said I was going to a gaming con...its hard to say whether my reputation would decline before or after I had to describe to them what it was...but the chance of uncovering a new gamer isn't worth it.  Acceptable hobbies:  golf, fishing, golf, philanthropy, golf, opera, golf, working late, golf, networking for more clients, golf...you get the idea.  Unacceptable hobbies: anything remotely related in anyway to something that has a hint of fringe culture to it.

So yes.  Gaming has impacted my life in that I tend to have much less casual conversation to discuss with clients and coworkers.  I am generally decidedly vague with "what did you do this weekend", or "how was your trip".

[Matt Gwinn]

So yes. Gaming has impacted my life in that I tend to have much less casual conversation to discuss with clients and coworkers. I am generally decidedly vague with "what did you do this weekend", or "how was your trip".

This is the sort of stuff I'm looking for.  Thanks Ralph.

I'm also interested in how gaming has effected your life in a good way.  I for one have used math skills and writing skills far more often than if my favorite hobby was golf.  I've learned quite a few big words too :-)

My experiences at the Forge have taught me a lot about people in general and how we interact with each other.  If it wasn't for gaming I'd have no idea what a social contract is.

,Matt G.