The Forge Archives

Okay, inspired by the "profiling" thread, I'm kinda curious about something.

What are people's day jobs around here? And how does that relate to your gaming? As much as we immerse ourselves in fantasy, I find our personal experiences in RL color our gaming, if only to determine what we *don't* want to deal with in a game.

I'll start off: I'm a UNIX System Administrator, a contractor for NASA. How does this effect my gaming? I tend to find "hollywood-style" hacking too annoying to deal with in-game, I tend to go overboard on issues like encryption when given a chance, and I hate being forced to solve "puzzles" -- like a cryptogram -- in-game as a player when I know a computer could handle the puzzle a lot easier.

I'll jump in. I'm a programmer contracted out to a school data processing center. I write really dull reports all day. Though it's pretty relaxed and when I'm ahead of schedule I get to slack off more and write to The Forge and work on roleplaying games. On the side, I am a writer and artist (published, even).

How does this affect my roleplaying? I don't have enough time for it. In fact, I had to back out of a freelance assignment recently because I don't have the time. When I do roleplay, I want the most bang for my buck, so I won't go down to the local gaming store and "blind-date" game. I'm friends with the people I game with, and I make sure we're all on the same page. Social Contract is key.

Okay, I'll play...

I'm a children's librarian (at least for a couple of weeks more, then I leave to go to grad school in library science). How this applies to gaming...well, the Forge has helped me solidify what I think the role of the GM is, especially in narrativist gaming (to facilitate everyone creating a story together, not to create a story his/herself & run the Players through it). And in turn, this has helped me solidify what the role of a librarian is (to faciliate patrons finding information, not finding the information for the patron). And the idea of being in an RPG group like playing in a band has helped me look critically at how my coworkers & I interact with each other, how we work together as a team.

If I ever end up as a young adult librarian (which is one of the things I could see myself doing someday), I'd love to start an RPG group at a library. Anything to subvert the youth of America.

I'm an editor for an agricultural Web site and print magazine. I get to do all kinds of stuff -- writing, editing, etc. One of the great parts about my job is getting to to a lot of graphic design, which lends itself very nicely to graphic design experience for laying out / designing all kinds of fun RPG stuff.

Trollbabe is next, once I put the wraps on Cartoon Action Hour! Now, if only this pesky day job didn't interfere with my time . . .

Oh man,

This is so, so close to being off-topic, non-Forge, chat-room stuff ... I mean, I was hovering one millimeter from the keyboard for a pure blast & scorch, don't-even type of post.

Then you said, "And how does it relate to our role-playing." So, I urge everyone participating to remember that this question is supposed to be focused on-topic to this very issue.

I'm a biology professor. This relates to role-playing as follows, in no special order ...

1) One of my academic areas of interest is the human mind as it relates to story-creation and story-enjoyment, in terms of some rather hairy evolutionary perspectives on what the human mind actually is. Enough said on that.

2) I'm faculty advisor for and constant participant at the campus gaming club, D.R.A.G.O.N., and no, I don't take any responsibility for the rather labored acroynym. I get to play lots of games I otherwise wouldn't, and I get to act as mentor to people for setting up their own groups instead of hiding in a scared little clique. So not only am I promoting role-playing, I am promoting a certain relationship of the social/self to the activity as well.

3) Academics, like any other professional activity, is a hodgepodge of common cause and individual jockeying for advantage. It fascinates me that department policy issues and gaming-company issues follow many of the same patterns (as do, for instance, martial arts schools). Parasitism as an economic factor seems to be widespread in both.

Best,
Ron

I'm a teacher in training.  I am working on getting my teaching credential but am unsure as to whether I will teach elementary or high school, though I am very interested in alternative education.  Next semester I start my student teaching (at an elementary school).

How does it affect my gaming?  I have not gamed at any real length for at least six months =(.  Because my classes are at night and my group either couldn't or wouldn't play on the weekend I kinda got frozen out.  Maybe I should have gone looking for another (weekend playing) group, but one of my links to gaming is that I do it with friends (no "blind-date" stuff as above).  What this also could mean is that I need to initiate and run some weekend gaming.

How will it affect my gaming in the future?  Well I am a bit nervous about student teaching taking up all my time and energy, but at least I will have my evenings free.  The only problem I see is that after this summer the other guy in our group who actually GM's is heading out of the state for law school, meaning either A) I will have to GM or elese no game; B) The combat-monkey sim-head will run Rifts ::shudder::; C) We will have to either find a game or alter our gaming such that we either just do one-shots and lots of people can try their hand or use something like The Framework to lighten the GM-ing load on me.

I'll be honest, this forced hiatus has been tough on me.  Before we had gamed on a weekly (or close enough) schedule (except summers before we all graduated) for about 4 or 5 years.  Hopefully I can stay organized and on  top of stuff and I can GM and student teach =)

-Shane

I'm a Chartered Financial Analyst and running close to $500 million in investment assets for private clients of a bank trust department.

Probably the biggest direct impact my career has on my gaming sensibilities is in the arena of motivations.

By far the two biggest emotions that motivate investors is Greed and Fear.  Both of which are the enemy of long term accumulation of wealth.

I see these same motivations at work across the spectrum of role-playing where again they are the enemy of successful play.

Greed manifests both in a power gaming mentality and also as a spot light hog.  Fear manifests in a variety of way from reluctance to try new games to lack of trust that the GM won't screw you.

Hello,

I'm a video game programmer.  And well, it's kind of obvious how that relates to the broader view of gaming but there's something a bit deeper going on.  When I was kid, I really enjoyed Infocom style text adventures and the later graphical equivalents put out by Sierra, Lucas Arts and the like.  All through college I was a heavy heavy participant in the online Interactive Fiction community who still turn out old-style text adventures as a hobby.

What I REALLY wanted to do was to essencially remove the railroading and puzzle aspects of these games and create true interactive works of litterature.  As a step in this direction I wrote a progam that allowed computer controlled characters to reason based on emotions rather than logic as my undergrad thesis.  I went to grad school with the intent of continuing this line of research but I ran into the wall of being severly misunderstood in what I was trying to acomplish.  I was buffered around the crowd who were trying to simulate artifical personalities but had no investment in dramatic implications and applications of such technologies and the crowd who was interested in creating art that was interactive but had no investment in the actual user end participation in the CREATION of that art.

Frustrated, I left and got this job working as a video game programmer which ultimately had a very refreshing side effect.  It drove me away from computer games and back in RPGs.  You see when you MAKE video games all day long, you really lose all your desire to play them when you come home at night.  I still wanted to game, but I needed a different KIND of game.  My foray back in RPGs brought me here where I learned a lot about RPG theory and realized it was VERY VERY VERY close to my original dreams of trying to create true interactive works of litterature.  I discovered that the reason I was so frustrated in grad school was because I lacked the vocabulary and fundamental understanding of what a story really WAS to clearly explain what I was trying to achieve.

I still continue my experiments with my RPG group.  Basically, I'm working on understanding on how one creates meaningful interactive stories using live human beings as the computer.  If I have a life long dream of some kind it would be to create the world's first Narrativist Video Game: An automated system that would allow the user to present their character (even an assigned character) as a proper protagonist with a theme of their own devising, and would 'intelligently' organize NPC reactions and behaviors to continue to facilitate the presentation of that character.

I hope that wasn't too far off topic as Ron pointed out.

Jesse

I'm a systems programmer by day, which includes a heavy dose of security and system administration as well.  All of my work with computers has shown me that the trick to figuring out any computer security or design issue is figuring out the humans involved.

It's affected my gaming by giving me an aversion to mechanical puzzles in the game, of the "press the right widgets in the right sequence" variety (played with a GM who loved them).

I don't want to spend much time dealing with mechanics at all. I get no thrill from it. It's a lot like stepping through algorithms at work.  I want to get right down to the human interaction, because that's where the real meat of things is at.

Quote from: Ron EdwardsThen you said, "And how does it relate to our role-playing." So, I urge everyone participating to remember that this question is supposed to be focused on-topic to this very issue.

Yes, I deliberately engineered it that way, because that was what I was interested in, and I figured it was on-topic for the Forge.

Part of what prompted me to post this topic is I remembered a player in In Nomine using Balseraph abilities (getting people to believe lies) to scam a car from a car rental place. The player, of course, worked at a car rental place, and knew exactly how the person at the counter would react if they believed certain lies...

I'm a Network Analyst, I deal with PC installs, troubleshooting, networking, security, training, etc... We only have a few people on staff in our dept, so we're kinda computer Jack-Of-All-Trades. I also ran a punk rock / hardcore / grindcore record label and was in a few puncrock bands for about ten years too. (I mention that because it's greatly effected my worldview).

How have both of these effected my gaming? Hmm, I think the most direct result is that I hate having to jump through hoops to game. All of the things I've dealt with professionally are very detail- and process- oriented. So when I game, I vastly prefer short set-up/prep, fast playing / rules-light systems that encourage fun and cooperation rather than rules discussion... 2PAM, Universalis, InSpectres and the card game Grave Robbers From Outer Space are my recent favorites...

Sean

The business card reads "DBA/Data Specialist", the org chart says "Manager, Data Engineering", and the truth is I'm a diverse-but-not-deep-skilled PC-based computer guy, working for a smallish Silcon Valley software (Intellectual Asset Management) startup emerging (with luck) from bankruptcy next month - maybe with me still employed, and maybe not.  I've got hundreds of gigs of text, terabytes of images, from patent offices all over the world.  And yes, I think that's very cool.

Roleplaying impact?  Well, recent events have helped thwart my efforts to start GMing in a big way again, but that's more general life interference than something specific to the nature of my job.  The physics of working with large data sets has allowed me to check in at the Forge while at work without it being TOTALLY slacking off (hey, I've got a bunch o' queries running - gotta wait for results anyway), though the managerial responsibilities make that harder and harder to justify.

I suppose some of the personality traits that make me good at my job (an analytical mindset, and, oh . . . an ability to get along with others pretty well) turn out to be useful in some aspects of RPGs, but most of my RPG drive/interest are NOT job related.  In fact, a need for a creative outlet in the face of what is (90% of the time) NOT a creative environment in the rest of my life is the biggest influence - so mostly, RPGs help balance out what I would otherwise find an unbalanced life.  Maybe if I were a writer/actor/musician, I wouldn't even bother with RPGs . . .

Gordon

I'm a Web Analyst for an Internet Filtering company, which means that I spend 40 hours a week actively and deliberately finding pornography and other "offensive" content and cataloging it for filtering and reviewing specific sites for customers.  

It doesn't directly affect my roleplaying.  However, all the "surfing" I do gives me plenty of opportunities to read essays, look at photos and spend time developing thoughts and ideas.  So the indirect effects can be enormous.

I'm a former public school teacher, former criminal defense attorney now working as the vice-president and writer/designer for a start-up computer gaming company specializing in online games for the PC.  I spend much of my time split between management and fundraising on the one hand, and historical research and backstory writing on the other.  I'm also an aspiring F and SF writer, but my spare time is pretty sparse these days.

How does this affect my roleplaying?  Being an entrepreneur pretty much squashes most of my current gaming opportunities.  I spend a lot of time online, so it's easy for me to drop in and check things out at the Forge.  Like Jesse, I prefer to spend my free gaming time with the pen & paper medium, but I'm convinced there has to be a way to bring real storytelling potential to computers, hence my interest in virtual communities and interactive storytelling.  I want to find a way to break the DnD headlock on the industry's design paradigm.  My pen & paper roleplaying aspirations reflect these goals, so the Forge has been an incredibly useful stimulus for thinking outside the box.

As a former attorney, I've spent enough time parsing rules and extracting meaning from convoluted blocs of text.  Consequently, I'm not interested in working within traditional rules sets.  I prefer streamlined rules that promote coherent scene framing and "cinematographic" details of storytelling, supporting a focus on character, meaningful conflict, and emotional reaction rather than "game."  As a writer, I'm fascinated by the whole interactive imagination aspect of group creativity and the ecology of story generation.  There's a whole lot of psychobabble I'd love to delve into, but it's best served face to face over a bottle of scotch sometime.

Best,

Blake

Hiya Folks,

I am a psychiatrist, although I must hasten to admit with a stronger clinical rather than theoretical slant to my work.

As you can imagine, this line of work has provided a wealth of ideas. Particularly paranoid and psychotic material that fits in very nicely with many of the games I have run in the past.

A favourite example is simulating psychosis in my players' characters, (when I was much more simulationist-focused) for example by presenting things in such a manner as to seem that they were being observed, stalked, etc. This worked particularly well where there were other non-afflicted characters who were not privy to that presentation and therefore drew there own conclusions about the afflicted character's mental state.
The sorts of games this technique has been useful include Call of Cthulhu, Over The Edge, Unknown Armies and HeroWars (one of my players characters [a repressed Yelmalion, for those interested] is 'cursed' and has been in conflict with a demonic entity).
I have a good knowledge of pharmacology and physiology which have also enhanced my presentation of material to my players.
But the best side-effect of my work is a mounting understanding of how systems of people work together (families, clinical staff, etc) - this fits neatly with the ideas of relationship-mapping-in-gaming that Sorcerer first introduced to me.

Psychiatry is demanding too, and I have little time for gaming, managing only one 4 hour session a week...and this online (as my old gaming buddies have scattered to the 4 corners) by IRC. There are some problems but also considerable benefits to online play of this sort.

I would also flip the question around. Roleplaying games have inspired me to utilise these sorts of techniques (role play) more in my work. It is a powerful tool for those suffering emotional or psychological interpersonal difficulties.

Additionally, I hope to be soon appointed as a Captain in the Australian Army. I imagine this will provide another interesting perspective for my gaming (but also further restrict my available time).

</end self indulgent disclosure>

Rusty