I just found this thread and thought I would go ahead and reply to it...


1. Consider yourself and the people you role-play with. Do you ever socialize with them without role-playing? If so, which type of socializing is the more frequent one? That is, do you occasionally role-play with these general/whatever friends, or do you occasionally socialize with these fellow role-players?

Yes. In fact, most of the people I game with I end up socializing with outside of the game. For the most part the gaming is the more frequent socialization though, this is not the case for some of the people I game with.

For example, my current "play group" is made up of eight people, and I wil list them in the order that I have met him and explain how I met them.

Sam, I try to hang out with at least semi-frequently outside of gaming. He is a pretty cool guy and I genuinely enjoy spending time with him. We have enjoyed various ethnic food together, gone to see movies, and done various other social activities together. He e-mailed me about gaming through finding an ad of mine early this year and I have enjoyed gaming with him ever since then.

Brian, I also met through an ad I made, though I had played with him in the past. I also enjoy his company, but he not as much as I do others in the group. I have hung out with him and discussed non-gaming subjects and we have gotten together to play video games, but that has been the extent of our social contact. I had met him once previously before that.

Scott I met through a video game development club. I was indifferent towards him at that point, until a friend at the time, Paul, suggested we game together. At first I found him slightly annoying in a social context, especially because of his tendancy to hit on most girls he met, but since then I have grown to respect him as a person and undrestand a bit of the humor based in both his jokes (which are often awful puns) and his hitting on girls (which I have grown to think are also jokes). I hang out with him occassionally. We go to movies and grab lunch or dinner together and talk about gaming and various other subjects. We are also both in the same major (I am in college), though he is more competent in language usage than I am so I tend to ask him questions about various matters rather than looking it up myself.

Mary I met through the same way as Scott. I found her obnoxious for a great deal of time, though this was colored by the (in my view) bizzare character concepts she had at first. This was her first tabletop role-playing experience though and I understand it a bit more and have since grown to understand her. She has a habit of annoying some of the other people I frequently hang out with so I only occassionally invite her to social activities. I have begun to hang out with her more frequently in a social aspect recently.

Chris, I also me through an ad though that was just recently. We have a similarly deep interest in music and politics so we sometimes discuss this. I intend to hang out with him a bit more in the Spring semester after he returns to school and we are going to start going to various political rallies together.

Lisa, I met through the same ad as Chris and for the first few months we enjoyed "other kinds" of activities together though that has since ended. I invited her quite a bit to social functions I attended until a recent incident involving jealousy and an ex-girlfriend and have since decided that I am not going to do so in the future, though I do not mind hanging out with her in a social context.

Kristina and Erik, I was friends with in a social context before we started gaming together. Unlike pretty much everyone else mentioned I spend more time in a social context with then in a gaming context.

So I guess the general answer is that it varies. For Kristina and Erik I occassionally role-play with people I socialize with.
For Sam, Lisa, Scott, and Mary I role-play and socialize with in about an equal measure. I first met them in a rp based aspect and have slowly pulled them into a more social one though.
Brian and Chris are people I role-play with and occassionally socialize with.

Pretty much everyone I role-play with I have a degree of respect for though. Those I do not respect or relate to I rarely role-play with and tend to get shunted out of the "group."

I am planning on doing a shake-up of the group soon and will probably be dropping Lisa, Brian, Erik, and Kristina from it. I don't have anything against them personally (far from it), I just want to try new things with role-playing and it seems that their styles aren't really complimentary to that (I maybe wrong about Brian though. I am still considering him), and I don't want to go through the work to try to make their styles complimentary. I doubt either Erik or Kristina will take it personally. Based on previous interactions with Lisa I am kind of worried she will. Brian? Who knows.


2. Consider yourself together with your fellow group members relative to other role-playing groups in your area. Do you talk about your play experiences and share information about play with members of these other groups? Do you socialize with play members of these other groups without role-playing being involved as an issue? [Please note: these last two questions are not alternatives, but independent of one another. One could, for example, conceivably do both, just at different times.]

Yes, I do. Though it is more with single role-players than groups. I have about three people who I have role-played with in the past who I discuss play experiences with and such. I know there is a large quantity of local gamers (otherwise we wouldn't be able to support the large store we have) but I rarely interact with them unless they are actually in my games. These other role-players are generally people who I formed some sort of bonds of respect with and left because of other issues. Those that I ejected because of incompatible play styles I rarely talk to.
I have socialized with all of them in the past in a non-gaming environment and will probably do so again in the future. (One invited me to an after-New Years party).


3. Consider yourself relative to people you know who do not role-play. Do they know about your hobby (that is, that you do this)? Do you discuss it with them to any degree, and if so, how often?

In general? Yes they do know about my hobby. Its not something I conceal, and anyone who has ever been into my room can spot the books and figure out that I am involved with it. Anyone who is friends with me for any length of time finds out about it. However, in general its not something I really bring up all that often, just like other subjects that I have a deep interest in that others lack. I consider it kind of rude to talk over people's heads about issues and generally reserve in-depth gaming talk to other gamers.

4. Consider your own entire history of role-playing. Have any of the answers to the above questions changed for you, over time? From what to what?
I was much less socially adept in high school but even then I had friends who weren't gamers and most of the people who I gamed with were friends. I went through a period of time where I gamed with people I wouldn't socialize with outside of a gaming context, but that has since changed quite a bit.
I also have never concealed the fact I was a gamer. I have gone through periods where I felt particularly ashamed of the fact that it was not socially "acceptable," but have since come to the conclusion I honestly don't care about what is socially acceptable or not.


5. Consider yourself and your fellow group members again. Do you all share similar answers to all of the above questions, or do you represent a range of diversity?
For the most part I think they do for 1-3.
No clue about 4.

That good enough?
;)

Hello,

The above post was split from Social Context, a thread whose last post was in November 2002.

Jesse - please review the Forge guidelines, posted in a sticky at the top of the Site Discussion forum. If you want to respond to an older thread, the thing to do is to post a new thread, with your response, including a link to the older one.

For everyone, I consider the Social Context thread to be one of the most important discussions ever at the Forge. So maybe this is a good time to take a look at it, if you didn't know about it, or perhaps not even about the family of threads it belongs to called The Infamous Five.

Best,
Ron

Ah, I do apologize.

I will keep that in mind next time.


Jesse Dean