I am, therefore, I game. Okay, that’s a bit dramatic, but gaming does factor into my sanity plan in a very real way.
First, I get to see some of my best friends every week or so for a few hours. As a stay at home mom, I don’t get a lot of adult time outside of improv and gaming. Gaming keeps me from going full hermit and wasting away on the couch, watching Designing Woman and eating a second bag of popcorn. Not that this is terrible way to spend your time, but it shouldn’t happen every night.
Gaming not only lets me work on my people skills, it lets me stretch my imagination and go bonkers! In our last campaign, we had an intervention, used marbles to Home Alone a witch, and gained inspiration by honoring the last wishes of the murder house children. You have to get creative to complete a campaign, and that kind of thinking helps keep my brain sharp now that I’m out of the formal working world.
Finally, gaming offers the unique opportunity to be creative for its own sake. My RPG sessions spark the creation of entire universes that will only ever be seen by the people in the room. The performance is for each other and for ourselves. There is something freeing about creating with friends without an outside eye on you. You can get weird and vulnerable, and that is so refreshing when everything about daily life is so scrutinized.
Without gaming I’d be a sweatpants wearing loner, writing werewolf/mob boss romance in a dimly lit, living room. With gaming I’m a sweatpants wearing social butterfly who is the werewolf/mob boss in a dimly lit dining room. See the difference?
As a man who is far closer to fifty than the ten-year old, who saw that first, fateful handful of six weirdly shaped dice requiring the numbers to be filled in with a Crayon would ever have imagined he would be, I can tell you, that kid needed roleplaying games (“RPGs”) in his life. Back in those days, it wasn’t as trendy to be a nerd as it is today. Celebrities didn’t boast of their nerd-cred. The closest thing we had to the Marvel cinematic universe was Lou Ferrigno painted green. We just had gotten our first taste of Doctor Jones fighting Nazis, and we were all still living with the shock of Darth Vader saying, “I am your father.” For chubby, ten-year old me the coolest thing that had happened to me before I entered my first graph paper dungeon was my buddy’s dad sneaking us all into watching Snake Plissken make his escape from New York. That was until I played Dungeons & Dragons (“D&D”).
Each of us has memories associated with games, memories that don’t fade. Learning to play gin rummy or solitaire from a grandparent. It was in quiet times like this, when my grandparents were watching me as a child, that I learned about intergenerational relationships and roots. Playing hide and seek or tag (for us it was a tag variation we called run around the cellar door) with neighbors and cousins. As an awkward, uncoordinated kid, games like this helped me understand that mental skills were just as important as physical skills. The informal, unsupervised play gave us the opportunity to resolve disputes on our own and to establish systems for working together, even when we were working in opposition. Sports in high school often involved brutal and explosive confrontations, ending up with more than a couple of trips to the ER. But, it developed my persistence, it fostered my sense of cooperation, it taught me the value of preparation, and I learned how to move past failure.
Yet, the best games also stimulated my imagination by drawing me into a story. It might be as simple (and pedantic) as a board game like The Game of Life in which the objectives of the game are dressed in a fictitious—yet commonplace—adult experience. By making the fictitious, adult experience more removed from the everyday, like in Monopoly, players immerse themselves even more into the story of the game, actually feeling as if they own the properties. The more interactive the storytelling, the more immersive the experience becomes.
In the Fall of 1978, my parents gave me Dungeons & Dragons. I still play it today. And, while it may undermine my geek cred, I did not open the box and begin playing immediately, never putting it down over the last four decades. I was the first of my friends to get it and there was nobody that I knew who could teach it to me. I learned and my friends learned, and we taught each other. We persisted, because we were already immersed in Tolkien’s world of adventure and imagination and D&D was an opportunity to make those worlds our own. The stories drew us into the game. Then the richness of the game drew us into other stories, including stories of our own creation.