Someone asked the question “What was the
best decade in gaming?” and given my (de)evolution over the years, I have to
say that there are a number of different answers, particularly when we consider
the different stages of a gamers life.
In turn, that got me around to thinking about the things that we do as
gamers and the different things we get up to.
I only have my own perspectives and those I grew up around for
reference, but I don’t think that there’s too much of a difference between
gamers in general.
Stage one – “You mean we can be heroes
in our own heads?”
A lot of gamers start out when they’re
too young to appreciate the subtlety of roleplaying
and are just happy to get together with friends and play at being something
they’re not yet, perhaps with the dream of one day getting to live that dream.
So for me, in the matter of gaming
without thinking what about what we were doing, the 80’s were undoubtedly
filled with win and in such quantities that we couldn’t carry it all, we never
got further than a few weeks into anything before trying something new, and all
of it was new, there was no shortage of things coming out and while some of
them weren’t any good, it didn’t matter, because there were stores in a number
of towns (anyone remember Electronics Boutique?) that stocked roleplaying games
in large numbers and it wasn’t hard to get into the hobby because it was so
popular. That said, I do think that
looking back on those era’s, we didn’t so much roleplay as wander down a
dungeon and there beat things till we won.
If we were playing in space, we wandered down a big ship and there shot
things till we won. These were the times
when just getting together with your friends was the main reason why you wanted
to do things and whatever you ended up doing was a bonus, because you were
there with your friends. This is where
my gaming really started, and that I had so much fun with it was the reason I
stayed with the hobby, most of the people who were involved in it were similar
to me, people who had interests that didn’t involve trying to find porn and
beer (which is not to say that we didn’t have those interests as well, merely
that they weren’t the only interests
that we had). I didn’t always get on
well with the groups I was with, got asked to leave by at least one (mainly
because I got a girlfriend and they didn’t like that…), and in general, got in
less actual gaming than I did in all the years to follow.
But we made those moments that we got
count…
Stage two – “Everyone Everywhere…”
The next stage, certainly for those of
us born in the seventies and just becoming slightly self aware by the end of
the eighties, was in the realisation that there were others out there who
weren’t just in our small circle and from there trying to catch up with them
and see what games could be played.
This for me was the 90’s
The 90’s were a strange time, I finally
got to the point where I had enough money to both survive on a day to day basis
and have enough left over to buy new games, and being a single parent, there wasn’t
enough to try and save up, and games weren’t that expensive, and I had nothing
else to do…
I could keep that list of excuses going
for some time, but the long and short of it is that with a reasonable job and
no other outgoings, I picked up a lot
of games in the 90’s, didn’t always get to play them, but unlike later times, I
certainly read through all of them and as I was getting to know myself as well,
made a number of choices in the sorts of games that I wanted to play, things
with atmosphere like SLA industries and Shadowrun, where the story was the
thing rather than the system.
It helped that I had a boss who
subsidised my MtG habit (he liked having opponents around who didn’t let him
win), so that took up significantly less of my money than it did for most other
people. The 90’s were also the time when
I started getting into the idea of campaign playing, with a few games in the
early nineties and then a massive storyteller system that went across the whole
gamut of books to the starting of the huge SLA campaign that introduced me in
an indirect route to the internet.
Suddenly there was the understanding that there were hundreds of other
people out there, maybe even thousands.
Maybe even…Millions…?
So the horizons broadened somewhat and I
made friends with a lot of other people with similar interests, no longer
separated by anything as petty as a few thousand miles of ocean, and from there
I started taking an interest in what else was going on in the world, but not
being tech savvy, didn’t ride in on the wave of net that everyone else was
already surfing, that didn’t really occur till somewhat later in life. However, when it came to campaign gaming, the
90’s beat everything hands down.
New gamers in this day and age get to
this stage a lot faster than my generation, because it’s not hard to find local
clubs and groups, and the companies that organise games are now actually organised rather than producing a few
modules a year and hoping that would keep people interested. The Internet may be responsible for a
multitude of sins, but in telling people that they’re not the only ones who do
things (for good or for ill), there’s no better tool in the world.
Stage Three – “What do you mean work’s
more important than coming to the game…?”
Stage three usually occurs at the point
at which most of the players in the group are starting to settle down and their
jobs are taking up more of their time, all of which leads to less time for all
the things that can be classified as “Non-life-essential…”
That for most of us includes games…
And that brings me into the 2k’s…
The 2k’s were a bitter time in many
ways, the early parts of it were still taken up with going to conventions to
run things and getting time to game when I could with who I could, but the real
world was starting to intrude in ways I didn’t appreciate, the job was no
longer abundantly providing, and as children get older, so they get more
expensive, and this was certainly the case here and while I never got to the
stage where we were in poverty, we weren’t far off on a number of occasions. I
was still supporting every convention I could (didn’t work weekends back then,
never let people doubt how much of a difference that makes when you want to go
to all these places), helping a number of game production companies (Cubicle 7
is a long way now from those meetings in the back room at Finchley), and
writing where I could. The monthly game
ceased around 2007 when I took my present job, there simply wasn’t enough time
to get the games in without taking days off, but then I went to a new
convention in Birmingham and saw something of the future in it and that brings
me to the last stage of gaming (or at least the one I haven’t moved past yet),
which is
Stage Four – “You’ve never played a
game? Try this…”
When you’ve been doing something as long
as I’ve been gaming, there’s a good chance that you’ve had a lot of fun doing
it, made some good friends, got reasonably good at it, and you get that
epiphany moment where you consider how much fun you’ve had and you start to
think about giving other people a piece of that fun…
That brings me to the 2010’s…
I still get a game once in a while, I
have a fortnightly meet with my good friends down in derby, but with their kid
just going to university and mine not being around a whole lot anymore, we
often catch random tangents and just enjoy the others company, because work
gets in the way for all of us and with me organising all the things I do, I’ve
often been dealing with games all day and I just want to do something that
doesn’t involve games and just hang out with my friends.
Does this mean I’m burned out on games?
Not at all, it means I’ve recognised (taken
me thirty years) that games aren’t everything, and that it’s the people that
you play with (Fnar) that make the games what they are. But then a lot of people in my age range that
have been lifelong gamers usually get to this stage and do one of two things.
1: Quit
I’ve seen this quite a bit recently, a
lot of people that I would have thought would have been playing games in the
old folks home have just sold up and moved on.
It’s not that they no longer enjoy the games, they do, but they’ve got
to the point where they no longer want to learn new systems, they’re not
interested in new games, and the games that they are interested in aren’t much
being played any more. Some people try
and get the game that they’ve been working on since they were a kid published,
some believe that if they make it, people will buy it (and more on that in an
article to follow), and when no one does, they decide they’ve had enough and
just walk away.
Others have found other interests that
they like more than gaming, and that’s fine (Bloody heretics…), some have got
kids and jobs that just don’t give them
the time to game, and some, some have just moved on, it was great for a
number of years, but when you’re playing Make:Believe, you can miss the Make
part, others will do that for you, but you absolutely need the Believe bit of
it.
2: Try and get everyone else into the game
Those of us who are still passionate
about games when they get to this stage understand that there aren’t as many
people at the same age as us now as there were twenty years ago, and in ten
years there’ll be even less, so the only way to make sure we still get to play
in ten years is to be there for the next generation, and I consider most people
of my age to be second generation, because there were those who were around my
age when I was six and it was those who showed me how much fun gaming was all
that time ago. The very least I can do
is repay the favour to all those just coming into the game and give them the
same chance for all the fun I’ve had over the years.
It’s why I put so much time for free
into helping conventions around England, if even one person gets out of gaming
what I have, then all the effort is worth it…
But this began with the question of
which decade I liked most of all for gaming…?
I wouldn’t give up what I’m doing now
for anything, but that’s because I’m finally giving back to games all that I’ve
had from them, but for me, the best decade without any shadow of a doubt was
the 90’s, when I was running one full time campaign and playing in another one,
with another playing campaign running once a month in another town, there wasn’t
a week went by when I wasn’t having fun playing and when it comes to gaming,
that’s the point, to have fun.
