Sunday, February 26, 2017

Gaming

Back in 1979, 10 year old me was fascinated.

I had found this world, a world I had no idea existed.  A world with orcs and hobbits and elves.  A world with dragons and grand quests to rescue treasure and a kingdom.  A world with giant spiders and goblins and secrets hidden in dark places. A world brought to life by Bakshi and Rankin in vibrant color on my television screen.  A world I would never want to leave.

I found other worlds.  Worlds written about in books with covers featuring dragons and the women and men who would fight or ride them.  I found farther off worlds, too. Worlds with machines and sentient computers.  Worlds with corporations run wild, dark dystopian worlds where heroes had to fight against the whims of power in an effort to just survive the best they could, and worlds where the heroes only chance was to simply hold out against the horrors hidden in the corners.

I wanted to live those worlds, so I did.

Don't get me wrong, the worlds were not the end all be all, but they were an escape.  An escape from the horrors I faced in this one.  It gave me the chance, for a half an hour during lunch and maybe an hour after school to be someone else, somewhere else.  A place I could win out against the bad people, or slay the monsters and get the gold and accolades of a grateful people as well as the accolades and cheers of my fellow players.  A place that didn't mean I had to be small, or weak or different.

Somewhere along the line, the games and how I played them began to change.  It wasn't just me, either.  These games were teaching us things.  They let us role play out situations and problems we had and likely never would have to face in our teenaged lives.  Problems of meeting people and speaking to them.  We had to role play them out, figure them out and we found that it wasn't always the dice that led to our success.  It wasn't so random as all that, no if we managed to role play around the conflicts, we had even more success.  Sure, you had to kill the monsters, but even the bad guys could potentially be talked out of things with a good argument and the people cheered even louder with a good speech to back it all up so we did that.

And we started taking those things we learned into other kinds of games.  Games with costumes and people and nothing *but* roleplaying.  Sure, we added foam swords and ways to "cast our magics" in the real world through bird seed or simple descriptions or rock paper scissors, but the games were still just games.  We would practice things with people or use our minds to solve complex storylines, dismantling plots and counterplots from story tellers and players alike, but we always went back to our pencils and papers and dice.

These worlds built us, just as we built them.

Our worlds became ones of real armor and wooden weapons.  Worlds where we faced not monsters or bad people, but real foes on the other side of a stick trying their damndest to ring our helms loud enough to force us to fake our own deaths.  A competition of physic and mind and speed to simply touch the other person with the blunted end of 42 inches of steel or a contest to send a golf ball ended shaft or a tennis ball across a crowded battle field into the opposing force.  We fought wars during the day, dreaming of times past and imagined chivalry.  We became paragons of duty and honor and love at night, or at least what we imagined those paragons should be through the lens of Victorian imaginings of what those knights should have been.

We took and taught classes, resurrecting techniques and clothing and fighting styles long dead, and we imagined ourselves as the people who did these things.  We crafted and cooked and brewed and all of this as entertainment and learning, we bonded together in our imaginings and we created households and friends and family. Our 30 year old selves, banding together to stand against the darkness we feared would surround us alone.

We became the world we wanted to be.

We took those lessons and we learned them.  We took them out into the wider world and became those dauntless warriors in our every day lives.  We fought against the tyranny of our circumstances and parlayed them into worlds where the nerds were the winners.  We worked in computers and in technology, sure, but in other worlds as well.  We brought it into science and finance and our ideas have rocked the world.

We brought our entertainment with us, creating new ways of telling our stories through screens large and small.  We brought our comics to life and the world embraced them because they needed that escape.  They needed to see a hero win.

Now I come to those worlds in thanks.  I teach them to the new generations and I bring them to my friends and family.  Now, more than ever, we need these worlds.  We need these times together to and in the shared victory of slaying the dragons we face every day.  To remind us that friends and family working together can overcome the odds and win out.  We can take 3-4 hours and sit together, spending a good chunk of it just chatting things out, or spend a weekend as someone else in the woods or spend a Saturday night on a campus somewhere dressed in satin, leather and velvet pretending to be the monsters.

I am a gamer.  We live in this world while we visit others from time to time.  The worlds may be imaginary, but the lessons they taught us are real.  We learned through them, and we became through them and those worlds have shaped us as we learned to shape our own.  We are geeks and freaks and we stand together as we change the world.

Just be careful not to become the darkness when you do.

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