They say that the majority of girl gamers are introduced to role playing through White Wolf’s Vampire. For me, it was 2nd edition Masquerade. The pathos! The juxtaposition of an evil nature and a good personality! The exquisite, elegant, story lines! The black velvet!
My friends turned me on to role playing when I was in high school, and for a while I was playing fairly regularly. But I wasn’t a gamer. I was just someone who played role playing games. They aren’t the same thing.
I blame 1920’s Call of Cthulhu for turning me from “someone who plays games” into “gamer.” It was the first game I played with people that cared more about the story they were telling than about power gaming their build. I’d always done improve theater, but I’d never realized how much I adored the effort of collaborative story telling. But with this group, I was able to design a complex character with her own quirks and personality twists. They say you never forget your first character. She was 34. She had turned her parents home into a boarding house to support herself after her husband left her for a telephone switchboard operator and run off to Sacramento. She developed a pathological fear of children due to her inability to have them. And, of course, she inevitably went insane when faced with the eldritch horrors that peopled her world.
That game hit the switch. It flipped me into the world of the gamer. I stayed with that until I moved, and when I got to San Jose, one of the first things I did was locate a group. With them, I tried White Wolf games for the first time since I discovered Vampire. Then I took the plunge and offered to GM. My first Scion campaign ran for nearly a year. Turns out, I’m a GM at heart.
Now, I GM at least one game a week, and play in at least one more. I have an opinion on the pros and cons of a variety of systems, and can discuss them intelligently. I have a bookshelf full of RPGs, and a want list that would fill another.
I’m a sucker for the highly narrative games, that are built around telling a story rather than completing a goal. I adore new World of Darkness as a system, and most of their re-vamped games (except Requiem. Don’t get me started.) Independent RPGs, especially ones with unique premises, make me happy.
And, as if that wasn’t enough, I just got a tattoo based on role playing game book art.
I think that means I’m a gamer.
Gamers 3.0
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009How would your perception of gaming change if you knew your grandfather was a LARPer? If your Grandmother could calculate THAC0? I was driving in to work today and was thinking about getting my niece her first Pokemon starter deck when it hit me. First generation gamers are now old enough to be grandparents.
First off, nobody panic. Games have been around since the first cavemen played rock, rock, rock (widely regarded as unsuccessful). Even King Tut was a gamer, his game board is on display up in SF this week. And who can resist the old guys in the park playing chess? But we are the first to roll for saving throws. We bold few who enjoy games so much we adopt the title of “gamer” as part of our collective identity. Every generation that follows us is yet another wave of humanity who will ask “Am I in range to cast fireball?”
So what this means to me is that someday if I am lucky, I will get to explain D&D basic to my grandchild. “You see Billy, it came in a red box and a dwarf was both a race and a class.” And watch him scamper off into the next room where he will say that the game really lost its center when the 8.7edition came out. Oh and that the new holominis are so much better than the old holominis.
Yours truly,
Your Girl Friday
~Jason
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