The reality of Geekdom

I'm at least on a roll, possibly in a rut, but I am feeling rather inspired this week, possibly because I just spent four days doing what I love more than anything in the world - gaming.

My husband has always been very secretive about his gaming hobbies.  Almost no one at his place of business knows where he goes when he takes a week of vacation in August.  I, on the other hand, generally live by the principle of "If you've got a problem with it, that's your issue, not mine."  When someone at work asks me where I'm going, I tell them.  When they ask me what GenCon is, I tell them.  And at my current place of business, the response is mostly confused looks, followed by repeated questions of "so..is this like something you do competitively?"

Honestly, "competitive gaming" is such a scary thought that I don't like to even dwell on it.  Certainly there are players who see it that way, and they annoy the piss out of the rest of us.

But then the question becomes 'What's the point?"  Why do I play games in which there is no winner?  It really is the joy of playing, but I understand why people think that's a cop-out answer. 

Is it that I don't like reality?  Well, occasionally.  Honestly, don't we all at least occasionally wish we were somewhere else, or we were someWHERE else?  And for the majority of role-players, that's what the hobby is about: being someone we're not in an acceptable setting for such behavior, so we can go back to our mundane lives without causing a stir. 

Are we unhappy with our real lives?  Not particularly.  But reality, honestly, is pretty boring in comparison with what it could be.  Granted, boring has its benefits.  In the real world no one is trying to kill me or depose me or otherwise destroy me.  Is my fantasy life something I wish I was living?  Not a chance in hell, in most cases!  Fighting crime is hard and dangerous work, and in some games, I'm not even the good guy.  On occasion, I can be a really rotten bastard in-game.  It's a joy to cut loose and do that on occasion, but it's not something I'd actually want to submit real people to.  Really horrible things happen to us in-game too.  The Star Wars game that has been referenced several times in my post is a great example.  Best scene I was ever in involved the death of five other characters, including my in-game boyfriend.  I had real tears in my eyes as it played out. Oh, and did I mention I was the one who killed them?  The BF informed us that they were doomed anyway, and there was a big baddie on their ship, and I gave the order to blow it into little bitty pieces.

And people ask me if I would prefer my imaginary lives.  Are you kidding me?  It made a great scene in a game, but I would never, ever, want to live through that or anything close to it.  That's the difference between fantasy and reality, folks.  And, yes, most gamers are very, very aware of the difference between the two.  It's been an interesting journey the last two years, playing a character responsible for the death of a loved one.  The character is a mess now, as one might expect.  But it's only fun BECAUSE it is fantasy, because no one actually died, because my character's devil-may-care attitude and drinking problem are things that I have chosen to play, not things that have actually been forced upon me by circumstance.  (suggestion to other gamers: alcohol and blasters really don't work well together,  just trust me on this one.  They are, however, occasionally hysterical together.)

And for this character in particular, we've ended up with a certain personality within a personality, which I find amusing, to say the least.  Very early on the character got nicknamed "Crash & Burn," due to her creative piloting maneuvers.  Almost ten years later, most people don't even know Crash has a real name, and she occasionally gets pissy about it, and I just laugh at it.  One of the judges actually double-checked that I was playing Crash at GenCon because he overheard me being called by a different name - the name I originally made for the character.  My character has a character.  There's me, and there's the character I created, and then there's "Crash," the character that other characters see, regardless whether that was my original plan for her.  And they are three sometimes separate people.

Are there connections?  Of course.  As much as I try to actually roleplay, to play someone I'm not, my own personality sneaks in.  Most of my characters display snarkiness and sarcasm.  I just can't help myself.  That's me.  Many of my characters have some sort of serious flaw, generally physical, and I can only guess that that stems from my physical limitations.  There's something about overcoming personal adversity that I enjoy playing.  A number of characters also have particularly dynamic with their fathers, although I haven't been able to logic that one out yet, as me and my own father are neither notably close nor estranged.

(ok, I've completely lost my train of thought, so I'm going to end things here, as my husband just came in bragging that he ran over two mice with the lawnmower.  Blah!  Not something to brag about, at least in real life.  Now there are mice bits all over my yard.  Yuck.)

Comments

[Badger]

You're my hero! :-D

[DeweyS]

I know several gamers and con-goers and LARPers but while they've told me about their activities and shown pictures, your post really gives me an idea of how it feels.

Thanks.

I will also add that I intentionally hooked one of my my nephews on Dark Age of Camelot so we could "hang out" despite being 700 miles apart. So in that case our escape from reality was in service of reality :)

[Daniel]

As many of you know, all four of our kids play World of Warcraft, and two of them are level 60 warlocks, so I do a lot of thinking about these massive multiplayer worlds. On top of that, I'm professionally fascinated by the idea of integrating game concepts into the way we present news online.

Anyway, late last week it occurred to me that gaming could conceivably challenge Milan Kundera's idea of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," which has to do with the fact that there are no do-overs in life. Things happen, we make choices and we never know how any of the alternatives could turn out.

Will that be true for all future generations? The ultimate game would be one in which you play yourself, with all your attributes and history, in an alternate future. Seems impossible, but then again, the Internet seemed like an exotic fantasy when William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in 1984.