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I Am A Gamer
Jan. 9th, 2007 06:12 amI don't like to ski. I pretty much hate anything that has to do with snow or more ice than you can put in a highball glass, and I have for as long as I can remember. And one time, on a family ski trip, I found a strange book with a picture of some guys climbing around on, and digging a jewel our of, some sort of underground demonic idol thingy. My dad said he'd buy me the book, but then I couldn't go skiing the next day. I took the book.
That book was the "AD&D PLayer's Handbook", which contained about a third of the rules one needed to know to play a game called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons- that's the AD&D part. Although I was a mere nine-year-old, I could not be put off by the arithmetic-heavy rules or the wonky syntax, or even the woeful incompleteness of the game. And when I could, especially starting when I was about 13, I found, or made up, similar games. These games were called "role-playing games", and those who played them were "gamers."
I didn't "game" so much once I was in college, and especially nor once I was in the graduate school. My need to perform complex mathematical operations was sated. And while I was away, the word "gamer" took on a different meaning. It meant someone who played a lot of video games, particularly "RPGs", which were automated parodies of the role-playing games I had played.
See, in my kind of game, now called a "pen & paper RPG", you pretended to be a fictional character, and your fictional character made his or her way through a fantasy, or science-fiction, or "realistic" landscape. (I say "realistic" because it wasn't. Those kinds of games were realistic in the sense that there were no aliens or elves or crap, but included things like espionage-thriller scenarios, which are not realistic at all.) There were elaborate math-intensive rules that determined what your fictional character could and couldn't do, and a person called the "game master" or "referee" who determined how the rules were applied in case of ambiguity or disagreement.
In a computer RPG, you took the role of a fictional character in a simulated world that you could see on your computer. And the visuals could be stunning, and a computer was certainly much better at doing math than any human referee. But the computer games felt like cheap parodies to me because you could never do anything the programmers hadn't thought of. One of the best parts of a "pen & paper" RPG is coming up with something to do that your referee never would have thought of in a million years, and watching him or her look puzzled for a minute and say, "Gosh. I guess that would work." By contrast, computer RPGs often relied on pathetically circumscribed menus that left out the two or three most obvious things I thought my character should try.
Eventually, I got back into pen and paper gaming. And that led me to try, despite my misgivings, a computer role playing game called World of Warcraft. And then I became one of them.
I'm the wrong kind of gamer, now. More about that a bit later.
That book was the "AD&D PLayer's Handbook", which contained about a third of the rules one needed to know to play a game called Advanced Dungeons and Dragons- that's the AD&D part. Although I was a mere nine-year-old, I could not be put off by the arithmetic-heavy rules or the wonky syntax, or even the woeful incompleteness of the game. And when I could, especially starting when I was about 13, I found, or made up, similar games. These games were called "role-playing games", and those who played them were "gamers."
I didn't "game" so much once I was in college, and especially nor once I was in the graduate school. My need to perform complex mathematical operations was sated. And while I was away, the word "gamer" took on a different meaning. It meant someone who played a lot of video games, particularly "RPGs", which were automated parodies of the role-playing games I had played.
See, in my kind of game, now called a "pen & paper RPG", you pretended to be a fictional character, and your fictional character made his or her way through a fantasy, or science-fiction, or "realistic" landscape. (I say "realistic" because it wasn't. Those kinds of games were realistic in the sense that there were no aliens or elves or crap, but included things like espionage-thriller scenarios, which are not realistic at all.) There were elaborate math-intensive rules that determined what your fictional character could and couldn't do, and a person called the "game master" or "referee" who determined how the rules were applied in case of ambiguity or disagreement.
In a computer RPG, you took the role of a fictional character in a simulated world that you could see on your computer. And the visuals could be stunning, and a computer was certainly much better at doing math than any human referee. But the computer games felt like cheap parodies to me because you could never do anything the programmers hadn't thought of. One of the best parts of a "pen & paper" RPG is coming up with something to do that your referee never would have thought of in a million years, and watching him or her look puzzled for a minute and say, "Gosh. I guess that would work." By contrast, computer RPGs often relied on pathetically circumscribed menus that left out the two or three most obvious things I thought my character should try.
Eventually, I got back into pen and paper gaming. And that led me to try, despite my misgivings, a computer role playing game called World of Warcraft. And then I became one of them.
I'm the wrong kind of gamer, now. More about that a bit later.
