Gaming and me

            Gaming, especially the role-playing kind, has become one of the rituals of my life.  In high school, it ruled every Friday afternoon from the time school ended until perhaps seven in the evening.  For those four hours each week, we got to pretend to be all kinds of different people.  It was where my closest friendships in high school came from, which is interesting, because we forged those friendships not as ourselves but as a variety of characters. 

            Actually, thinking back on it, my love of playing someone else began earlier.  I gloss over video games too easily here, but they were my first experience in gaming, and they have maintained a place in my life even now.  I may have asked my parents, back when, for the system that had Mario, meaning in my childish, brand-addled way Nintendo, but my desire for Mario ended as soon as I encountered Link at my cousins’ house.  I became enamored of the Legend of Zelda, so much so that when my copy stopped working (even when I blew into both the cartridge and the game unit) I had to have another one.  And despite some disappointment in Legend of Zelda 2: Link’s Awakening, that series has remained one of my favorite of all time. 

            I don’t remember being particularly unsatisfied with my childhood.  I think I played these games, which despite the inability to modify the characters are still role-playing games, out of simple enjoyment.  It was easy to love.  The character has an easily defined quest to complete, usually before some great evil takes over, and a sword and other tools with which to complete that quest.  Along the way are any number of baddies trying to stop him, and he can defeat them with a little deduction and practice. 

            Such easily defined goals had immense appeal to me.  As I got older, and began to interact with my classmates at a more adult level, I began to realize that there were things that were different about the way I viewed things.  I was raised in a religious household, and the restrictive views of my parents and church kept me from many of the things that could have formed the basis for forming friendships.  I had never been allowed to participate in sports activities, for example, because these were usually held on weekends, and I would not have been able to miss church on Sunday mornings.  Or Sunday nights, for that matter.  Or any of the other times that a child should be there, participating in church activities.  Not being able to discuss sports presented a real roadblock to popularity, and so I felt set apart.  There were other reasons as well, that would become even more significant as I got older, but those were not apparent yet.  At least, not to me. 

            These challenges were beyond me at this stage; but, where I lacked skill in the actual world, I was still able to overcome challenges and finish quests in the virtual worlds.  These virtual worlds became even more of a draw for me, and I remember spending hours playing the original Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, and Crystalis games for the Nintendo.  Super Nintendo brought me such gems as Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, the Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy II (IV), which is still one of my all-time favorites.  Games like these got me through some awkward transitional years.  I had questions about sexuality, what mine was, and whether it fit in with both popular opinion and religious belief.  I didn’t like the thought that I might be different, and turned to video games as  a means of avoiding, or at least postponing the questions. 

            In high school, I joined the Science Fiction & Fantasy Club, which was really a euphemism for the role-playing game club.  The school wouldn’t allow a club with that exact premise though, so it had to be hidden under the semi-educational guise of a club for readers of those genres.  This was perfectly acceptable to the club members, for whom playing characters became second nature.  This was the first real gaming ritual I had, and I loved it.  I had enough friends to get by, and could ignore the taunts of other classmates, secure enough that I had a place.  And for four hours a week, I could be almost anything.  My first character was an elven cleric, who could heal, and who wielded a halberd even though the rules prevented it because we were all still learning the game.  I think he blew up after drinking an unlabeled potion.  Hey, I was still new to role-playing, and I didn’t know any better. 

            It was easier to recover from mistakes in role-playing.  If something fatal happened, a new character was some dice rolling and chart consulting away.  If I wasn’t doing as well in the real world, I decided that I didn’t care.  I had something else to turn to. 

            The real problem began when I got out of high school.  The people with whom I had been playing went off to college, and I stayed local, and then started working.  Somewhere along the way I stopped playing games.  I stopped role-playing because I couldn’t find a group of people to play with, and I stopped playing video games because I was working and trying to save money for school.  I don’t want to give the impression that I was alone and lonesome; I had friends, and had an entirely too active social life.  But it was a life that I absorbed from the friends I was hanging around with at the time.  I went clubbing frequently, and as one of my best friends loved movies, I saw almost every movie that came out in theaters. 

            It took a long time for me to realize that I wasn’t happy.  I am somewhat ashamed to say I took it out on my friends in ways I didn’t even realize were unhappiness.  Looking back at this time, I realize that I didn’t really have anything in common with this particular group of people.  I didn’t listen to the same music they did.  They weren’t big readers like I was.  I had some common ground with video games, but only with a few of them, and none at all really with my “best” friend.  I wonder now if I was myself at all with them.  I think this is also when I started having outbursts and mood swings, which turned out to be signs of a larger problem than I realized at first.  My relationships grew strained, and then, out of convenience and mutual desire, ended.  

            There came a period when I wasn’t really hanging out with anyone.  By merest chance, this period of exile ended at work one day when a coworker noticed me reading through a role-playing game manual that had come in.  I hadn’t played anything in years, and in the time I had been away the game had changed greatly.  I don’t even remember why I was reading this particular manual.  I think it was simply to have something to read on a break.  My coworker noticed and asked me if I played, and I replied that I had in high school.  From then on, she tried on numerous occasions to get me to come over to her gaming group.  For whatever reason, I resisted, until a particular event made it too convenient to ignore.

            In many ways, I owe my current group of friends to J.K. Rowling.  I was managing a bookstore, and the release of the fifth book meant that I had to work all weekend, instead of having Sundays off as I normally would.  Sundays were when this particular gaming group met to play, and as I was going to be in the area anyway, I said I would come by and meet everyone.  And I did.  And I kept coming, and still have almost every Sunday since. 

            This group of people was a revelation in many ways.  They were adults, raised largely in an urban area, and as capable of navigating their actual environment as they were the imagined environments we shared.  They weren’t socially inept or introverted; they didn’t stay holed up in their rooms unless they wanted to be.  They accepted me not just because of my interest in playing, but because that is the kind of people they are, and we’ve grown together over the last seven or so years.    

I have a new gaming ritual now, in the Sunday night sessions that began long before I even met this group of friends.  Interestingly enough, we aim for four hours at a time, which must be a magic number for role-playing games.  Perhaps the various games I’ve played are practice sessions where I try out different methods of interacting with people.  Perhaps I was just waiting for the right group of people to come along.  I certainly feel more comfortable in this group of friends than in almost any other group of people I’ve known before. 

More than simply being myself, I think my friendship with these people has helped me to define myself, to become myself  Over the last few years, I’ve developed some concrete goals about what I want to do with my life.  I’ve taken trips to places I would not have gone before, in real and imagined worlds.  It seems strange, looking back at years of playing games that I should find myself most fully realized through the act of pretending to be someone else.