Gaming and Growth

Hello, 

Welcome to the Shores of Night, where I talk about too many things. Welcome back if you've walked this beach before; at least you know where the half buried skull is (be careful, it bites). To stretch the metaphor, you know what sort of flotsam and jetsam washes up here: comics, roleplaying games, a bit of politics, a bit of philosophy (though that seems too fine a word for what I talk about). Add in some interest in history, paganism, and religion in general, and whatever the tide drags in, and you know what litters the shore. 

Or just life updates and complaining, which is all very much grist to the mill.

Today's flotsam takes the form of something I'm rolling around in my mind: roleplaying. I've been involved in the hobby for a long time - over 30 years - and it's ebbed and flowed around me. There have been times when I've loved it and times I've hated it. I've never really felt indifferent towards it and ever since 1994, it's felt like a central part of my identity, a large part of the mosaic that makes me, me. I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before that I started with WFRP but it didn't really take, and the hobby really caught my imagination with the World of Darkness, SLA Industries and Call of Cthulhu games I played at university. 

I was hooked and there were so many flavours of game to choose from that I plunged in, buying pretty widely from across the publishing world, though mostly focused on horror, urban fantasy, and conspiracy games. I bought more than I could ever run. I resented dropping money on games other people ran (using my copies). More than that, I always felt like I was questing after something I couldn't put into words. I wondered why people were content with just one game - didn't they want variety? (I realise, of course, that there are as many reasons for gaming as there are gamers - one person's paradise is another's poison). 

This restlessness of spirit is one reason I wondered if I had ADHD (and sometimes still do). I flit from one project to another, never committing to them long term. Paradoxically, the more choice I have, the harder it becomes to settle on something. At the same time, I've realised I'm bored of things like the World of Darkness and it seldom haunts me. These days, the game I find most interesting from that line is Changeling: the Dreaming, because it feels the most emotionally honest. I fear that element wouldn't survive at the table, though. Much of gaming culture seems loud, hard-edged and cynical to me now, and that feels like the very antithesis of Changeling. 

A big part of the problem is that it feels like roleplaying games encourage violence as a way to resolve issues. Killing enemies to fix problems has such a long history in the hobby it feels baked in. Games like Vampire or Werewolf are full of violence, even if they also enforce the idea that bloodshed makes everything worse. Werewolf even makes violence explicitly limited as excessive violence led to them being feared as monsters in the first place.  

More generally, it's baked into game design. Dungeons and Dragons grew out of war games, after all. In many ways, it feels like the basic pattern for most roleplaying games hasn't shifted very far from that basis. Some games, like Golden Sky Stories, go to the other extreme, having no combat rules at all. Others, like Nobilis, create new styles of combat that don't resemble traditional fighting at all. A duel which takes the form of gift giving or changing a neighbourhood to reflect your influence seems much more interesting than yet another firefight. To me, at least.

For a hobby built around imagination, it seems strange that these games are in the minority. I wonder why so many games wash ashore in the same shape. 

I've clearly changed, washed up on my own shore in a slightly different shape, and the question I face now is what do I want from the hobby and from games now? From how I feel right now, it'll be something different, more expansive, symbolic and surreal. Less a stormy sea that abandons chests of gold upon the black sand of my beach and more one that leaves dreams and visions. That's something for another time.