The Gamer's Journey. How did you get to be where you are today as a gamer?

[Bride of Cthulhu]

I am semi new to this forum and I am interested in reading about other members' personal journeys as gamers. Who got you started? When do you think your 'game' was at its peak? What were your main discouragements as a gamer? Did you ever 'give up' on gaming? Do you still game now? Do you foresee gaming in your future?

Mostly, what has been the affect of gaming on your life socially?

Here is a look at my social history as a gamer:

I am a second generation gamer who grew up with veteran gamer parents and three older brothers who shoved graph paper maps under my nose as soon as I knew how to read. First through third grade was the emergence of what I called ‘paper character’ or ‘paper map games.’ I didn't make the connection and commitment to D&D until about fourth grade. I established two close friends ( both girls ) who gamed with me regularly, three or four days out of the week. We always met at my house because my parents understood D&D and had all the books and dice we needed and a vast library of comic books and access to miniatures and painting.

Soon, however, as Jr. High came around, one girl moved away and the other girl one day just flat out told me that (in more or less words) 'boys don't like girls who play D&D. Playing D&D and being a gamer girl makes you ugly.'

This was troubling. I had been popular up until my 'secret was out.' Not that I had been trying to hide it. I was a dancer, an outgoing student leader and active member of the theater and musical community, so I didn’t exactly fit the shy, geeky, awkward bookworm routine, but it was true. At my school, there were no table top gamers outside of my brothers and I and those we 'converted.' Since I was so 'weird' because of this, dating was out of the picture but I liked it that way. I wasn't interested in boys who couldn't hold their own against a hoard of Orcs. Despite the warnings of my peers, even with out a gaming group for a year or so, I stayed sharp on the world of gaming, Teen Vogue, Seventeen Magazine, D&D modules and home brewed campaigns were always at my fingertips. Weird combination. I know.

Though I did have friends, rather than attending most social events, I would be dungeon delving and dragon slaying; swinging my bastard sword over my head as I adventured across the land, rescuing the weak, and thwarting evil. Devil worshiper, geek, nerd, freak-- I heard it all. My parents, however, patiently braced me for these misunderstandings.

I finally made another gamer friend my age when I was 13 years old who is still, to this day, part of my regular gaming group. She had never gamed before meeting me but she was very interested in reading and comic books so soon enough, we were gaming regularly (D&D 3.0 mostly) with my brothers and random groups at the gaming store. High school saw a lot of gaming, finally including games other than Dungeons and Dragons (and upgrading to 3.5) as well as meeting boys my age who were also interested in gaming. Apparently I had been attending the one school in the country that didn’t have any guy gamers. My nose could not be pulled from latest comic book, beauty magazine or role playing supplement. Gaming was like a sport. I gamed every week and 'trained' by studying up on it when I was 'off the field' or away from the gaming table.

At long last, I eventually followed my dream and became a small scale professional gamer, running games at a local gaming store for cash and store credit and running games on site as well as at conventions for parties who wanted to experience gaming for the first time or who wanted to try out a new game system or for just a change of pace from the regular Dungeon Master of their group. I also ran workshops on miniatures painting techniques and became popular in the gaming community of my hometown. The money was good and my dream had been fulfilled. (Though I still daydream about how cool it would be to be a professional gamer as a career. Who doesn't?)

College saw most of this activity as well as introduced me to a regular gamer in my art and music classes who made sure to find a way into every game I ran in town. He had come from a weak gaming background but had the vast imagination I had hungered for in a gaming companion. Soon he was quite the expert and had the largest gaming library in town. He had more gaming books than any gaming store I had ever seen and I had helped him grow that collection with the guidance of my years of experience. Four years of gaming and growing together and we finally got married. We game occasionally with a group locally but often play one on one campaigns since moving away from our home town.

I do fear losing touch with our gaming once kids and real careers come along but the (no exaggeration here) THOUSANDS upon THOUSANDS of dollars we have spent on gaming books, accessories, art (we own several original copies of gaming book illustrations signed by the artists) all over our house make it hard to imagine losing touch with our gamer selves.

I am now 22 years old and no kids are on the horizon just yet but I catch gaming where I can which, for now, is still often. I hope to never stop gaming. I enjoy life and treasure my friends (yes, even those who aren’t gamers) but I will always be a Dungeon Master at heart.

 

[Bride of Cthulhu]

I realize it is a long post but if you would care to share your own gaming journey, I would really love to read it and communicate with others on their personal road to the gamer that they are today!

 

[edemaitre]

I started role-playing back in high school near New York City in the 1980s, when Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop RPGs were experiencing a wave of popularity. I helped co-found our gaming club, and in college, I briefly got everyone on my dorm floor to try playing. That's not to say there wasn't interpersonal conflict or varying levels of interest, but that's more because of late adolescence than gaming itself. Thanks to overlapping circles of acquaintances, I met the woman who eventually became my wife.

I had no trouble finding fellow gamers through grad school, and as my peers got older, began careers, and started families, it did get harder to schedule social events. Still, through the 1990s in Virginia and the 2000s in Massachusetts, I was fortunate enough to run groups of about a dozen people at a time. I've also had the pleasure of having everything from infants to 80-somethings sit in at my tables. The D20 wave of popularity helped in the early 2000s, giving people a common frame of reference, if not quite eliminating rules debates.

Now that most of my cohorts are middle-aged, we still manage to gather face to face regularly, and one of my groups meets via Skype. Are there challenges with finding good people and time? No more so than for any team activity, whether it be for work or sports. Video games and other media certainly compete for time and attention, but the Web also helps with meeting tabletop role-players, preparing for sessions, and finding appropriate systems and aids.

I've always tried to encourage younger people to try our hobby and to give anyone a chance to try out the Game Master's seat. I've stayed in touch with alumni from my campaigns as they've moved around the world, but I've also tried to stay open to meeting new people. My personal development as a role-player has been to cherry-pick what I've enjoyed most in past games while treating each new group of players and characters as fairly as possible. Fun is still the name of the game!

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I started out age 10-11 joining a little group in the East Middle School library in Aurora, Colorado in 1977/78. I was a lifelong reader of fantasy & Sci-fi due to my Dad and some odd happenstance.* The first adventure hooked me.

As we moved around- I was an Army Brat- I found that there were a lot of gamers in the military, both active duty and dependents. In the earliest days, I didn't associate gaming with unpopularity. I had lots of gamer friends, and there were lots of the other standard "reasons" to dislike me: overweight, short, smart, black.

It wasn't until I landed in a private school that I made the connection between gaming and unpopularity...juuuust as the "Satanic Panic" got under full sway. Mom was concerned at first, but the fact that I still went to church willingly, hadn't caused any problems with the monks at school, and generally hadn't changed a bit killed that noise early on. Fortunately, she never dumped my gaming stuff as happened to so many kids in those days.

By the time I got into college, my nerdiness was as much a part of me as my hair, and battles about the way I was treated because of my race had given me an internal toughness that any guff I got for being a gamer was truly immaterial.

So I basically don't advertise my gamerness, but I don't hide it, either. I don't bring my gaming to work- no books, no paraphernalia- but if you come to my house you'll see it. If it comes up in conversation, I'll discuss it. If I'm going to a gaming store and get asked where I'm going, I'll say I'm going to that store...assuming I'm not playing hooky, of course!














* one of my early school books included an excerpt from The Hobbit- Bilbo & Golum's riddles in the dark- and a short piece from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders setting.

 

[Morrus]

I think my story's pretty typical. I started at age 11ish in school with a group of 4 or 5 friends (none of whom I'm still in contact with, sadly). I stopped for a couple of years when I went to university at age 18, but by 21-22 I was gaming again having somehow accidentally found a few gamer friends. Then, over the next 15 years, I gamed pretty much constantly. The group has changed though - only one of those people I gamed with at age 21-22 still games. Also over 15 years, people have move away, two died, some got families and gaming became a non-priority.

 

[tangleknot]

The summer of South Park season 1, I must have been 12 or 13. My very first game was with 2 other friends we tried out D&D 2nd ed. I remember we bought a ton of dogs with our starting cash, used them to fight some orcs who happend to be carrying a Deck of Many Things.... Enough said, the game may have ended 15 minutes later but we were hooked. I had group of 6 friends who played through Junior high/ High school. Strangely we were actually "the cool" kids in our school. We even petitioned and got a school club to pay for our hobby. All of us went to same college and kept gaming until we graduated.

After graduation I moved out of state and gave it all up... 6 months later my GF (now Wife) told me to start gaming again as she was tired of me going through gaming withdrawals. 7 years later: I now play twice a month, and I've even introduced my wife to the hobby.

 

[Gilladian]

I was introduced to DnD in about 1976 by my older brother. He and I still game online regularly, though we live halfway across the US from each other. I met my husband at 14 at a game shop club meeting; we started dating even though he was a good bit older than me, and have now been married for over 30 years. We gamed continually through my HS and college years, and with only a few short breaks, have kept right on all our lives. I don't think we'd know what to do with ourselves if we didn't roleplay together. I'm mostly the DM, and our group is small (right now just 3 people; my husband, my mom and my best friend), but we've been together as a group for years. Gaming has, as you can tell from what I've said above, always been a family thing; nobody ever thought it was "dangerous" or "satanic" in my family, though my husband's parents would have preferred we have a different hobby; at least she will buy us dragon/fantasy art for Christmas!

I'd have to write volumes more to explain what effect gaming has had on my life; I was always an "outcast" in school, but it was as much because I was a teen with an older boyfriend in a very small community HS - moving to the town just in time for 10th grade didn't help; it wouldn't have mattered WHO I was, I wasn't going to fit in... gaming, being in the SCA, being a fantasy/sf reader, and not being "like them" were each just a tiny part of the picture.

 

[Fox Lee]

I had a female friend bring me to a local gaming club when I was in high school, in around 1996. My mum was pretty worried about it, because she was still on the tail end of her religious phase; she had been bullied into believing all sorts of crap about the Evils of Fantasy, despite the fact that she herself was a a lover of Lord of the Rings, Pern, David Eddings, Julian May, and everything else easygoing 70s kids were likely to have encountered.

My very first decision as a gamer turned out to be fundamentally indicative of my "thematics are your own" approach to game systems; I took somebody else's abandoned AD&D2 male human ranger, figured I'd have more fun playing a female elf, wrote that in instead, and had fun. My other character at that time was in an unnecessarily ridiculous Judge Dredd campaign (really unnecessarily. Her name was Judge Hairylegs.). For me, this was the "Hollywood tough girl" phase of character building; everybody (well, except Judge Hairylegs) was a hot, smart, independent young woman who yelled at men for ogling her big boobs even when she herself chose to wear sexy revealing clothes, and would inevitably have something horrible happen to her so she could be emotional and important. Ugh, I am embarrassed by that phase. In my defence, I was like 13.

So I played lots of stuff over the first few years, including Shadowrun, d6 Star Wars, TMNT, 2e Ravenloft, Call of Cthulhu, Palladium, a bit more Judge Dredd, and a homebrew system one of the guys made. When 3e D&D was launched, it was divisive enough to make some of my more grognardy gaming companions retreat a bit from the club, but solid enough that most games we started after that point began to default to it. Exceptions were a few systems/settings that leaned more towards our anime interests (Usagi Yojimbo and BESM). Unfortunately my particular group within the club also started going through some awkward bad blood at that point; my self-esteem was so trashed in high school that I had never really considered how being the only girl present might have been relevant to several my male friends, and the tension was not helpful. There were a few genuine fights after I brought my boyfriend along on the grounds that I reckoned he'd be a good GM (turned out he would, though dumping him headfirst into finishing somebody else's BESM game was in retrospect a bad choice). For me, this was the "playing broken baby bird boys" phase of characters; I started one emotionally damaged prettyboy and never really got to play through all of his development, so I made another and another until everybody was thoroughly sick of them.

It was also when I first planned to run a game - a Legend of Zelda campaign running in BESM - though it never actually happened thanks to the size of the potential group, me and now-fiancee having to leave the club for work reasons (though we still played regularly in games that could come to us). For me, this was the era of "actually playing nicely rounded characters"; I had matured enough that my female characters were no longer hypocritical action movie cliches, and my male characters were no longer worthlessly emo waifs. Memorable faces were Sidhe Smith, a hammer-toting half-elf blacksmith who had unofficially adopted the younger characters in the party; Cayden Willowby, a shield-bearing human paladin raised by halflings; and Kyrie Bladeborn, a stoic fist-fighting half-giant police officer with one fake arm.

In the year or so we were away, financial issues with finding insurance (what insurance company knows what a "Role Playing Club" is anyway?) finally managed to kill the club; what was left of it merged with the gaming club at university nearby, and when work issues eventually went away, that's where me and now-husband wound up. We were very solidly invested in 3e at that point, to the degree that we had developed a ton of homebrew/custom setting stuff for it, so we had a strong trend toward playing that (though we did a little d20 Modern as well). Most GMing was done by husband at this stage, to the point where he was often running multiple campaigns at once. We had also begun to pick up 4e; though highly sceptical of it at first, but the GMing tools won over those of us who ran games, very quickly indeed. For me, this began the "modern age" of characters; I more or less alternate between tough girl and pretty boy, with an eye towards trying not to make the same archetype too often within that mould.

I finally did run my first game right on the tail end of D&D3.5e, a heavily-homebrewed Bleach campaign that went quite nicely until two of our players had to move away. Since then, our group has almost exclusively run/played 4e campaigns, though there are often rumblings about d20 Modern or Exalted. Currently I am two modules deep (having skipped the second) into War of the Burning Sky, albeit a heavily homebrewed version where Leska is a male religious zealot and Simeon is a a strict English-accented headmistress

 

[Stormonu]

Mostly, what has been the affect of gaming on your life socially?

My dad showed me a news spot on the game (back when that kid got lost in the pipes, I believe - they were showing some 3D dungeon setups at Gencon, I believe). I asked for the game for Christmas, got it and two boxes of lead minis. I was in 3rd grade, about 9 years old. Until about high school, I played with school friends at lunch and we didn't pay attention to the rules or use dice back then. I learned a good bit of computer programming in those days, trying to emulate games like Dungeon of Daggeroth, Zork and the like. My masterpiece back in the early 80's, when I was in 7th grade was Danger in Halbard Forest, an Apple ][ program that was about 32 pages of dot-matrix paper length code.

I started getting "serious" about the game in 9th grade, just as Unearthed Arcana was coming out. New group, and I started learning the rules. However, it wasn't until I moved to Mississippi and started college that I hit my "peak", with a 2E game that lasted over two years and saw the characters hit about 15th level. I had a few more campaigns and groups after that time, and was lucky enough to marry a wife who enjoys playing RPGs.

During all this time, I was the DM about 95% or more of the time.

Somewhere in the 90's, I started getting tired of playing just (A)D&D (2E). For about two years, I switched to playing Vampire, though I still collected a lot of D&D. I eventually managed to get an adventure published for D&D in Dungeon magazine (#78, The Winter Tapestry). About two months later, TSR went bankrupt

I sort of took a D&D gaming holiday after that and started picking up other RPGs, like 7th sea, L5R and the like.
When 3E came out, I got a new group and started playing once again. I've been steadily playing since then, though I do occasionally play other systems - now sometimes actually as a player instead of always as the GM, and after the 'end of 3E' did a lot of Vampire again with my new group, and some Pathfinder.

I've always been a shy and somewhat reclusive person who likes to sit alone with a book or comic than be out and about with others. One of my favorite things to do (before my body started to betray me) was hide in a secluded spot half-way up a tree and just daydream about stories I'd like to write. I never did go out dating or any of that sort of stuff, and didn't even have a car or job until I was 21 - I just spend my time doing schoolwork or D&D. Once I did hit 21, I started looking back at how I'd spent my time sheltered away from what was going on around me and started to creep out of my shell. Not much, but enough to get married, have a career and have two wonderful kids - who are now well on their way to becoming gamers too.

Personally, now that I'm 42, I tend to see RPGs take up less and less of my time. I still like to daydream (a lot), but RPGs are no longer the primary way I share my imagination with others. I don't think I'll completely ever get away from them - I've got over six shelves full of them - but they don't take nearly as much of my time as they once did.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

My first exposure to gaming came through the D&D cartoon series and the "Gold Box" AD&D computer games. I can't remember why anymore, but I eventually started looking for the "board game version" back in junior high.


I got a copy of the basic Red Box and tried it once or twice with a friend. In short order I moved on to AD&D 2e. I ended up playing that with two other friends (always as the DM) for a relatively short period of time. I always seemed to have a hard time getting my friends interested. At the same time I amassed a decent collection of AD&D materials.


The "D&D is evil" phase was still going on at the time, but my parents didn't seem to have a problem with it, and I found the claims absurd.

Socially, I was a bit of a shy kid, somewhat of a nerd when young, but by high school I was more of a "who?" than a nerd. For unrelated reasons, I didn't finish high school, so that cut short some social life.

I bought a lot of World of Darkness products, as well as dabbling in some other RPGs. I still seemed to have a heck of a time finding players. I occasionally joined a one-shot run by someone else, but most of the time I ended up studying the rules and settings of many different systems, occasionally getting a friend or two into it for a bit.

Then I moved to another state, and found a group of gamers right away. These were fun, well-adjusted people, and I loved having a consistent group to game with. We played Shadowrun, Ars Magica, a home-brew system the GM was working on, and my first exposured to D&D 3e. Despite being in my 20s, I was still in a socially awkward stage of my life (not dating much, minimal social activities outside of gaming, etc).

After a few years of little gaming opportunity I found my current group while in college (yeah, I started late). Whether coincidental or related, I started socially developing shortly after joining my new group of friends. We became quite close completely outside of gaming, and I managed to put together social events and trips that played a major role in helping more than one of my friends find their future spouses. Gaming played no role I am aware of in my non-gaming social life, other than the fact that most of my closest friends are also gamers. We've focused on D&D (still 3e), but have also played other games.


During this time I've mostly played, but occasionally GMed. I still consider myself primarily a GM who hasn't had a lot of opportunity lately. I still game with the same close friends (new people join and others leave, of course), although most of us are geographically scattered and now connect via teleconferencing or VTTs.

For some reason, I've never self-identified as a geek, even a gamer geek. Although I love fantasy and role-playing, I've never been into comics, don't like MMOs, only started watching anime because Hulu ran out of other shows I liked, am not much of a fan of Monty Python, and don't fit a number of other stereotypes.


I have to admit I don't advertise my gaming to anyone I don't already know games. As a single guy, I feel it closes off too many opportunities.


So there is my ongoing journey. Fun topic!