D&D General Gamer Stats From White Dwarf in the 80s

Considering some of the crazy stuff made on minecraft which would have taken hours and hours of work, I'm not sure I'd call people playing minecraft casual.

It's funny because I chafed at using 'gamer' to describe people playing video games for a while.

It just sounded weird to me.

I was used to it meaning what we now term as 'hobby gamer'.

Spending countless hours painting Warhammer figures and then playing games with them on highly detailed maps is far more involved than turning on an Xbox and playing Call of Duty.

The meanings of words change over time.

My grandma occasionally plays solitaire on her computer. Who knew she was a “gamer”. She certainly wouldn’t consider herself one. I guess now I get to brag that my 97year old grandma is a gamer.

Lanefan said:

My guess for part of it is that in the early pre-confederation days there just weren't enough kids in a lot of the small towns (i.e. anywhere not named Montreal, Quebec City, or Toronto) to support a school for each gender, so they all went to one school instead and thus mixed schools just became part of life.

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Despite what one might think of Anne, Anne of Green Gables is a pretty good look at rural life in Canada during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I don't know whether discussing the semantics on who or what could be defined as a "gamer" via outside means leads us anywhere. The statistics have their own definition (someone who plays video games every now and then) and with that definition comes other implications, like knowing how to use the tech required to play said game (even if that's as simple as just putting on your computer... which means that 1) you own one and 2) you're not a technophobe).

Whether the people playing video games would self-identify as a "gamer" (and I guess this is the only other "definition" that could count here) is on a whole different table. One could argue that less women than men who play video games would self-identify as a gamer, but 1) I haven't seen any statistics on that question and 2) being a "gamer" has certain social connotations, which is why your grandma wouldn't want to sit in the same bus as 15 years old Timmy who plays Fortnite all day.

My own idea is that gaming (as in "playing any video game") has become so normal that we should treat it the same way as watching movies or reading books.

Going back to the thread's original topic... playing roleplaying games isn't where playing video games is yet. But I doubt that the people who make these statistics make more systematic errors than we would by, say, counting the gender tags of all ENworld forum members or looking at FLGS gatherings.

Lylandra when you want to play do you do a session 0 or do you look for a specific type of game?

Forums have made me aware of session 0, our games were essentially self contained for 20 years so same group with replacements one at a time.

They left it up to me to do world building. I would check with them if I wanted to run something different like Darksun.

I had a female players in the 90s and she was into Wicca and wanted an Amazonian area of the world with a goddess so I just drew it in the map for her.

The guys didn't really care. I'll do requests, most people don't bother asking though.

Oh, I'm basically the same. My group has been plaing for 15 years now with the occasional break and they are more focused on the RP part as well.

I joined another group recently, but I asked the GM (a colleague of mine) about the style beforehand (homebrew world and a healthy mix of all pillars and also avoiding racial stereotypes) and the other players happen to be pretty new to the game. One of the newbies is a woman who's really enthusiastic about the game.

But yeah, I'd basically do a session zero for future groups or adding new players to new campaigns. We're still looking for someone who's as enthusiastic about being a DM as we are when it comes to playing our characters for our "old hare" group...

Lylandra said:

Oh, I'm basically the same. My group has been plaing for 15 years now with the occasional break and they are more focused on the RP part as well.

I joined another group recently, but I asked the GM (a colleague of mine) about the style beforehand (homebrew world and a healthy mix of all pillars and also avoiding racial stereotypes) and the other players happen to be pretty new to the game. One of the newbies is a woman who's really enthusiastic about the game.

But yeah, I'd basically do a session zero for future groups or adding new players to new campaigns. We're still looking for someone who's as enthusiastic about being a DM as we are when it comes to playing our characters for our "old hare" group...

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Gotcha I normally aim for a 4 or 5 person group and will do requests within reason.

Are you familiar with adventures like Isle of Dread? Still has combat but more exploration pillar.

I'm thinking of doing. 5E Greyhawk campaign circa 1977-83. I'll probably need a session 0 for that one so if anyone doesn't like that idea they can voice is session 0 and if it's more than 1 or 2 players don't like it it's a bad idea.