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Message: <blockquote data-quote="King_Stannis" data-source="post: 203708" data-attributes="member: 324">Ah, the ageless topic – us on the social ladder. My thoughts are this: Roleplayers have in many respects earned the derision that is heaped upon them. How is John or Jane Q. Public supposed to react when, on their first day of college, some smelly nerd dressed up like Graham Chapman in “The Holy Grail” accosts them and starts blathering on about the Monty Python Club and the RPG Club and how much fun it is. I should know, it happened to me - and I was a gamer at the time! Yet I still cringe thinking about it. I started thinking then that, “we have met the enemy, and he is us”. I started wondering why it was that most gamers couldn’t carry on a conversation about sports, politics, the weather, etc. without bringing gaming into it. Not all, mind you, but quite a few. Perhaps that is changing – who knows. In the real world, I would like to think I’m a fairly broad person who can talk with non-gamers about a bevy of topics without bringing in gaming. Does that mean I’m “better” than the nerdiest of nerds who blathers on to his workmates about “Veldor”, his 9th level barbarian? No, not necessarily. But I would say that I, and people like me, are a better ambassador to the public than those people.If you’ve ever gotten a reaction from people like “I didn’t know YOU gamed!”, chances are you may have just changed people’s perceptions about our hobby. If people run from you because you are conversant in only one thing, don’t wash and have bad breath, you haven’t changed anyone’s feelings about gaming. In fact, you’ve just reinforced several negative stereotypes.My advice to the most hopeless of gamers is this: hit the gym or the weightroom, open the sportspage every once in a while, go out and have a beer (leave your Princess Leia T-shirt at home), and try to actually make conversation with a non-gaming acquaintance about something other than “table-talk”. Sorry about the tough love, but it’s because some of these “I don’t care what the public thinks of me” lose..errr, I mean…gamers, that keep the rest of us in the closet, so to speak.</blockquote>

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