The gaming community: online compared to the physical world

[WizarDru]

Or, to be more analogous - take the subset of people who visit a particular coffee shop at least three times a week. We don't need to know the full habits of the rest of the population to differentiate the coffeeshoppers from the rest of the townsfolk. The only thing we need to know is that they don't go to that shop often.

But it sounds to me like the core argument being put forth is, to carry that analogy forward clumsily, that the infrequent coffee shop customer is entirely different from the coffee shop customer who sits in the shop and that he complains about stuff that no one else does...i.e. the guy who only takes his latte to go is saying that the location of the chairs in the store is bad feng shui, while the people who stay and drink there never discuss this or observe this as a problem.

I personally don't see the existence of a separate and distinct 'online forum gamer' versus a 'purely meatspace gamer'. It came across to me as 'well, these guys are just intellectually gabbing, no one actually ever really talks about most of these things in reality, just on the forums'. My experience has been that such discussions happen in person just as they do online (though perhaps the frequency and vehemency of the discussions vary) and that there is no hard and fast rule either for the discussion or the commenters.

 

[Hussar]

I dunno about you WizarDru, but I know that I've had conversations here that I would never, ever have with my gaming group.

 

[Umbran]

But it sounds to me like the core argument being put forth is, to carry that analogy forward clumsily, that the infrequent coffee shop customer is entirely different from the coffee shop customer who sits in the shop and that he complains about stuff that no one else does...

Nobody but you said "entirely". I'd say something more like, "substantially, and in ways you may or may not realize".

i.e. the guy who only takes his latte to go is saying that the location of the chairs in the store is bad feng shui, while the people who stay and drink there never discuss this or observe this as a problem.

More the other way around - the guy who pops in on Mondays to get his lattes to go is not going to care about the chairs, as he doesn't use them. The chairs are inconsequential to him. The folks who are there for several hours a day, however, will care very deeply about the chairs, as they are the ones with their butts in them.

And maybe that'll translate into a discussion of chairs, or maybe something tangentially related to chairs - like the flow of traffic through the store, or how cold the shop is (because the chairs may be grouped near the exit), or what have you.

Moreover, the folks who are in that coffee shop every day are... hanging around a coffee shop, shootin' the breeze. The Monday morning latte set are not. This says some things about each - MMLs are either more busyaat those times, or just don't like sitting around in coffee shops, while the regulars have the time and inclination. That speaks to having different concerns, in general.

Also, the regulars quickly develop a certain amount of groupthink, history, and common ideas that the Monday morning latte set haven't heard about. The Great Bean Controversy may mean a great deal to the regulars, who lived through so much of it and saw the fistfights, while to the MML people it is apt to have meant that a couple of times they came in and their coffee tasted a little funny, and at which they shrugged and moved along.

No, take this one step further, and realize that most folks aren't even MMLers. They never even enter the store! They live in other states and cities, and your little store means squat-all to them. Anything even vaguely particular to the store is apt to mean nothing at all to them.

My experience has been that such discussions happen in person just as they do online (though perhaps the frequency and vehemency of the discussions vary) and that there is no hard and fast rule either for the discussion or the commenters.

Yes, well, in my experience, most of the discussions seen here almost never occur in a gaming group. For example, the term "GNS" theory has never arisen at my table. We have never had anyone given a beatdown at my table over 3e/4e preference. Only one of my gamers regularly also runs games, and he does so with a different set of people altogether, so no "GM theory" discussion ever happens among my folks...

Your (or my, or Piratecat's, or whoever's) personal experience is, honestly, just like experience on a particular forum - it is experience with a small subset of gamerdom. Any small subset can (and in fact, is statistically expected to) have notable differences from the usual behavior of the whole. You have to specifically go out of your way and take precautions to select a small subset that does represent the whole reasonably well. This is the reality of statistics, upon which most of the science that supports your technological lifestyle is based. I wouldn't dismiss it lightly.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

"GNS" theory

What's that?

 

[Jack7]

Agree on the type of dwarf.

Thinking through the "real adventurer" versus "only in play adventurer", for the two games I run and the one I'm a player in, a lot of people have some "adventuring" in their background -- a Navy veteran, two Army Gulf War veterans (one was a tank commander who saw combat), one guy who was in briefly in law enforcement and was later a civilian expat, one guy who did two stints in Africa with the Peace Corps and was later a civilian expat, one guy who was a civlian expat in Vietnam, one guy who is the son of a State Trooper and is an avid gun collector/shooter/NRA member, two more who have been part of the "military industrial intel" complex in other ways, and two more who are civilian experts -- truly experts -- on military history (one makes his living from it).

So I'd say, in my experience, there's some correlation between being into D&D and being into "adventurous" stuff. It's by no means a complete overlap, or lack of overlap.

Oh yeah, and I think the player who's a surgeon and plays a cleric should count somehow too.

Sorry about the delay in replying haakon1. I got called away on assignment. I agree with everything you said and if I stated things in a way as to be misunderstood then I apologize.

It's a sort of parallel subject I know, but in my opinion gaming is generally good for you and can have many benefits for you in real life. I too have a number of military and law enforcement buddies who game or grew up gaming. (Of course I don't want to limit real life adventuring to just law enforcement or the military, many occupations are adventurous. I just used those because they are obvious and easy to understand examples.)

And you can learn a lot useful in gaming that can be applied to real world situations or to real world problem solving. (I actually first learned to read maps and navigate with a compass, and to draw accurate maps by playing Wargames and RPGs.) I think there is a correlation between gaming and problem solving skills, and even real life "adventuring skills." I've often argued for this. And I'm a firm believer that where the mind goes so will go the rest of the man, eventually.

My only point is that there is a certain sub-group of gamers who seem to separate out the real world and the gaming world (as if they are at odds with one another) or to stop at the point of mental imagination, and not go on to apply their imaginary capabilities (I'm not using imaginary in the sense of "fictional", but in the sense of, "beginning in the imagination") to other aspects or realms of their life.

That is the line of demarcation I think between gaming communities and real life.

Actually I think real life can be quite useful for gaming and gaming can be quite useful for real life, and I'm often stumped by those who imagine themselves some great thing (in their minds) but will not apply those same mental or physical or imagined or problem solving (or whatever they possess) capabilities to solving real world problems.

It seems to be a huge waste of potential.

And to be absolutely honest if some of this sub-group of gamers put nearly as much effort, mental energy, imagination, and outright devotion into solving the problems around them as they do to gaming (not that there is anything wrong with gaming, either as training or enjoyment or a spur to the imagination, or all three) then there wouldn't be as many problems around them.

That's my opinion of where the real line between gaming and the real world exists. And on what I see as a huge waste of real potential.

However I did not want to imply that all gamers are living in an escapist fantasy world or that gaming does a person no good. Actually I really believe the opposite, that gaming and the imagination can be very useful tools for the real world. It builds innovation, flexibility, and problem solving capabilities in the players. Rather than just relying upon magic, or technology, or super-powers, or whatever the mechanic du-jour of the game might be.

And as a matter of fact I not only let my players use their real world skills in-game (if it is appropriate - if we're playing D&D there is no use for computer skills, but there might be for analyzing codes) I encourage it and let the players write it into their character skill sets.

I actively encourage Real World and Gaming Skill-Set Interfacing and practice. I think it's good practice for the players and actually make sit far more enjoyable for them to be able to use real world skill sets in-game.

Anyways, gotta hit the hay. See ya.

 

[Rogue Agent]

Hussar, the OSR community would be much smaller without the internet, but some people would still be playing "old school" type games.. None of the players in my tabletop 1E AD&D game were recruited online. I've tried using the internet to recruit players, but the only recruiting successes that I've had have come by other means (e.g. one of my players knowing somebody that'd like to play, posting a notice in a gamestore).

Recruitment of players seems like a red herring to me. Recruitment of DMs is the important part of growing an RPG.

And what the 'net allows is the sustaining and transmission of memetic communities that would otherwise be too small and too dispersed in the real world.

Would there be people still playing pre-3E versions of D&D if the internet wasn't a factor? Certainly. But they mostly wouldn't be aware of each other; talking to each other; developing games; developing support products; or creating new ideas and communities that are capable of attracting others.

Re: The OP. Online forums are specialized communities. Specialized communities are generally going to self-select for those most deeply involved in the given hobby. This is true for RPGs just like it's true for anything else.

If you go to a forum of wine connouisseurs, their discussion is going to be very different from the vast majority of wine drinkers: They're going to be interested in specialty wines. They're going to discuss wine-related issues using specialized terminology and values that will frequently be quite foreign to the casual wine drinker (although that doesn't, necessarily, mean that it's irrelevant to the casual wine drinker).

Same thing with RPGs: Online forums are probably fairly representative of gamers who are deeply interested and involved with RPGs. This subset of the hobby is going to be interested in specialty games and yada yada yada. Given that RPG-playing is more of a niche than wine-drinking (which is completely mainstream), this subset is probably a larger percentage of the total population of RPG-players than wine forums would be of the total population of wine-drinkers... but one would assume it's still a minority. (Unless the hobby has completely collapsed in on itself.)

 

[Will Doyle]

...various cranks who adhered to discredited pseudoscience and bizarre conspiracy theories (like one very vehement poster who insisted that the Necronomicon was an actual ancient occult text discovered by HP Lovecraft and that he wrote the Cthulhu Mythos stories to deflect the public from the truth that Cthulhu et al is real).

I've heard this theory quite a few times, and it always makes me chuckle.

I think it probably stems from the George Hay "Necronomicon", a book published in the late 70s that suggested Lovecraft's father was a freemason, and claimed he'd copied much of his mythos from damnable masonic tomes. It even had a few pages photographed from the "real" Necronomicon.

A hoax of course, but that didn't stop people believing it. My girlfriend had this stoner friend who would regularly whisper about it in hushed tones. In fact, as a teenager I was hooked into it myself. When I was about 15, a friend and I even forged a "Scimitar of Barzai" out of an old hacksaw handle and tried to summon Yog-Sothoth on top of an old Celtic barrow, using an incantation from the book.

Happy days.

 

[Ahnehnois]

Frankly, my experience with ENW and other online venues is better than that with RL gamers, so I prefer to think that the former is actually a broader and more representative example of the gaming community.

Sure, ENW is a self-selected group of mostly DMs who are mostly relatively old (given the age of the hobby). That being said, it's people from all over the world from all different walks of life. There is some diversity here.

Conversely, when my gaming group split and went to college, we found that the gaming community at our various schools was not what we were looking for at all. When we had the chance, we reconvened in an almost obligatory fashion. Frankly, none of the (small number of) D&D players I've met outside of my own personal circle are people I would want to associate with.

With that in mind, I think ENW and online communities in general are a great way to diversify my perspective on rpgs. These people are just as "real" as the ones at my FLGS.

 

[Mark CMG]

Yes, well, in my experience, most of the discussions seen here almost never occur in a gaming group. For example, the term "GNS" theory has never arisen at my table. We have never had anyone given a beatdown at my table over 3e/4e preference. Only one of my gamers regularly also runs games, and he does so with a different set of people altogether, so no "GM theory" discussion ever happens among my folks...

There are gamers online (and even on EN World), too, that are strictly players and do not discuss things from a GM's perspective, many who do not know of GNS theory, and plenty who avoid the beatdown/edition war syndrome. So, there are gamers online that are similar to gamers in your own group. The "reality of statistics, upon which most of the science that supports your technological lifestyle is based" would dislike being used as a cudgel by someone who chooses only the data that supports his own claims. You should apologize to statistics. She will be displeased and will only serve you if you play nice.

You don't have to have a "core standard" to have a subset that is notably different from the whole.

Please define the "whole" and your relationship to it. Perhaps your understanding of the whole is skewing your impression of online communities as a subset.

 

[Umbran]

There are gamers online (and even on EN World), too, that are strictly players and do not discuss things from a GM's perspective, many who do not know of GNS theory, and plenty who avoid the beatdown/edition war syndrome.

Yep. I think you misunderstand. I'm quite aware that my personal table is not representative - that's the point! None of our personal tables are. I'm trying to show, rather than tell, that personal experience is almost always anecdote, and you can always find another anecdote that counters yours. We can bash anecdotes against each until the sun grows cold, and we'd not get closer to the truth of the matter.

As the old (and in this case, accurate) saw goes, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".