MIB North Extras: Director's Cut: Just a phase?

Director's Cut - Just a phase?

It's fall semester of my freshman year in high school. I'd transferred again, leaving almost all my friends from junior high behind, and my inclination towards introversion is not helping matters. I have a Dungeons and Dragons book stuck under my arm.
"Hey!" a voice says behind me. "Do you play?"

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She's in my gaming group. We're not really dating, and she's much more into our time together than I am, but she's cute, and I've constructed a situation where I'm going to be able to kiss her while still clouding its context. It's rushed on purpose, a horribly forced and staged moment. Afterwards, it occurs to me that a real one might not be all bad.

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Our university gaming group is playing Illuminati. The guy next to me asks me if I've ever listened to the college radio station. "You ought to come down sometime. It's pretty fun, and the music is good."

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There's a message from an employee of Steve Jackson Games in my mailbox. "We are putting together a group of people who know our games and would be interested in demoing our games at conventions. We feel you would be a good candidate for our program..."

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I can understand how, for some people, gaming is a phase that they go through - a part of their life that becomes difficult to maintain, or replaced by other interests. For me, giving up gaming makes as much sense as giving up talking. It's a tool that has helped me meet interesting people, expose me to a wide variety of opportunities, and to this day still hints at more on the horizon.

Perhaps "tool" is too impersonal a word for it, but when I game, I do it to meet people - and potentially to open the door to other activities with them. My fondest memories at Gencon involve eating out with folks, or drink-soaked nights of clubbing, or quiet moments of conversation with someone. The stereotype of the unwashed, socially inept gamer still has some basis in reality, but it has nothing to do with the people I spend time with at a con. And, with enough positive reinforcement, we'll get the rest of them to come around, too.

I'm not so naive as to believe that gaming should even be the first topic I lead with for most people. But gaming is something that most people have some context with, whether it be family Monopoly sets, or Yatzhee at their grandparents' house, or college poker night. If I don't have the social skills to get them into a conversation, there's no chance for me to find out if gaming is something we potentially have in common. And, if not, I've still got comics, cooking, and college football to fall back on.

Being with fanatics is fun - there's a viral enthusiasm when you get a few thousand people together that share a common interest, whether it be games or infrared spectroscopy. The trick, of course, is to take that enthusiasm and let it energize you, without falling into the delusion that anybody outside the walls of the con (and, frankly, most folks within) has any interest in the minutiae of your RPG character, a turn-by-turn retelling of your last gaming victory, or your encyclopedic knowledge of game mailing list transcripts. If, however, your intense day of gaming has put you in the mood for a couple of drinks, trading double entendres with the redhead who was in the booth across the walkway, and making the pinball machine in the corner beg for mercy, then the first drink's on me.

This website is a tribute to the men and women I work with in the Steve Jackson Games Men in Black program. They are people who can expertly run games, but they're also folks that I have gone to concerts with, that I have played disc golf with, that I've gone spice shopping with, that I've done many other things with beyond gaming. Gaming is what brought us together, and I celebrate and respect that by trying to be an example of how gaming can make your life richer, not narrower.

Folks who game are fun. Come join us and find out why.

Alex Yeager
AlexYeager@yahoo.com
SJ Games North US MIB RD/Cheapass Games Demo Monkey