Social Glue

I'm a gamer, I like to play games, all varieties of games in fact. I enjoy card games, board games, pen and paper roleplaying, computer games and even the occasional wargame though it's a rarity thanks to the fiscal and time costs. I play games for a variety of reasons, escapism, decompressing, creativity and simple enjoyment. I'm lucky enough to have a group of friends who are also gamers and for at least one of my kids to have developed an enjoyment of board games, we can play together from time to time.

The games I play most nowadays are pen and paper roleplaying games, like Dungeons and Dragons and the plethora of other games out there. I've been playing these since I was about 14 or 15 years old. It started with a wargames club I had joined in school, turns out a couple of the guys, from Australia, were D&D players. Specifically Ravenloft. I was a huge fan of fantasy at the time and have always been a horror fan, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula at quite a young age, it was pretty formative for me, so this looked like just about the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

Being teenagers these games were sputtering at best, I don't even remember much by way of details connected to these games but I do remember the feeling that creating something with my friends gave me. It was exciting and fun and simple. After those friends, whom I still miss, moved back to Australia when I was about 15 or so, another friend of mine had found his way into another social circle, which I became part of over time. This social circle also happened to be gamers, mostly computer games, but they were huge fans of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale. Between that and the fact that a few of them were into online play by post gaming we ended up going through a phase of making our own games, back-engineering the rules of D&D out of these computer games, adding our own twists and ideas. Some were successful, most weren't, but we had fun all the time.  

My friend, the one who introduced me into this social circle, calls these the Lost Years, on account of our lack of funds for buying actual gaming books and just cobbling what we could together. I prefer to think of these as the years I really found myself and the people I would be friends with to this day, nearly 15 years later. We still game together, even with jobs and marriage and kids, we find the time to game together. We play as reluctant heroes, smuggling goods between planets; as wizard detectives in modern London, desperately working inside a deadly political system; as hardened survivors of a psychic apocalypse, trying to make our way in world out to kill us; and as sword swinging adventurers, employees of a swarthy rogue. We do other things as well, obviously, we still have get togethers in each other's houses, drinks and chatting, our non-gaming friends and families hanging out, but I think games have definitely helped keep my circle of friends cohesive.

I'm pretty thankful for this.