Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Games & Gameplay >

RPG's and other hobbies adversely affecting somebody's life?

All Acting Regiment

23:09 / 01.11.05

RPG's and other hobbies adversely affecting somebody's life. Can it happen? Obviously the Chick Tracts (if anyone wants a link, ask, but I doubt you can have got this far without seeing them already) are a bit crazy, but can these sort of hobbies have a bad effect on someone's social/emotional life?

I'm thinking about people who use the "beleif" in a fantasy world as a maladaptive coping mechanism- I think this is the right term- as a place to spend their time because the real world is dangerous, and also people who might use the hobby as something to be into when by all rights they should be doing something more social. What about other hobbies like fishing or stamp collecting?

Your thoughts/experiences welcome.

23:13 / 01.11.05

Yes, it can happen.

...

I don't know what more to say. Any sort of pastime can fit into that position. I got into a lot of trouble because of my interest in biting ducks, but in the end, by biting ducks all the time I was just avoiding dealing with reality.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

04:11 / 02.11.05

Look on the bright side... the ducks were left in no doubt as to what was real.

04:47 / 02.11.05

It can, but in my case for a much more mundane reason. I've pretty much given up LARP now, but used to be an avid enthusiast of it. At my height, I was writing the plot for the largest LARP event in Europe, whilst simultaneously writing several smaller events of my own, in addition to writing fiction (oh, and supposedly full time work was thrown in there somewhere to enable me to continue existing whilst this went on). I barely had a weekend off in two years, and was almost permanently having fictional distant relatives die off so I could justify more time away from work.

Well, the inevitable happened and I pretty much broke down with nervous exhaustion. Fortunately I'm much more sensible these days, and never let my enthusiasm lead me to take on more work than one person can actually manage.

07:37 / 02.11.05

Oh yes. One probable cause for my shamefully bad A-Level results was that I was spending far too much time doing a diceless superheroes RPG. I was revising and everything, but my mind kept drifting back to what my character was up to.

One thought, this thread would go quite nicely over in Game (and frankly Game needs all the charity threads it can get).

09:21 / 02.11.05

Yeah, move it. I'm a recovering LARPer and storyteller, clean for three years now. (although I did buy Paranoia XP and the new Mage book recently, it's just to have them there and read them, I won't play them, I am strong, oh yes, the computer is not my friend...)

While at University I was running an ongoing LRP campaign every two weeks, playing five or six weekly games and the occasional one-off, an annual 24-hour roleplay and ostensibly studying for a degree. Our girlfriends set up an RPG Widows club, but the adverse effects were largely minimal. I did see some other people descend into 'Tragic-the Blathering' addiction though, it's like crack.

13:30 / 02.11.05

I think I was guilty of this to a certain extent during my early to mid-teens - I spent more time gaming (starting with Warhammer and fading through to RPGs as I got older) than I did socialising in an orthodox manner.
However you could also say that spending my time with friends (admittedly geeky friends) sitting around a table was a healthier way of spending my leisure time than what most of my peers were doing at the time, which was consuming vast amounts of cider/alcopops down the park.
I grew out of it, but I do know a couple of blokes who didn't, and seemed to spend rather more time than was healthy thinking about their fantasy lives, as opposed to their real ones.

13:48 / 02.11.05

Because there were so many of us involved in this diceless rpg we used to hang round the local park in the evenings to do it. Every now and then we'd get the police drive up to us and ask what we were doing.

"Ummm, nothing."

Somehow you feel they'd be disapointed if you told them you were doing something as deeply geeky as rpg.

All Acting Regiment

16:53 / 02.11.05

However you could also say that spending my time with friends (admittedly geeky friends) sitting around a table was a healthier way of spending my leisure time than what most of my peers were doing at the time, which was consuming vast amounts of cider/alcopops down the park.

In terms of physical health, probably. But do you think that the park 'n' beer kids might find it easier than you to fit into a social setting? A pub, for example.

What I mean is, they were basically mimicking mainstream adult activity, whereas you were doing something that most adults (out of the whole population) don't.

I find this really interesting- the dichotomy between "normal" adolescent social activities- drinking,smoking,girls/boys etc- and "geekish" social activities (RPG's etc).

It seems that the "normal" activities, whilst setting you up to fit in better socially with the mainstream culture, have relationships, work well with the average colleague, sometimes render you incapable of having an alternate point of view- the cool kids are the natural conservatives.

On the other hand, people who've been involved in the geekish activities sometimes seem to live so far from the mainstream that they basically exist in their own world- in some cases I'd almost go as far to say a kind of autism seems to surface.

ONLY NICE THINGS

08:15 / 03.11.05

It seems that the "normal" activities, whilst setting you up to fit in better socially with the mainstream culture, have relationships, work well with the average colleague, sometimes render you incapable of having an alternate point of view- the cool kids are the natural conservatives.

I dunno - your roleplayers are sitting around a table, wearing comfort-fit slacks, performing calculations, annotating sheets of paper and pretending to be somebody far more impressive than they actually are - that seems to me to be a remarkably apt preparation for white-collar work.

08:34 / 03.11.05

Legba: I guess it could have been slightly better for my social development. But I'd like to make clear I did (and still do) go to the pub, parties etc, I just started slightly later (16-17).
Though I will say that as I spent more time down the pub, the amount of time I spent gaming decreased, though whether the two have a causal relation I'm not sure.
Hmmn, I'd like to give this more thought and get back to it, I've got the edges of a theory (or at least some points) but I can't quite articulate them.

08:46 / 03.11.05

I find this really interesting- the dichotomy between "normal" adolescent social activities- drinking,smoking,girls/boys etc- and "geekish" social activities (RPG's etc).

However our group of friends did a heck of a lot of rpg on weeknights and then socialised at the weekends with our non-rpg friends. Plus, our core group all did rpg to one level or another, so we were socialising with each other.

It's a bit of a cliched image of roleplayers that they're socially inept. It's never been true in my experience. Drinking, smoking, and girls/boys were all part of our groups teenage years. It's just that rpg was in there too.

ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!

11:50 / 04.11.05

I was never an RPG-er in highschool, because such things didn't exist in my area (Not publically, anyway).

However, I've seen a number of people who you could easily categorise as socially retarded become much more personable/socially ept individuals, through the influence of my primary group of Uni friends, who are a bunch of roleplaying geeks.

None of them (Including myself, most of the time) fit the image of the socially retarded/inept geek gamer. We have the occasional SRGG show up and join the crowd, but they (almost) always end up being fairly normal people who also game after a year or so of intense socialisation.

So, in general, I find that gaming is a positive influence (or: correlates highly with positive influences) in my experience. However, I have met several people (through conventions, mostly) who were smelly, irritating, and unable to converse in a normal fashion, as per stereotype, so I'm not claiming it never happens. I've met a similar number of similarly performing football fans, though, so it may just be perceptual bias on most people's part to attribute these characteristics to gamers specifically.

I think, with roleplaying per se, if people are playing a character which is challenging to themselves on some level (holding different views is a simple way to be challenging for some people) it can teach them that these sorts of differences are possible, and then they can generalise to the real world, and learn the important art of tailoring their responses to their environment. Which itself can be problematic in extremes, but is a pretty common part of normal social interaction.

17:18 / 04.11.05

ahh gamers . . .

i can honestly say that the worst people i gave ever known, i have all met through gaming. of course i have known many gamers who were great as well. but all the most repellent, ignorant and socially inept rejects i have ever met, have been through gaming. also, the most treacherous and evil people too.

but i think these people were fucked up before they ever picked up a d10. it just seems that people who already have problems are attracted to gaming and other forms of geekery.