The Sociality of Gaming

Of Friends, Frustrations, and Adventures across Time and Space in Small-town New England

My first foray into the world of gaming was thanks to my brother. From somewhere he had procured AD&D 2^nd edition books and a couple of Marvel RPG boxes, and I became his test case for his DM/GM experiments before he developed his own gaming group of friends. My imagination was primed with my brother’s comic books on the one hand, and a bookshelf full of fantasy novels on the other hand. My first fantasy series was The Lord of the Rings, and later I devoured anything from the Tolkien universe and eventually branched out to the Mossflower series, at the recommendation of a certain Nalfeshnee. 

By high school I was blessed to have a great group of gaming friends, about 5-7 depending on the game, each of whom brought something unique to our games, and made every session unpredictable—often frustrating as a DM/GM, but undeniably fun. We had M, a consummate second-generation gamer who forever thwarted my plans with his incessant Stoneskin spells; his house also served as a second home to our gaming group. We had TC, a guy who was great at getting into character and had an unpredictable gaming style, and who often ended up dead early on through no fault of his own, but rather just bad luck; through his Boston Chinatown connections he brought various enigmatic and artistic oddities from across the globe. There was Tyson, a hardcore logical gamer who calculated all aspects and managed to cultivate characters who became catastrophically powerful; he also brought the heavy music to match, and I learned of NIN, KMFDM, Tool, and many other bands through him. There was N, the polymath with a photographic memory who spent most of his time reading any gaming book that happened to be on the table, seemingly not paying attention, but always managing to somehow twist my story plans and keep me on my toes as a DM/GM; he was the Warhammer connection, who occasionally hosted our group at his hermitage in the forest and always had a pile of White Dwarf magazines in the house.

There were also two off-and-on gamers: E was the original Mossflower gamer from our elementary school days, who balanced RPGs with sports and his busy social life; S was a passionate gamer with explosive energy as well as a penchant for hiding dice, but who would frequently disappear from the table for weeks on end. We gamed entire days away, taking breaks to eat pizza, play badminton with broken rackets, and throw sticks at each other until someone’s head would bleed. A motley crew indeed, but a fine crew that I would (and figuratively did) sail to the ends of the earth with.

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Foiled Plans, Bob Marley, and the Dwarf who Ended the World

The campaigns were epic, and so were the frustrations of being the DM of a motley crew of violent belligerents, snarky story-breakers, and distractable pranksters. How many times did I spend days planning out the backstories and side stories of certain characters, only for their dramatic entrance to end as abruptly as they appeared with an axe to the face or a Disintegration spell that literally erased my plans…? Although I loved all of the games, for me, AD&D was the core. Our AD&D campaigns ranged from conventional Forgotten Realms dungeon crawls, to an interplanetary reign of terror across the realms of Spelljammer and Planescape in the bastardized Bob Marley-themed assault craft, the We Be Rammin’. And yes, there were giant space hamsters, as well as an epic battle with a celestial dragon that ended with a Xixchil (the “mummified bugman”, a moniker taken from a certain Ren & Stimpy episode) literally eating its way through the dragon’s brain. In our foray into a (very loosely) historically based campaign set in an anachronistic medieval Roman world, my frustrations over the stubborn story-breaking antics of one particularly surly dwarf led me to make the entire Earth explode in order to end the campaign. 

School breaks were the times for epic gaming sessions that could range across several days at different friends’ houses. While AD&D continued to be the mainstay for me, there were also many days of massive-scale Battletech clashes with hexagonal terrain maps spread out across my entire living room floor, as well as New Year’s Eve gaming sessions that literally stretched across years. When we tried to add a Mechwarrior element things got complicated. But in the end, most battles ended with the mutual carnage of death-from-above attacks all around. 

While world-building and narrative creation were my favorite aspects of the games, I did try my hand at painting. The results were atrocious. Pewter AD&D models turned into lumps of what looked like colorful melted wax thanks to poorly mixed paints, cheap brushes, and unsteady hands. Given pewter’s softness and my own clumsiness, many a model ended up with broken weapons and/or missing limbs, and indeed one of my favorite parts was splattering them with red paint in the end to make the best out of their battle-scarred bodies. Plastic Battletech models did not fare much better in terms of paint jobs, though thanks to their bulky plastic materials they survived the skirmishes with my paint brush without the amputations suffered by the pewter AD&D models. Still, (badly) painted or not, the models were just one part of the greater enjoyment of gathering around a table with friends.

With AD&D and the other RPGs, I maintained some control of the story arcs, but when it came to tabletop war games, I was hopeless. I skirmished with Warhammer Epic and 40K, borrowing my friend’s armies, and always ended up annihilated. I eventually bought a Necromunda gang of Delaques, and my record with them was impeccable—not a single win to my name, but plenty of battle-scarred bodies. I played mostly with Tyson and N, and I have vivid memories of playing through the dystopian towerscape with my Delaques in my basement, while listening to the Akira soundtrack. (As an aside, the aesthetics of a dystopian metropolis were very attractive back then; I must admit that now that I have lived in a real one—where I witnessed my local mall turn into a warzone between heavily armored state stormtroopers and petrol-bomb wielding, gasmasked resistance fighters—my fantasy for such a world has been tempered.) At any rate, eventually my Delaques found a new master with Tyson, who led them to flawless victories. A born commander I am not; indeed, my tabletop gaming forays taught me a lot about how to lose. I eventually came up with the strategy of fighting “to the pain”—not quite in the Princess Bride sense, but rather with the explicit aim of causing as much chaos and pain as possible for the other army before being completely destroyed. It was a “strategy” I would later bring to other strategy games like Risk, with the same inglorious results. But in the end, it was all about gaming with friends. 

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RPGs as Wormholes: Time Warps and Convoys Across Space and Time

RPGs were both an outlet for expression and an entryway into the exploration of new worlds and interests. I was always torn between my passion for medieval history, archaeology, and fantasy, on the one hand, and my fascination with foreign languages and cultures, on the other. As a child, RPGs could help cultivate these interests, and as I grew older, I learned that both were aspects of the holistic field of anthropology. As a result, my post-high school life trajectory carried me in the direction of the study of global human culture. It was thus inevitable that this would take me far away from my hometown and friends.

I left for college out of state, and gaming became an infrequent holiday activity during semester breaks. On these occasions, Tyson took over the role of the DM, and I thoroughly enjoyed his knack for creating deep narratives. He could spin worlds and craft tales that were beyond my capacity, and I was happy to be carried along into his world. I also enjoyed the chance to be PC rather than a DM—the world is very different on the other side of the DM screen, when you don’t literally rule the world. 

In retrospect, I am grateful that my last days of gaming were as a player in Tyson’s worlds. It left me with good memories. The earth has catapulted around the sun over two dozen times since those days. Since then, my connection with roleplaying has been severed. I no longer even read the kinds of fantasy novels that had sustained my imagination in those days. My job is 90% reading and taking notes or editing what I read, and so I am no longer even really capable of reading for fun. Nor do I have the capacity to write for leisure, either—in fact, the musings here are probably the first time I have done so in more than a dozen years.

As for the old gaming group, life has taken us all in different directions. There were marriages, divorces, arrests, illnesses, injuries, parenthood. At times, our old group was scattered across the U.S., Asia, and Africa. Some disappeared for years and resurfaced; one disappeared and is still MIA. I ended up settling in the Antipodes. For various reasons, a decade went past without being in touch with many of the old crew. But as I age and the detritus of my life is sifted away, I am left reflecting on the meaningful connections that remain, and I am reminded that the deepest friendships are the ones that can be picked up decades later, no matter how much our lives have changed.

These connections are the constants in life that keep me from disintegrating into nihilism, by keeping me tethered to the ontological fact of myself as a creature with a distinct socio-historical dimension that flows into the present and extends into the future. The anthropologist David Plath describes the ways that our friendships help to orient, shape, and maintain our sense of self by using the term “convoy.” Like the Navy convoys that he was a part of during World War II, Plath describes our social convoys as the protective group of consociates that we travel through our life with (even if some may leave and new ones may join), which give us a sense of identity, purpose, and direction. Plath suggests that our convoy in life has “the power to certify which version of [one’s] life narrative is ‘authoritative’” (Long Engagements, 1980: 288). My friends from the gaming table gave me the literal opportunity to narrate lives and worlds, and our joint creations around that table shaped the authoritative document of my childhood experience.

Reflecting back, in the sociocultural desert of semi-rural suburban northern New England, friendship was salvation, and RPG and tabletop gaming was the ritualistic excuse for us to gather round a table and spend hours talking, laughing, eating, fighting, and spinning lots and lots of dice. Through gaming I found friends like Tyson, M, N, TC, E, and S, and most of these folks remain my best friends 30 years later, despite the long time-lags between communication and the thousands of miles between us. As Plath also suggests, these folks have not only been part of my life; they have been the co-authors of my life’s biography. My life could not have been written without them. And I would like to give a special acknowledgement to Tyson for giving me the opportunity—and this community space—to reflect on what all of this has meant and continues to mean to me today. Thanks, Tyson.