I Am A Gamer

I am a gamer. I spend my evenings and weekends holed up in cavernous basement rooms consulting sourcebooks and to-hit charts, or running around parks and community centers in full makeup and costume playing rock-paper-scissors at various intervals. I spend my paycheck or my allowance on the latest games and supplements and mounds of polyhedral dice which have a way of turning up in the oddest places around my house or apartment. I have hundreds of stories about games I have played and characters I have known, some of which are actually interesting and funny to other people. I am a gamer, and this is how I spend my free time.

I am a storyteller. I practice a dying art. But my stories are even better than ghost stories around a campfire, because they are completely interactive. My friends and I play Let’s Pretend, just the way we used to as children—we become the intrepid hero, the plucky princess, the wise old man. They let people live another life and, in the process, discover things about themselves. So the tales I tell are always about Big Things: the fight between good and evil, a battle for the future of the world, the struggle against the darker side of one’s own personality. I have things to say, and by God, I’m going to say them. I am a gamer, and I bring new (or simply forgotten) things to the world.

I am unique. I’m not necessarily smarter or better than the rest of the world, but I have a way of looking at things which gives me decided advantages. I would rather participate in the world that sit back and let it pass me by, even if the world in which I excel is an imaginary one of my own creation. So even when I’m not gaming, a part of my mind is always in the game, thinking about what I’ll do next session, what past events have taught me, and how I can apply it to the real world. Some people call this foolish escapism. I call it creativity in action. I have strange and unique interests. My style, my behavior, and my manner don’t fit the cultural norms. I am a gamer, and I possess qualities that few others have.

I am misunderstood. In the best-case scenario, people think me geeky and eccentric and tend to smile nervously and look around for the nearest exit when I begin to talk about my hobby. In the worst-case scenario, I am blamed for the rise of “satanic cults” and the moral decay of the nation by promoting violence, magic, and sin. I am suspected of being incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. I am accused of driving teenagers to suicide by encouraging them to become too attached to their characters. That last one makes me smile, because I know that in reality gamers actually have a suicide rate at least 300% below the national average. I am a gamer, and I understand perfectly why this is.

Because there was a time when I was awkward and shy and even (God forbid) nerdy. I knew all along that I was different from most people, and that truth turned me quiet and introverted, sure I would never fit in or find anyone like myself. But then a funny thing happened. I went to my first gaming session. Suddenly I found a whole room full of people like me, who never felt they were entirely part of this world. Naturally, we bonded, and I made my first real friends. But another funny thing happened while we played our game together. As my character learned how to interact with others and solve problems and fend for herself, so did I. I learned how to function in the society that had shunned me. I was happy again. I realized that I had a rare and special gift, and that it was my duty to use it to make my real life as desirable as the one in my imagination.

I am a gamer. I have something that most people lose before the age of ten—a sense of wonder. I’m always discovering new worlds through my game, so I’ll never be too jaded to drop my jaw from time to time and allow myself to say, “Wow.” I put magic and color back into a world that’s too often content with bland mediocrity. I am a gamer, and I am not alone.

We are gamers. We are your children, your relatives, your friends, your co-workers. We’re the smart but quiet girl on the school bus holding a dog-eared copy of The Hobbit; the man browsing the shelves of the science fiction section at B. Dalton, leafing through a Star Wars novel and muttering about how he could do better; the hard-working guy two cubicles over who always seems to be looking at something far away, something you can’t see--yet. We create worlds together, and our lives are changed and improved by these things that we imagine. We know better than to say, “It’s just a game”—not because we can’t distinguish fantasy from reality (we do that quite well, believe you me), but because this game has helped us in ways we never though possible. We are gamers, and we have the power to change the world. Just wait. You’ll see.