First off, thanks very much to everyone who gave me such great input on Women in Gaming. I’ve gone from wondering whether the panel will have enough to say to wondering if the panel will be long enough.
There is another aspect of gaming I want to explore. I’m wondering how non-gaming Significant Others view gaming. Has your gaming habit ever driven away a SO? Do they tolerate it? Have you turned a non-gaming SO into a gaming one? Mostly what I’m fishing for here is stories. And if you ARE the non-gaming SO, then I’d definitely love your input. So drag out all your old stories about that weird girlfriend/boyfriend that you once dragged to a gaming session and air them here for all to see.
Thanks!
When I brought my non-gaming but suitably geeky SO to a session of Mage, she was bored because she wasn’t playing. Then we gave her a character, and she got addicted fast.
Oh, I didn’t see the Women in Gaming entry, but this same Mage game will, this fall, have at least three female gamers, maybe four, one male gamer (me) and the male GM.
Here I cannot help you. For that matter, most of my gaming friends’ SO’s are, in fact, also gamers. So I can’t really even ask them.
So I’m guessing from the responses here that one of three things happens.
Gamer with gamer = no problem
Gamer with tolerant non-gamer = no problem
Gamer with intolerant non-gamer = either the gamer ceases to game or the relationship falls apart.
I once tried to recruit a female friend to come and game with me so I wouldn’t be the only female in the group. She came, she got bored, then the friendship more or less ended because she couldn’t understand why I preferred to spend time with those geeky guys on that stupid game rather than hang out with her listening to her drool over the guy of the week. Yes that’s right guys, girls pull the “you don’t love me!” card on each other, they just phrase it differently.
I’ve never had time to GET an SO, or someone inclined towards the idea. 😀
But yeah, those responses do sound about right – though it gets worse with MMORPGs when there’s a heavy time investment, which can result in widow/widower-hood for the person who isn’t gaming.
What exactly does MMORPG stand for?
Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Game. Popularized around the time of Ultima Online, it stood for the first generation of online RPGs were you could have thousands playing at once, versus MUDs and MUSHes that could hold at best a hundred or so people. Nowadays, ‘MMOG’ or Massively Multiplayer Online Game is used more often, given that many of the concepts out there have about as much to do with RPGs as ‘Chocolate Fingers’ have to do with real human digits. 😉
The reason that MMORPGs tend to take a lot of time to invest in is because many of them are levelling treadmills – to get the most out of the game, to enjoy all the content, and just to generally gain fame and fortune in the games, you have to be massively powerful. This usually means spending hours at a stretch just playing, and some of these games have missions or tasks which require many people to put in a full night or two of six to eight hours just to complete the quest.
This means a non-gaming SO can lose their significant other to the online community for long periods – resulting in widowhood/widowerhood.
Yup. My boyfriend and I used to both be addicted to EverQuest, but I’m burned out on levelling treadmill games now. They are SUCH a time sink. Lut still tries new games as they come out, however. He’s playing tons of the World of Warcraft beta. But since I spend so much time in solitary pursuits anyway (drawing, writing, planning my next RPG, etc.) it doesn’t really pose a problem for us that we’re not playing the same game.
I don’t think I’ve ever had a non-gaming SO, in fact. Lut and I have occasionally struggled with gaming incompatabilities — when he’s playing one game and I’m playing another, and we’re not doing much together. But we usually find a workable compromise. Such as a new game. 🙂
I think that here, you’re going to get a fair few stories of SO’s who’ve met or started roleplaying because of their partner.
My gf is one of the latter, I used to do online roleplay based on the dragonriders out of Anne McCaffery’s Pern books. When I met Jo we were in a Pantomime together, so to go down to the local tabletop roleplay group only took a little persuading. A couple of games later and she was hooked!:)
We’ve now moved into live roleplay, which we describe to friends as ‘acting without a script!’ but still enjoy tabletop games when we can get enough roleplaying friends together.
However, I have heard stories off other friends of people splitting up due to roleplay, either (in one case) because the partner didn’t understand why the other wanted to ‘escape’ for a few hours a week; in the other it was cited in the divorce that the partner was always away roleplaying and was never at home!
Interstingly, both our live and tabletop roleplay groups are well mixed in terms of the sexes. Live is about 50/50 split, with some couples coming along .. and their charicters being (im)mortal enemies. Jo’s and my own charicters are friends, but don’t trust each other that much:)
At tabletop the girls often outnumber the boys, and that makes for a totally different style of game, but I find often more interesting:)
Makes sense I guess
I guess it makes sense that many gamers would end up together with gamers. People are most comfortable with others who have compatible interests. Gaming was not the primary axis of compatibility for Howard and I (religion was), but as I look back on our relationship it may have been a major one. Our childhoods could have taken place in the same imaginary world, we watched similar shows, played similar games, got into roleplaying, gave it up for awhile, read similar books, and then met each other.
while Howard and I do not have completely congruent interest sets, it makes sense that we share an interest in gaming since gaming was a very formative experience for both of us. Now we reinforce each other’s interest in gaming and things sci-fi.
I guess my point here is that gamers who are together with gamers are more likely to stay gamers than gamers who are together with non-gamers.
Or maybe I had no point. Oh well.
While not having a current SO, nor one that lasted long enough to learn about my gaming, one of my gamer friends is engaged to a non-gamer. I shall quiz her and find out her thoughts. Any questions/time limit to this?
-Simon
I leave for Fandemonium on August 10, so maximum usefulness will be prior to that. After Fandemonium I’ll still be interested, but I won’t be able to use the material for the panel.
Non-Gamer SO
my SO is a non-gamer. As far as I can tell, she wondered what all the hoopla was about some weird people sitting in a room rolling weird dice…
At this point I would have to say that I am a non-gamer as well. not directly due to this, she never once even hinted that gaming woudl be a problem, and the few times that I went she was completly supportive, just uninterested, but over time, I have only so much time to spend doing things, and in terms of relative importance, speding time gaming was far below spending time with my SO. I do miss gaming sometimes, but dont even for a minute regret my decisions. (I also miss being able to take a vacation or go to the movies without wondering how to find a babysitter, or if the movie is OK for 4-5 year olds, but I regret that even less!)
Had she been a gamer, I might have kept it up, or not, our lives are pretty busy, but after having kids I don’t think that there was any chance of doing anything like that… once the kids grow up, mabey I can convince them that it is in interesting hobby, or not… (I still have all my notes, books, and GM materials in some vain hope that I will someday use them)
Good Luck, and have fun! (and say hello to Howard for me!)
Dan Strohl