Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
This forum is in permanent archive mode. Our new active community can be found here.
GeekNights Tuesday - Why No One Will Game With You
Tonight on GeekNights, we consider why no one will game with you. Why is it so hard to form gaming groups? Why won't anyone play Air Hockey with me? Isn't this the panel Rym and Scott are presenting at PAX East? In the news, there's some old Game Boy Megaman coming to the 3DS virtual console (along with GBA Advance Wars on the Wii-U), and they're even having a completely meaningless vote on nothing! Also, our good friend Conrad Kreyling is making waves in the dating game scene. (He's been on GeekNights before).
Download MP3Source Link
Comments
My brother set the date of his wedding for the same time as the European Juggling Convention in 2000. I missed the convention to be his best man. But I hadn't been to an EJC before, so I didn't know what awesome I was missing.
My oldest sister got married in the summer of 2001, but in a roadside chapel in America, so there was no invites and no chances of clashes with the EJC. I went to the EJC and it was awesome.
The next year, 2002, my other sister said "Mark and I are getting married in the summer." I said "If it's on either of these weekends, I can't go, because of the EJC."
It turns out it WAS on one of those weekends. But then she changed the date of the wedding, not just because of me, but also because of it not fitting in with other people. So I went to her wedding and the EJC. The EJC was 1000% more awesome than the wedding.
It's tricky with family members, where weddings trump just about any other plans, but I'd say never miss your one must-visit convention or festival to go to a friend's wedding. I've known many people who have done this, and all of them have regretted it. The only people who didn't regret it were the ones who were so good friends with the people getting married that the festival or convention was always waaaaay in second place in terms of priorities.
A good enough friend will make sure they don't fuck up the highlight of your year just to impose the highlight of their year onto you.
A friend who isn't good enough to consider the un-reschedulable highlight of your year when planning their wedding shouldn't expect you to cancel your plans, but should still be a good enough friend to be understanding when you miss their wedding.
A friend who doesn't consider your schedule and also doesn't understand that other things happen in your life, not just their own wedding, may get mad at you for missing their wedding, but then they are the kind of person who probably wouldn't talk to you at all the entire wedding day anyway. So fuck them.
Lessons learned: miss the wedding.
I have a very good group of friends. I am the guy who has the nice house and the large collection, but my wife and I go out of our way to make sure we are excellent hosts and make sure "that guy" is not welcome. When the host is an enabler, or the problem itself, things get ugly fast.
Now, when I was getting paid to write board game reviews on a weekly basis, starting around 2010, I needed to play a LOT of games, sometimes multiple times with different groups. I had to revoke my "off the grid" status and start attending public gaming groups. It may be because I live in NJ, the most densly-populated state, and am only an hour from NYC, but I had a grid drawn up where I could attend a public game night almost every night if I wanted to. The only problem being that most of these groups were weird and undesireable. The problems of open groups are very, very real.
I did find some really good groups though. Groups that consistently met, where everyone was skilled and played to win, and everybody showered. These were a huge assett to me, but ultimately most of these people I wouldn't wind up befriending in personal life. I curse like a sailor and have a twisted sense of humor, while board games tend to attract a different crowd.
The old guys and the religious folk were great gaming opponents but it's hard to find common ground outside of the game. As you get into the more religious parts of the country, it seems to go a LOT more hand in hand with tabletop gaming since it is such an innocent hobby. Lots of groups and even smaller conventions are held in churces.
We did have one bad experience with opening up our group. After attending our first PAX, one of the guys found a local guy on the Penny Arcade forums who was looking for people to game with. He was even an Enforcer, which to me seemed like enough of a reference to take a chance at inviting him in. It was a baaaaaad idea, and we had to suffer through his presence for a day. He was not invited back (although a friend and I did bump into him on our flight to PAX Prime the next year. aaaaawkwaaaaaard.
Othe random thoughts:
- My parents used to let random 30-year-olds pick up 12-year-old me and a friend. They took us to game stores, local cons, and even their homes to play miniatures and board games. I don't know whether they were very trusting people, very stupid, or just glad to have us out of the house for the day.
- That Netrunner Brooklyn scene is pretty new. I follow Doug Wilson on Twitter (he's the guy who created JS Joust and works w/ NYU Game Center), and he got bit by the game HARD about a month ago. Tweets about it all the time, got a bunch of his local indie video game friends into it, and started his own game nights. So Netrunner is definitely not a static game. New people jumping in big all the time.
We have monthly game days that float between the 5 or so game stores in the metro area that is hosted by the Role Players Guild. There is generally pretty good attendance. Most of the game stores also have weekly board game nights that are pretty well attended.
The biggest issue I've seen here is gamer Balkanization. The White Wolf LARPers don't really talk with the tabletop people. Board gamers tend to stick with other board gamers. Pathfinder Society tend to stick to themselves but have been getting more involved with the monthly game days.
Though, even before I moved to city and was living in a smaller town in the super-sticks, I was never really without a gaming group. I think this is probably because we kicked 'That Guy' out of any groups we had, which made new people coming in way more comfortable and likely to stick around.
Also, the thing with Go is that the game takes only 2 players, so if you have like 10 people, that's great, just have 5 games of Go.
Generally I'm okay with video games, but board games I CANNOT play with a lot of people mostly because a lot of people willing to play relatively complex games I do not get along with. Generally because I relate to people mostly through humor and if you don't have the same humor (or sometimes energy) then I just cant really be friends with you or have fun being around you. People that I enjoy being around socially tend to not be into board games or only want to play more casual games. It could possibly be that I happen to have bad luck on a frequent basis but maybe I'm the problem but I don't really care to change of course.
Maybe its just me but I feel like there is a disparity between video gamers and board games. Some people will dabble in both but video gamers, to me at least, are just different than board gamers usually in personality. That Guy is unfortunately in both groups though.
We basically avoided him for the rest of the evening.
The thing is that the guy did not seem weird or even close to "the guy" type that you point out in the podcast. I was OK with him joining us, but the rest of the group were reluctant. After thinking for that a bit, I realized that the newcomer would have (unwillingly) destroyed the group atmosphere: we were a bunch of Spaniards playing some random casual board game, speaking Spanish and laughing about those type of jokes that only the locals of an area with common background (in our case northern Spain) can laugh at.
Basically, what happened here is not very different from what the podcast is trying to explain: a guy that does not share similar common traits to the guys playing is seldom welcome. However, in our case the reason was based on geographical and cultural aspects and background: the "locale" of our group (northern Spain) did not match the "locale" (California) of the guy trying to join.