Tabletop, Geeks, Games and Me
I realized recently that I may have been wrong about myself, and where I fall on the geek spectrum.
See, I don’t feel like I have many of the biggest markers of true
geekdom. I have never been a comic book fan, and I’ve never been to a convention. I’ve never played a RPG or LARP, but I know what the initials mean (I think) and I certainly have gamer friends.
I’ve never managed to finish the entire LOTR series of books, and even
the movies leave me a little cold. I’ve never dismantled a computer (but
I know people who have), and my coding knowledge stops at basic HTML. I
find video games fairly boring.
But–I did read the entire Shannara series, by Terry Brooks,
in fifth and sixth grades, not to mention the Harry Potter series as an
adult. I did play on my high school quiz team, my high school
sweetheart was a Mathlete, and I did score a perfect score on my
(verbal) SAT. I did teach myself HTML back in 1998 to put up my first
webpage, and I remember the sheer thrill of figuring out how to make
images become links. I’ve been blogging for about nine years, and I
remember playing video games that were all text (“You go into a room. In
the room, you find an Orc”). I’m obsessed with Game of Thrones and have read the first four books of the Song of Fire and Ice series.
My husband is a little easier to peg, I think. He played Dungeons and Dragons in his youth, treasures his battered copies of the Dragonlance
novels, and can tell you more than you want to know about X-Men and the
Avengers (before the movies came out, of course). He can also tell you
lots about techno music and the impending zombie apocalypse, introduced
me to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and enjoys Chemistry Cat
a little too much. As a result, my girls already have opinions about
their favorite superheroes and are waiting to be old enough to love Buffy.
So Are we geeks, or are we nerds? Does even posing the question also provide the answer?
I don’t remember the first time I read Wil Wheaton’s blog,
but it’s been a regular read for me for at least the past year, and
slowly but surely, I’ve become intrigued with gaming. Wil’s new
webseries Tabletop
got me hooked; I’ve seen every episode, but the real kicker came when
my girls caught me watching an episode and wanted to see what was making
me laugh. It was the Ticket to Ride episode, and they were instantly hooked! They have seen every episode now, and their favorite is the episode featuring casual games. So for their birthday, I bought Tsuro,
and we have really enjoyed playing it! Lucy even likes to say, “Stop
getting up in my dragon grill,” because one of the Tabletop guys said
while they were playing. I think sometime this summer, we will end up
owning both Zombie Dice and Get Bit, and then we’ll decide on a bigger game to purchase that we’ve seen on Tabletop, probably Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride, once we feel ready.
Are we raising geeky/nerdy children? I can only hope so, as one of
the great accomplishments of my adulthood has been embracing the idea of
being a geek or a nerd: a highly intelligent and passionate person who
dives deep in each enthusiasm and is inherently curious and engaged in
the world, someone who wants to share those passions with anyone who
might be interested, and someone who always has a new fact or opinion to
bring to every conversation. What’s not to like about that?
Related articles
- Episode 1 of Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day’s “Tabletop,” a net-show about tabletop gaming sessions (boingboing.net)
- Review: Table Top Episode Three: Zombie Dice, Get Bit! & Tsuro (comicbooked.com)
- Stab Your Buddy! This Week’s Tabletop Features Munchkin, and Steve Jackson Himself (wired.com)
- [Crimson Bastards] Youtube show, TableTop, starring Wil Wheaton review (crimsonbastards.com)
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