The Ravens Nest

Managing Expectations In Gaming

It’s no secret I’m an old-school gamer and I know there’s the question of whether or not I like newer games and pictured above is a small smattering of newer game with Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age having been delivered by USPS yesterday via the mail carrier literally throwing it into the hallway. I heard the impact and was thankful as balls to see that the books were unblemished. Thanks again for your worthwhile handling of packages, USPS.

In case you’re wondering, we’re resetting the clock to 0 Days Without Sarcasm here.

There’s a reason for that and one I’d like to share in this open letter to casuals and tourists alike. Let’s start with the Casual. The person who found gaming by happenstance and adaptation.

Dear Casual Cathy,

We have gone well out of our way to attempt to convey such sentiments. Now while I’ll concede that sometimes we could have done better. Sometimes, it was overload because, well, we’re nerds. Ever heard the term “nerding out” or “geeking out?” That applies here.

We love sharing anything and everything about our little niches whether it’s video games, music, movies, tabletop roleplaying games, so on and so forth. It lights us up and makes us just happy.

Would you like to know why, Cathy? Well, here’s how that’s gonna go, I want you to imagine your favorite book or series of books. Take a minute and go to your shelf right this second and I want you to find that book or that series of books that you went out of your way to find and it just changed your life. That one you couldn’t stop talking about. You recommended it to book clubs, people at the library, people at your local bookstore, people online, at work, etc. That one you just couldn’t and wouldn’t shut up about. That one you’d go so far as to get it for someone for their birthday or other such holiday, I mean you love it that intensely.

If I were to approach you, not getting it and I asked you what it was all about, could you thumbnail that? It would hurt to have to thumbnail it, wouldn’t it? You really just wanna talk about it, you wanna discuss it with me and you can’t wait until I get to that one part where there’s a twist or a big reveal right?

Yep, you get how people could love something so intensely, I hope. Nevermind books, attribute that to movies, TV, music, hiking if that’s what you enjoy, whatever it is you love with an intensity that just makes your life and all the bullshit you have to go through to get to that next station where you can settle in with it? That’s us too. The thing we have in common, Cathy, is that sometimes, we wanna share those joys so much that we have serious trouble holding back.

We don’t gatekeep, we throw those gates wide open and gesture for you to come over and see it all. The ups, the downs, the all-arounds.

Now imagine when you throw those gates open and the person who asks, peeks in, looks around, dismisses it all with phrases like “ah…nerd shit” or a constant stream of “I don’t get it” or “Yeah that’s too much of X for me” and then just walks away. Now, imagine that, on top of all of that, you’re belittled, teased or treated with hostility over it. More than that, some of us have suffered actual physical violence because someone else spread a metric fuckload fear and stupidity, further fueling stupidity around it.

Now imagine wanting others to enjoy this with us and they come in and suddenly, we went from pimply nerds with greasy skin, stringy hair, oversexed and looking like couch potatoes taken root to being accused of signing up for the next Klan rally.

Imagine someone coming into your hobby, your passion, that thing that changed your life, got you through the pain of the bad times, helped you celebrate the good times, helped you maintain your sanity and then, after going through all the agony and crap, you’re greeted by these people. Demonstrably, everything they touch turns to absolute drizzling shit and you’re making demands so you don’t seem like a bad person until what you once loved is unrecognizeable and then, you’re told that if you don’t like it to “go make your own.”

The bookshelves at your local bookstore? Littered with their constant pandering and lecturing. The comic books? Same. Movies? Uh huh, you guessed it. TV, to the most overbearing and ad nauseum degree. Oh and your older books are going to be “Updated for Modern Audiences.” Oh and you can forget video games. You didn’t wan that physical library and now your game is just as terrible.

We wanted to be inclusive and we did more than our part and ended up Invaded by Tourists. Tourists, they come in, they don’t actually want or like whatever the thing is that’s in front of them, they only seek to dominate every conversation and push people out. They don’t care about anything other than their ideology and brands. All of it must be destroyed, you see, and they’ll use any sort of circular logic to make it so.

Again, Cathy, what’s the point? Why didn’t you just ask questions about characters and how they developed? Why did you approach it with an assumption in your mind already, Cathy?

No one did anything to keep you out, you kept you out.

No one ever stopped you from buying the game. You did.

No one will ever stop you from buying the game. You will or you won’t.

Now, if you want to come into gaming, whether video gaming or Tabletop gaming, that’s fine, despite how there are a few loud, dumbass tourists there are, no matter how much shit we’ve had to suffer, you’re still welcome in.

Let’s get some things clear in your mind, first, Cathy. This is not a Tourist Destination. You come in, you get the lay of the land and you carve out a space for yourself. We don’t mold around you. That’s not how this works and it never shall be.

The reason behind that is that there’s a seat for every bottom out there. Every. Note that. Even yours. You can find a nice chair custom fit to your ass, metaphorically speaking. Some may not be perfect but they’ll be right and you can go right ahead and have that seat. Personally, I play a lot of retro games when it comes to video gaming. I don’t particularly care for the ways that some games have devolved into little more than railroads with little to no agency for the character I’m controlling. I prefer something more open world and if I can’t have that then I can fire up a game that does.

In reality, Cathy, I prefer tabletop games over video games any day of the week. You want characters and development with a whole lot of agency? Well, look no further. There’s also all the things you love. Intrigue, suspense, emotional rollercoasters, the works. Some of them you can even do on your own with that fireplace going and then you can take your notes and literally write a story similar to how I’ve done it at my Against All Odds Blog. By the way, there’s a Call of Cthulhu story and you can do the same thing I just did for free if you want to try it. You can do it entirely on your computer and all you’ll need is a set of RPG dice which you can find here really inexpensively. If you want, you can even print the PDFs, grab a pencil and get to playing. Let me know how it works out for you. Consider those gates wide open.

With that being said, there’s something else you need to understand. We do keep gates. Oh yes, the past several years have taught us that we should welcome everyone but not just anyone. Every table is going to be different, Cathy. Remember how I said “there’s a seat for every bottom?” That’s especially true here.

That last screenshot I posted was someone, yet another in a dwindling minority, harping on about Warhammer 40K which is a wargame that uses miniatures, terrain and stuff like that and they want female space marines. They want entire sections of the lore around it retconned so that they can have their way. Now, once that’s done then there will be another hoop for everyone else whom have been there awhile to jump through. We’re not dogs. We don’t do that. The answer will be no. I know that seems hard to understand but listen.

Disney is suffering to the point where even their CEO claims he wants to “quiet the noise” around their releases. They want to pull back on the pandering and the lecturing via media they release. I’ll believe it when I see it, personally, but they’re in a state where they’re passing those losses on to you. Your Disney+ Subscription will be rising in cost per month.

Wizards of The Coast (the company that owns D&D) isn’t having a good go of it either, however, they too are failing to learn by proving it’s critics correct when we said they want an all-digital Magic: The Gathering and and all-digital D&D.

Why would that matter? I hear you. Well, see we in the tabletop gaming circles, we’re kind of a strange bunch. We play different games for different reasons. We alter rule sets when it doesn’t seem to make sense for our tables, it just kinda boils down to the statement of “My Table, My Rules. Your Table, Your Rules, always in all ways.” With Wizards of The Coast in particular, they seek to remove that sentiment, seemingly unaware that other games exist that can facilitate a similar if not better experience and, right now, it looks like they’re in well over their heads at the moment.

It’s a credo we’ve lived by for going on 50 years and it’s not going to stop. With the Tourist, they’re all about control, control, control and they love their purity tests. With video gaming, movies, TV, books, sure these Activists (the more fervent of the tourists) got into positions of power in those companies, got their way and now…financial failure is starting to hit them and hard. With Tabletop Gaming, it’s different. With Comics, it’s different. Anyone with any skill can make their own and we have done just that.

See, these tourists messed up, Cathy. They won some wars here and there and those victories are slowly but surely turning into ashes in their mouths now but when they came into this space, they came armed with their flags and their ideology and their demands and decided to take on people with decades of experience solving problems creatively, malicious compliance, outside-the-box thinking and the ability, drive and desire to create entire worlds and shut them out. Now, it’s only a matter of time before those brands that they captured collapse and conventions end up telling them that there’s no money in featuring them and the attention focuses to independent publishers who aren’t interested in activism. In short, they’ve stepped into a quagmire. All they have is their lies, fearmongering and shunning in order to get what they want which is demoralization. They’re not getting it here and it’s enraging them to the point where they’re unbalanced. They’ll wage war against people who are not their enemies over games they simply do not have to play.

These Tourists and Activists failed to see that we do not need the brand in order to continue playing a game. Their prohibitions do nothing and they can save their boos because we see what they cheer on.

There’s also the question of expectation, here, Cathy. The movies, TV shows and “actual plays” you’ve probably watched, that’s not really the game itself, merely, someone else’s interpretation of the game. Be keenly aware of that because if you come in with unmanaged expectations, well, it’s going to result in another moment where we consider our time wasted and asking, again, “The fuck was the point of that?!”

To sum all of this up, Cathy, you’re more than welcome in our space but be aware of where you are; Our Space. You’re talking to someone who has spent 30 years or more gaming when and where he could. Not everything is going to be perfect, not even for me but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to be fun for me. There just has to be a really good reason for me to continue gaming in that space, that’s all. It could be just hanging with good friends, having some good laughs, it could be wild stories to tell later, could be anything but it doesn’t have to be 100% perfect. Even a game like The Elder Scrolls Online has faults I could nitpick but I still have fun playing it.

To cap this off, you said you’d do anything. My question is, will you really? We will show you what we love. We will share with you what we love but we’re done making concessions. Some have confused compromise for acquiescence and we will no longer acquiesce and that’s because it does us no good. It’s not mutually beneficial and people like that tourist and activist pictured above prove that.

Finally, to the tourists, do yourself a huge favor. Take a run down to the library and start looking at books on architecture. I want you to really look at bridges in particular. Check out all those bridges built in antiquity from just a construction standpoint alone. See how sturdy some of them still are to this day despite weather conditions and time beating away at them. Really study how those people designed something that not only worked but lasted. Then attempt to build one yourself. Feel that sense of accomplishment no one can ever take away from you.

…then use that bridge to get the fuck over yourself.

Sincerely,

Raven Wulfgar.

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