Games
Where to even begin describing the influence games have had on me as a person?
From chess, to X-com, to 500, there’s never been a game I’ve shied away from learning. Sure, I enjoy some of them more than others, and sometimes my moods have been more towards one or the other, but the learning of rules and learning to navigate within them provides a structure for interaction which I find incredibly comforting.
Because should social interaction go sour, you can always return your focus to the game, and before you know it, a new opportunity for socializing has opened up.
Board games
I regularly play board games with a small group of friends. Every other Tuesday at 17:00 we meet up to have fun in the danish student house in the middle of Aalborg. That’s because every other Tuesday, they provide a bevvy of different board games, all of which are incredible fun.
Everything from King of Tokyo, to Carcassonne, to Codenames, to Azur, to Pandemic, my friends and I explore the worlds and rules of building kingdoms, being spies, and being on the front lines of deadly pandemics (alright, so maybe that last one turned out to not be all that special in hindsight).
Board games, to me, is the perfect icebreaker to bring out when you want to get to know someone: If they’re new, something simple like King of Tokyo is easy to pick up and understand: You’re a big monster wanting to invade Tokyo, because that’s what a legally-distinct Godzilla would want to do. It’s an easy way to make some common ground with complete strangers.
If they’re experienced, what kind of games they like can tell you a lot about them without you needing to ask probing questions.
The board game becomes your “common third” - something you now share and can relate to, together. And from there, you get talking, and thus friendships and smiles are made.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games
To those not in the know: A tabletop roleplaying game - or TTRPG - is a game where you and your fellow players build characters based on the rules of the game, and then play through a world and a setting managed by another - oftentimes more experienced - player known as a “Game Master” (or “Dungeon Master”, if you’re older than me).
In essence, you can view a TTRPG as a collaborative creative experience: The Game Master sets up a world with locations, non-player-characters (NPC’s) and a story they want to tell. It is then the players’ jobs to use the characters they have created to explore this world according to the rules of the TTRPG, These rules are often incredibly broad - often more of a system of what you can do and how you do it rather than the play-by-play of most other forms of games - and allow you to create a character who is wholly unique to you: there are very few strict limits on what you can and cannot do, and it is up to the GM to ensure that whatever your actions, the world that they have created reacts to them.
If your character finds a valuable artifact, powerful people might be hunting them to retrieve it, for instance.
These games are often played in sessions for around three hours once a week, and over the course of years, you and your friends build a story that - like the characters - are wholly unique.
Now, I called it a collaborative creative experience, and while that is true, It is the players who write the story: they control one character each, and the GM cannot force them to do things, so as a GM, the number one skill you can apply and which will quickly develop is improvisation: You are never going to be able to predict in advance what the players will do - you simply need to be capable of adapting to it.
It’s a difficult task, but as the GM, you have knowledge that they players don’t: they are characters, you are the setting. You can move pieces around on the metaphorical chessboard behind the scenes, and the players won’t ever know that the noble they’ve rescued was secretly the main villain until the reveal in the third act.
But do it right, and you end up with something that could be a movie or a book in its own right.
After years of collaborative creation, it is certainly worthy of being put on a commemorative poster.
Computer games
The domain of the nerds once upon a time, and while that has changed - for the better if you ask me - I am in no position to deny that it held true back when I got my start, back when the internet was still screeching at us.
Although my true start was even before I had access to a computer. If you wonder how Pokemon became such a big part of my life, it’s because my family made the mistake of getting me a Gameboy with a Pokemon game.
Despite not understanding a lick of english, I more or less brute-forced it, and I learned and got good at it. I was the guy in the schoolyard who knew everything about the first generation Pokemon games.
But the school had something more. Something that was the dream of every prepubescent child in the early 2000s:
An IT room, filled with rows upon rows of computers.
And thanks to them, I began to play Runescape, through which I learned a lot of english grammar and vocabulary. My parents saw this and tried to turn the family computer into a sneaky way for learning with games, but in the end… well, I won’t say they didn’t succeed, primarily because I liked exploring the unknown even back then.
But the days of learning nature sciences with Ole the Otter or traversing the world with the Pink Panther are far behind me. I eventually progressed into my real-time strategy phase with games like Command and Conquer and the Warcraft/Starcraft series when the internet stopped its screeching and broadband became a thing, thinking I was hot shit because I could beat the computer on the highest difficulty and then getting immediately trounced online because turns out, the computer - and I - had no idea what a “metagame” was, because even back then, there were bigger nerds than me, and I quickly had to learn what the “real-time” part of the genre was referring to.
Still, I was the eldest of three brothers, and they consistently looked up to me whenever I played a game. And that was enough for me - even if they were annoying at times.
Nowadays, my choice of games are typically the narrative ones, they have taken up the spot that reading books once occupied, allowing me to explore interactive worlds much like I do with TTRPGs - only this time, the GM is the game itself. Setting the rules and telling a story. Of course I have what I like to term my “comfort food” games - games I just start up to pass an hour or two with no larger point to it.
But that really is the strength of computer games: It is nowadays a juggernaut of an industry, and while that makes for some utter garbage being made in the name of capitalism, you can find plenty of genuinely good games made because someone wanted to make them rather than for the sake of appeasing shareholders, allowing you to explore heartfelt stories through mechanics that you enjoy in particular.