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Stop Telling People How to Enjoy Their Hobby, Gaming is Gaming
I came across a post recently that stopped me mid-scroll. The argument, roughly, was that video gamers are unattractive to potential partners, that they’re wasting their lives, that anyone worth anything is too busy with their career, their kids, and their ambitions to spend time gaming.
I read it twice because I couldn’t quite believe someone had written it seriously. And then I thought about how many times I’ve seen the same energy aimed at board gamers. “Aren’t those for children?” “You still do that?” “Why would you spend three hours sitting around a table when you could be doing something productive?”
Same argument. Different hobby. Same nonsense.
Hobbies Are Not a Moral Failing
Here’s the thing. Any hobby takes time. Watching football takes time. Running takes time. Binge-watching TV takes time. Nobody writes viral posts suggesting that people who spend their Saturdays at the gym are unambitious or undateable.
Gaming, of any kind, gets treated differently. There’s a particular flavour of snobbery directed at it that I don’t fully understand. Some of it is generational, some of it is cultural, and a lot of it just boils down to people not understanding something and deciding that makes it worthless.
The people I know who play games, board games, video games, tabletop RPGs, card games, whatever, are some of the most creative, interesting, and socially adept people in my life. Several of them also have demanding careers, families, and all the adult responsibilities the people writing those posts seem to think are incompatible with fun.
You can have a career and play games. These things are not in competition.
The Famous Names Didn’t Get the Memo Either
If the stereotype were true, you’d expect the most successful, ambitious people in the world to have no interest in games. Funny, then, that the list of people who’ve been open about their hobby tells a different story.
Vin Diesel has been playing Dungeons and Dragons since he was a teenager and wrote the foreword for the official 30th anniversary D&D book. Henry Cavill is a committed Warhammer 40,000 hobbyist who spent lockdown painting miniatures and talking about it without a trace of embarrassment. Joe Manganiello had a dedicated dungeon room built in his house and runs campaigns with other actors and musicians. Stephen Colbert, one of America’s most recognisable television hosts, is a lifelong D&D player and has spoken about it at length. Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard skipped the post-Golden Globes parties in 2017 to go home and play Settlers of Catan. Wil Wheaton built an entire career out of loving games, hosting TableTop for years and introducing board games to an enormous new audience, he’s one of the reasons i got back into table top gaming.
These are not people who failed to find anything better to do. They made a choice about how to spend their time, and they chose games. Good for them.
And Then There’s the Gatekeeping From Inside the Hobby
I wish I could say the condescension only comes from outside. It doesn’t.
There’s a particular version of this that shows up in board gaming circles, usually aimed at people who only play one type of game, or who play games at a lighter level than whoever is making the judgment. “You only play gateway games? You’re not a real gamer.” “You prefer co-ops? You don’t understand real strategy.” “You haven’t played heavy euros? You’re just scratching the surface.”
I’ve heard versions of all of these. They’re all rubbish for the same reason: the person saying them has decided that their preferences define what the hobby is, and everyone else is doing it wrong.
If someone wants to play Ticket to Ride every single week for the rest of their life and never pick up anything heavier, that is completely fine. If someone only plays D&D and has never touched a board game, also fine. If someone only wants to play one character type in every RPG campaign they’ve ever been in, genuinely none of your business.
The hobby is not diminished by someone enjoying part of it. It’s not a ladder with a correct top rung.
“Playing Make Believe Wrong“
This brings me to something I keep coming back to. There’s a quote attributed to Matthew Mercer, the Dungeon Master behind Critical Role, which I’m paraphrasing here because I can’t remember the original source, but it captures something I think about a lot. It might have been Liam O’Brien as a comment when Matt Mercer was talking about complaints they had in the early days of Critical Role.
The idea is roughly this: when you hear someone getting worked up about another person playing a tabletop RPG differently from how they would play it, there is something genuinely strange about the idea of telling someone they are doing collaborative, Playing make believe wrong.
I think about that whenever I see someone in a board game forum explaining that another player’s enjoyment of a game is invalid because they’re not playing it “properly”. The game worked. Everyone had fun. What’s the problem?
The same logic applies across the whole argument. If someone spends their evenings playing video games and genuinely enjoys it, they are not doing their evenings wrong. They’re not failing at life. They’re having fun, which is, as far as I can tell, the whole point of a hobby.
Let People Enjoy Things
I know this won’t fix anything. The people who write posts about gamers being undateable aren’t going to read a board game blog and change their minds. The gatekeepers inside the hobby aren’t suddenly going to decide that Carcassonne counts.
But I find it useful to say out loud anyway. Gaming is not a substitute for a real life. It is part of a real life. For a lot of us, it’s the bit of a real life where we sit down, switch off, think hard about something that doesn’t matter, and spend time with people we like. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.
If it doesn’t affect you, let it go. If you don’t enjoy games of any sort and don’t find people who game attractive, don’t date them. Someone’s at the table enjoying themselves. Someone’s on the sofa with a controller having a good evening. Someone is playing the same elven ranger for the fourth campaign in a row because that’s what they enjoy.
None of that is your problem. And none of it is a problem.
Now, Lets Play Some (all the) Games!