Two things I want to cover. One is D&D, both tabletop and electronic. The other is gaming before marriage vs. after marriage. I’ve been having a lot of discussions about these topics with friends, lately, so I decided it was time to bring together all my thoughts.

Dungeons and Dragons

The beginning of it all, right? D&D was the first commercially available pen-and-paper role-playing game (RPG), if not the first invented. It started the industry of RPGs, a type of game which is my favorite because it serves the purpose of encouraging social interaction as opposed to competition, according to this article. In tabletop D&D, the players and dungeon master (DM) gather around a table with all their supplies and act out their respective character roles in a story through “a process of structured decision-making.” They have character sheets which list all of their equipment, armor, weapons, spells, hit points (health), background, and abilities, and they use that information to determine what the character would do in any given situation. On their turn, they state what their character would do and often have to roll a die or dice to determine whether the character can successfully complete said action. (In other cases, players may choose to play a live action form. This is less common and, in my opinion, weird. Just saying.)

Pros:

• face-to-face interaction
• feeling that the dice rolls are real and determined only by natural chance

Cons:

• difficult to limit out-of-character talk
• tends to be slow-paced
• must schedule a meet-up at the same time in the same place

The alternative to tabletop D&D is to use a program on the computer which tracks character information and electronically rolls dice at your command. The DM can easily manage multiple maps while hiding from the players anything of which they should not yet be aware. Rather than shuffling through papers, all the information needed is essentially at your fingertips and available at the click of a button. By creating buttons that automatically roll the necessary dice for any individual action, you can save on time. The pro/con lists should show you which version I prefer.

Pros:

• turns seem to take less time
• easier to separate in-character talk from out-of-character
• easier to imagine the scene through textual descriptions
• less distracting to get up from the game to do things like get a snack, use the restroom, et cetera
• can play from a distance by using the internet

Cons:

• no face-to-face interaction
• dice rolls sometimes seem less random when done by the computer

Girls and Gaming

Let’s face it. There are fewer girl gamers than guys. Why is that? I don’t know. Maybe not enough girls had older brothers to introduce them to games at a young age, like I did. Maybe parents tend to work harder to discourage girls from gaming. Whatever the reason, girls make up decidedly less than half of the gaming population.

But, when I started moving from Mario and Spyro to RPGs and MMOs (short for MMORPG, or massively multiplayer online role playing game), the percentage of female gamers was closer to 4% than the 20-40% you find now (depending on your source of information). 4% is quite a minority!

Its Place in My Life

One might think that now that I’m married I would have outgrown gaming. But no, no such thing has happened.

Perhaps if I hadn’t married a fellow gamer.

But really, gaming as a wife is even better than gaming single! Now, I have a partner almost any time I want one. And I felt a lot less like a loser playing Rock Band online on Christmas Eve since I was playing with my husband rather than with strangers.

Gaming definitely has a place in my life. It’s something I enjoy, and more importantly, it’s something my husband loves and we take joy in doing together. Which is great because I don’t think I’m ever going to want to go camping with him as often as he would like. Gaming is great shoulder-to-shoulder time for us, especially when I’m able to reign in my temper over things not going like I want them to…

While it’s important to balance recreation time with other responsibilities, I still think it’s good and even advisable to have some good recreation time – every day, if possible! Gaming in its various forms helps my husband and me relax together, helps my friends and me connect, and helps me take a break from reality when reality is especially trying.

What are your thoughts? I know a lot of wives are more of spectators than participators when it comes to gaming, but are there any others who do enjoy a good video game sometimes? What do you enjoy about it? What games do you play?

Guys, what games do you enjoy? And what do you think about marrying a gamer or non-gamer?

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