Last night we had dinner with the neighbors. A very nice couple of our parent’s generation. Both very accomplished, very gracious and, most importantly, very interesting.<\/p>\n
And they find this whole computer gaming thing puzzling.<\/p>\n
They’ve known that I had a little side income coming in from writing about this pastime, but tonight’s discussoin went into a little more detail about what form our household entertainment hours generally took.<\/p>\n
And they were shocked.<\/p>\n
Not that we played games – they’ve known about my little side business for a while. But they were surprised at the variety of games out there and how they have become my household’s primary form of entertainment.<\/p>\n
There was some difficulty in explaining some of these games. Neverwinter Nights<\/i>, with its combination of packaged software and user created content, is a mystery still I think. My description of historical strategy games and the possibilities they open up for creative game play intrigued them but certainly remains an abstraction for them in many ways.<\/p>\n
There was none, however, of the knee-jerk doubting of games as legitimate pursuits for adults. My neighbors are the educated mainstream. And they ended the conversation by wondering if there was this little subculture side in their own children.<\/p>\n
The conversation was, in a way, emblematic of the challenge facing gaming as a “mainstream” hobby. For those many thousands of people who were raised in a world without video gaming, the hobby is something they know next to nothing about. If we had said that we were into Korean cooking or coin collecting, there would have been much less to explain.<\/p>\n
But the upside is that their questions were evidence of a sincere curiosity about gaming. I don’t expect them to be loading Civ 4<\/i> onto their hard drives any time soon, but I do expect to have more of this conversation with them in the future.<\/p>\n
I’m a big advocate of adult gamers being “out”. The juvenalia that dominates the media on gaming (and sometimes the games themselves) can only be overcome by, to appropriate a religious term, “witnessing” about the power and possibility of gaming. I like to think that I made a little progress last night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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