What this blog is about: a bit more about me

When I recently wrote some critical historical bits about Gary Gygax (of which there is a a little more to come), a lot more readers suddenly showed up. Perhaps nerves were touched, but I do not know. Say Gygax and heads turn, apparently.

A blogger named Josie ended up here and scanned what I wrote so far, taking a negative impression (here). They did not like that I wrote about the ""so-called old-school"" (in those terms). They replied,

Taking a quick scan through your blogposts, you, personally, seem to be far more obsessed with the past than a lot of the modern old-school scene is.

With that in mind, your condemnations don't come off as witty & incisive, just sneering and hypocritical.

It occurs to me that others who read my entries, which are often critical--and, yes, never witty or incisive, nor intended so--may likewise not know what this is about, especially with a quick scan. Things taken out of context can look far worse than intended.

I don't expect anybody to go back and read it all to get the context. Therefore, let me provide a second introduction here today, along with a little more about why I am writing.

An orientation to my ignorant perspective

If I seem out of touch, that is because I am.

This blog has a premise, as it says at the top. I played RPGs constantly throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. Then I stopped completely. Less than a year ago, I came back to the hobby.

I missed about a quarter century of role-playing gaming. A whole lot has happened since the mid-1990s.

What I have written about, for about four months only, is my perspective, not yours or another person’s.

What’s my perspective? I am disoriented. I have a lot of questions and observations. It still feels like I woke up to gaming after a slumber of decades and a thing I once cared about doing more than anything else doesn’t quite make sense anymore. It looks different, the issues are different, it feels different. Partly the difference is me. I am over the hill and I have a lot of other interests at the same time. Partly it is the hobby that has changed.

I used to buy nearly every game that came out just to study it. Now there have been big gaming trends and big reactions to those trends... and reactions to those trends... that have come and gone. I’m still catching up on stuff like the D20 phase. What I used to know inside and out is now strange. My ignorance should be obvious. My ignorance is part of point of this.

But ignorance of the recent past grants a fresh perspective both to my memory and to the present. People make selective claims about the early days of the hobby that run counter to my experiences and what I remember. The tone of the story that’s told today often does not match what I saw. Also, a lot has simply been forgotten. If anybody wants to read my reminiscences, they are mixed in here. I absolutely do not think that my experience stands for those of everybody else’s, but as I sort out my thoughts and get oriented, I have been trying to put the discrepancy into words.

I had no idea that anybody would read what I wrote. I don’t use any social media and never read blogs before late last year, when I started looking for game stuff to do with my kids. This blog is primarily for my own hobby interest. That will remain my perspective.

Another factor that may make better sense of my perspective for readers is that I am a professional historian writing here informally. I teach at a research university. It’s my livelihood and it has an influence on my perspective and how I present my perspective. I can’t help but approach the past of the hobby now similarly to how I analyze the cultures of other times and places. It’s not possible to disconnect my brain from that. Unlike my professional work, though, for which I write polished books and articles of a somewhat technical variety, this blog is casual and informal writing, typos and all, for my entertainment, for my own thinking things through. What I write here is at least partly autobiographical. Still, I bet that a blog that makes interpretive arguments about gaming history and gaming culture sounds contentious to some people to whom the issues matter.

Obsessed with the past

Josie is right that I am obsessed with the past. That is the point of this whole thing. I have been inundated with a flood of vivid and sometimes emotional memories about things I spent all my time on but that I have not thought about for years. They really seemed important at the time... I’m trying to sort them out. I am pulling things out of old boxes and bam! I am back there for a moment. It’s actually pretty intense at times. Older readers may sympathize.

Role-playing games are old enough that there is a history worth telling. I’m interested in that, and I’m not alone. Setting aside books, there are plenty of blogs about the history of gaming. Some that come to mind are DM David’s blog, the Refereeing & Reflections blog, and Zenopus Archives. Jon Peterson has a great pro blog that everybody interested in the hobby’s history should read. I don’t compare my notes to their work--we are different people with different purposes--but this blog is related somehow to that specific genre of blog.

I never said that OSR gamers were obsessed with the past, as Josie suggests. If they were, they would know enough to acknowledge they were doing something new (not reenacting the old) and they might change the name back to what it was before: Fantasy Role-Playing Games. This observation is almost certainly irrelevant to OSR gamers, but it’s my own limited point of view. Note that I am not telling OSR gamers how to have fun. They should do what they like, just as I do. We probably mostly do the same things, in actual play, anyway.

Critical analysis is not condemnation.

All this should explain why I have critical, analytical things to say about the OSR more than any other gamer sect. It’s the one current gaming movement that claims to represent how things used to be. That’s a different claim from any prior RPG movement, as far as I know. I find it completely fascinating. It is a gaming movement based on a notion of the history of gaming, justifying a way of having fun on a historical claim to marketable authenticity. But the claim is also very weirdly skewed and selective. More importantly, fun needs no justification, so we can drop the pretenses of being “Old School” and the gatekeeping and posturing that often go with it. That’s why I say “so-called Old School.” It’s not to insult people or to say that they are fake, but to emphasize that it’s a recent trend, not actually old-time gaming. I have been at pains to clarify the distinction between the two concepts, so it bears repeating. I’m still incubating a bigger egg of thoughts on the OSR. It hasn’t hatched yet.

Josie described some things I say as “condemnations.” I don’t know which entries they are referring to, so it’s harder to reflect on that. I assume Josie wasn’t thinking of my useless “I hate elves” post, which is a silly rant about my personal taste and my reaction to a group of young kids all of whom wanted to play elves (and I hope that no elves are reading this—if so, please do accept my embarrassed apology). I admit that pointing out grammatical mistakes in foreign languages used in game products, as I did in one entry, is absolutely pedantic, but certainly no more pedantic than dressing up game products with false foreign language titles to make sales with “authentic” features. Somebody out there on the internet characterized one of my recent entries as “anti-Gygax,” but I actually met the man briefly and thanked Gygax--he had to know what I meant by those words--despite the divisive outrage he caused among gamers and the garbage he wrote that I paid good money for. I remember those days. I’m against the Legend of Gygax, but I’m in favor of understanding the actual man and the stuff he did and said that seems to be forgotten, even the stuff that makes him look bad by comparison with the 100th-level demigod some people seem to think he was. For a historian, telling the truth about someone is the closest we can come to honoring that person. It shows that this person mattered in a special way.

I certainly don’t condemn how OSR players play. Given my experiences, I probably have more in common with OSR gamers than any others, especially some of the other geezer bloggers out there. I do criticize bad history. I do criticize gamers who say "my way is the right way and your game is inferior." I’m all for fantasy games, not fantasies about game designers. I’m certainly not trying to be witty or incisive, good golly. I write this to sort out personal thoughts about an old hobby, not to impress anybody, especially as I will never meet any of you.

I am sure that my writing about the discrepancy between then and now will grow old, if it has not done so already. As I said at the outset: "When I run out of things to say, I’m going to stop. If you don’t like what I have to say, please just don’t read it!"

Anyway, this is a lot of words to clarify my stance on things, in case you are just starting to read my entries and I seem like an aggressive, opinionated blogger. If I say something that rubs you the wrong way, I hope you will be a friend anyway, or just move along. Happy Day!