Nearly
everyone plays games in today’s world.
All cultures have played games for one purpose or another and many games
played today can be traced back to antiquity.
Games range in scheme and grandeur from one-person games for entertainment
such as solitaire or crossword puzzles all the way up to awesome spectacles
such as the Olympics or any of the major sports. Games are played for a number of reasons; entertainment,
exercise, money, politics, religion and education are just a few examples. According to Greg Costikyan in his essay
“Understanding Games (2000),” the number two-entertainment business globally
has been games. In the last quarter
century the American gaming industry (not including the sports industry) has
grown from roughly 200 million dollars per year to eleven billion dollars
(Costikyan p. 22). With so much growth
and such a strong position economically we have to look at what the social
affects of the industry are.
Within the gaming culture at
large we find the role-playing gamer sub-culture. It is this particular group that this study will focus on. As I will demonstrate later, for the last
twenty years this group has been decried as following a path to drug use,
crime, suicide and Satan worship by the media and conservative religious
groups. I believe that through better
understanding of the sub-culture these assumptions will be shown as the unfair
judgments upon of a particular group of people.
Given that
the gamer subculture has continued to grow from its population of roughly
300,000 in 1979 (Fine 1983 p. 26) to 5.5 million people in 2000 (Dancey 2000)
it would be easy to suggest that role-playing games are more than a fad and
that the unique subculture of role-playing gamers is one that should be understood
and not simply maligned by those from the outside of the group. This sub-culture is generally without
representation and is often lumped in with other groups that are associated
with the before mentioned problems, and will continue to remain so until
role-playing gamers are given a voice.
Through
the course of this study I set out to better understand two different aspects
of the gaming sub-culture. The first
was how people who had little or no contact with role-playing gamers perceived
the members of the sub-culture and the games themselves and then how that
perception changed following an introduction to the sub-culture. The second thing I set out to understand was
how role-playing gamers view themselves and other gamers as well as how they
think those outside of the sub-culture view them and their games. Through the study of these two areas I hope
to foster some understanding of how to make the sub-culture easier to identify
in a positive light instead of with the tremendous negative stigma that has
been attached to it in some quarters.
In
order to address these questions I am using a focused look at a few individuals
to explore the situation as a whole. I
will go into more detail about the people being used as a focus later in this
study, but it must be kept in mind that with a small sampling there will be
little in the way of new empirical evidence within the study. While there will be some empirical data
within the study, much of it comes from industry sources and will be identified
as such.
It
is also important to note that I did not come by this subject randomly. I consider myself a member of this
subculture. I have played role-playing
games off and on since 1982 and continue to do so today. My decision to pursue this topic largely
stems from my desire to understand how society in general is completely unaware
of the existence of the role-playing gamer subculture, or why what awareness
they have is marred by negative connotations and fear. While it would be easy for me to include
endless pages of personal anecdotes from the last twenty years, I will refrain
from doing so in order to concentrate on the observations made during the
course of this study.