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OK, most don't understand what "gaming" is. The first question people usually ask after hearing I game is usually something like "You mean like computer games?". No, though I like that too. Gaming means real games. In person, with real people. No computer, though a calculator is often useful.
My favorite game in the world is World in Flames. It's made by the good folks at ADG (Australian Design Group). WiF, as World in Flames is called, is awesome. It's a game encompassing all of WWII (World War II) from '39 to '45. All theaters of action. And there's a political module letting you lead your country from '36 onwards. The game is a monster, has a 120 page rulebook, 70 some optional rules, enough maps and charts to cover up two large kitchen tables, and I think it's up to about 10,000 little half-inch cardboard counters. Monstrous. Takes really fast people about 80 hours to play the whole game, and I've seen games with slow people, investing about 5 hours a week, take over a year and a half. That game was hosted by the owner of Game Parlor, so this is a good way to segue to....
Game Parlor. It's a store, well two stores now. Owned by Rob Weigand, the original store is in Chantilly, VA and the new one is in Woodbridge, VA. I've spent (wasted?) at least a thousand hours in this place (the one in Chantilly). It's amazing. About 2/3 of the store is a normal store, albiet one that sells games. The back 1/3 of the store is dedicated to FREE gaming tables. Any time the store is open, you can go in and play a game. Be your game Hearts, Monopoly, Axis and Allies, Risk, Stratego, Chess, etc. etc., you can go in and play. No obligation to buy anything. Also has an 8 computer network for computer gaming, though that costs about 5 bucks an hour. Game Parlor also boasts a small snackbar with sodas and snack food. Chips, candy bars etc. Outside food is OK too, so you can bring food in and eat there. The store is a landmark to those of us that game, I've seen nor heard of no other store quite like it. And it's been open for 15 years or so now. Independantly owned and operated....Can't find the right superlatives to describe this place.
My introduction to gaming in general was when my friend Jamil got me a copy of the game Axis and Allies when I was 12 or something. Thanks, Jamil! Axis and Allies is also a WWII game, though far more simple than WiF. Compares probably more closely to Risk, which I'm sure everyone has played, or at least seen. Or maybe not, I have a skewed view of the world. Anyway, we played A&A a lot, and then someone introduced me to Game Parlor, where they had an Axis and Allies NIGHT!! This was, in a word, incredible. A store that actually had a night dedicated to playing a game. No, a game that I liked. Nay, a store dedicated to playing games! And I was at that impressionable age.....Well, there you go.
A coupla years later, I was introduced to the phenomenon that is called "Collectable Card Games". The game that made this huge was Magic: The Gathering. The basic marketing principal for this game seems to come from baseball cards. Sell random cards in packs of 15, people collect them. Make the good cards harder to find to create a "market" for the cards. This one had an edge: add some rules, and a basic game system, and people will play with the cards, buy more cards, play more, etc. Great idea. Every few months now Magic introduces an expansion to the basic game, and they've re-done the basic game (up to 9th edition now, I think). Magic has also spawned dozens and dozens of other collectable games, from Star Wars to Spongebob, and I can't forget Pokemon, from the same company that invented Magic. People spend hundreds of dollars on this game, buy tens of thousands of cards, just to build a 60 card deck to use. Collectable Card Games have pretty much sealed the death of baseball cards, especially since no one cares about baseball anymore.
I played Magic for a few years, until they kept changing things and making my old cards worthless. This strategy made, I'm sure, tons of money for Wizards of the Coast, creators of Magic. It, however, left teenagers like me broke, and with lots of cards that weren't all that useful anymore. So I finally gave up and gave all my cards away. I still kinda follow the game, and am capable of giving a good game if someone lends me a deck (most Magic players have enough cards to create hundreds of decks, and most carry at least five or six with 'em when they go somewhere to play). But I wisely got out of the "pissing away your (and your parent's) money" part of the game.
Somewhere along the line, I picked up on miniatures gaming. This combines two hobbies into another very expensive and time-consuming hobby. You buy the models, usually made of pewter, and go home and paint them. Much like some do with model trains, I guess. But this has a practical application: You can then go and play games with the pieces you have. Anything from the Roman Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, American Civil War, WWI (haven't actually seen that, but I'm sure it's out there), WWII, etc. Games Workshop improved on this idea with Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. Warhammer is a fantasy game, with elves, dwarves, orcs, skeletons, etc. and Warhammer 40,000 is a sci-fi game with, well, elves, orks, etc. The company has a good sense of humor about their games; in Warhammer 40k, the Orks have a weapon that teleports tiny orks (called snotlings) into the machines and armor of the other side's stuff. The snotlings go berzerk and tear the machinery apart, or jam it with their bodies, or whatever.
I played 40k for a while, but lost interest. I suck at painting the damn things, and the game doesn't look good if the units aren't painted. Also, it gets quite expensive too (notice a trend?) buying everything you need to play. Games Workshop used to have a game called Necromunda, set deep in the cities of the Warhammer 40k world, essentially gang wars and stuff. That was great, you only need about 10 models, but, of course, it went out of print (another thing that happens with alarming regularity in the gaming world). I keep hearing rumors about it maybe coming back, but nothing concrete (or pewter) yet.
I'm neglecting a lot of the gaming world, but one or two more things. It's not all wargames. There's a world of non-wargames out there, from the game Evo (trying to evolve your dinosaurs so you have the most when the asteroid comes and wipes 'em all out) to stuff like La Citta (a game of city building in renaissance Italy) and Puerto Rico (building a plantation in, yes, Puerto Rico). Then there are the old games from such standbys as Avalon Hill, like Merchants of Venus, set in space, you're an interstellar trader trying to make more money than everyone else. Sorta like Monopoly, but totally different. It's a great game.
Also, there's Loony Labs, a fairly new company. They've got great, cheap, simple games like Fluxx, Chrononauts, and, possibly the best game ever, Zendo. I can't explain Zendo, it's kinda like the color and shape associations on IQ tests, but that doesn't do the game justice. I just discovered it recently, didn't want to stop playing.
Oh, and Cheapass Games. Yes, that's the name of the company. Their main ideas are that, 1. Most people already have dice and pawns from other games at home. So why keep buying them over and over again? and 2. Games are fun, so try to have a sense of humor about it. There's games like Kill Dr. Lucky, Save Dr. Lucky, a game called Escape From Elba, in which you're Napoleon and so's everyone else, and you need to escape the island. Get Out, wherein you and your friends decide to leave the house and get a life, the winner is the first one to get three lives. Oh, and Give Me the Brain. You're a zombie working at a fast food restaraunt, as is everyone else playing, and there's only one brain to go around. You play cards, do actions, and the winner is, uh, can't remember how to win. Has to do with having the brain though. None of the Cheapass Games cost more than 10 bucks.
I'll cover role-playing in a separate section, it's part of the gaming world, but different enough to rate its own page.