"Shut Up Mikey, You Don't Exist!"

(or, a funny thing happened on the way to my D&D session...)

 

I got the idea for this column when I noticed a few things about my website.  First of all, I realized that people were visiting my pages of gaming quotes, and not only that, sending me email about it saying how much they'd enjoyed it.  And second of all, I realized that they were some of the most-visited pages on the whole Satellite.  Now, I'm utterly delighted that people are actually reading my stuff (thank you, thank you).  But really, people...pages consisting only of out-of-context quotes from various gaming sessions, which were funny at the time but will probably make no sense to anyone who wasn't there?  Isn't that a little self-indulgent?  So I was kinda feeling stupid for ever posting the thing in the first place...until I went surfing around looking for more links for my role-playing links page, and discovered that there are about a million other people out there who also have RPG quote pages...and that I was reading them...and laughing.

 

The players were from the US, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, and the quotes came from every game imaginable.  (My personal favorites came from a Mage campaign..."Five mages, no clue!  Five mages, no clue!" and "Reality is like a parent--it has strict rules which cannot be broken, and it is all set to break them in order to PUNISH your ass"...but I digress.)  Some quotes were very specific to the game world, while others seemed to be universal.  Such as, "Shut up Mikey, you don't exist!"  Everyone has probably said that at one time or another to the player of a deceased PC who kept trying to horn in on the action.  It's the kind of thing that would either seem utterly stupid or make no sense to most of the population, but gamers invariably find it hilarious.  (Mundanes overhearing things like that may be the source of a lot of those nasty anti-D&D urban legends...but once again, I'm saving that for a later column.)

 

(Before I go any further, I suppose I should explain my use of the name "Mikey" in the quote in question.  My first ever gaming group had a guy named Mikey who was kind of the good-natured, silly, comic relief of the group.  My current Mage GM is named Mikey and serves much the same function.  My GURPS group doesn't have a Mikey in name, but there's a guy who is definitely a Mikey in spirit.  Half the gamers I talk to are either named Mikey or serve the function of a Mikey.  I realize it's a common name and all, but it's gotten to the point where I use "Mikey" as a generic name for any male gamer I don't know and much of the time I'm right...but once again, I digress.)

 

As I was saying, gamer humor has a definite niche on the Internet; after all, The Gamer Chick's Link Collection devotes a whole section to it.  At first glance this doesn't seem too unusual, since you'll find humor specific to just about any hobby you can imagine.  But when I've tried to find humor sites for some of my other interests, I've come up surprisingly short--and I'm never at a loss for gaming humor.  The extreme popularity of "funny gaming story" sites like RPGHost' survey section, the fact that ANYONE would visit a 2000+ item list of Famous Last Words, and the never-ending propagation of email forwards filled with fanboy pickup lines, vampire humor (if you check this one out,make sure to read the WoD Disney characters thing...it's great), and the 25 types of gamers, demonstrates this as well as anything.  What is it that we gamers find so freakin' hilarious about ourselves, anyway?

 

Yes, no matter how much it may appear that way, this column is MORE than an excuse to link to a bunch of my favorite gaming humor places so we can all have a good laugh (although that's definitely part of it).  As pastimes go, we're all aware that gaming isn't exactly needlepoint.  Walk up to the average person on the street and start talking about how last night your half-elf paladin talked Heironeus into giving him a +10 Sword of Everything Killing, scored a crit-hit on his attack roll, decapitated the demon lord who had been oppressing his homeland, and then went on to get eaten by the tarrasque, and they'll want to call the cops to take you back to the looney bin before you even get to the good part.  Knowing that can be pretty disheartening.  And despite what the name would imply, gaming isn't all fun and games.  We get into some pretty heavy subjects in our hobby: war, death, magic, religion, the unending battle between good and evil.  And while it's great that a game can be a vehicle for these serious discussions, sometimes gamers just wanna have fun.  That's where the jokes come in.  Gamers need one another to tell those crazy stories and quotes that don't make sense to anyone else, to know that there are other people in the world who think they're as funny or as cool as you do.

 

But lest you all go away from this thinking that roleplaying needs to be deathly serious all the time...I also think one of the wonderful things about gamers is that most of us don't take ourselves too seriously.  IMHO, a good group is defined as much by their ability to laugh at themselves as it is by their roleplaying skill.  When our GURPS group's GM got tongue-tied and told the party wizard to "keep close watch over [my] package," no one got embarrassed or upset or angry with themselves for breaking character; we just took a time-out, laughed about it (the GM included), wrote it down on the quotes list, and kept going.  (I truly appreciate this after playing under the GM who would flip tables and get in fistfights with players if they dared to tell him, 'It's just a game'...but that's a long, complicated, and ugly story.)  Above all else, gaming is supposed to be fun, and it scares me when people try to make it be something else.

 

We gamers are a diverse lot any way you slice it.  We're tabletoppers, LARPers, freeformers, wargamers; our favorite genres are fantasy, sci-fi, horror, cyberpunk, unclassifiable, all of the above; our characters are warriors, mages, thieves, creatures of the night, and a million other classes. Yet we all identify with the "You Might Be A Gamer..." list, laugh at the gazebo story and (my favorite) the Head of Vecna and read each other's lists of messed-up non sequiturs.  Who knows what else we might have in common?

 

Apart from being named Mikey, I mean.

 

 

Copyright (c) 2000 by Beth Kinderman.  This is my original work, so please respect it.

 

 

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