The Gamer Nation’s Seat Of Power
Recently I was hanging out at Chris
Fox’s site, Ramblings Of A Mad
Gamer, and came across a very well-written editorial on the demise of the local
game shop. Chris talks about the
problems facing independent game store owners more articulately than I ever
could, so I’ll leave that to him. But
his editorial (and his loving descriptions of game stores he has known) got me
to thinking about gamers and how attached we get to our typical game
spots. One of the attractions of
tabletop RPGs is that you can play just about anywhere, and over the years I’ve
gamed in dining rooms, basements, cluttered two-bedroom apartments in which
five people and four pets lived, school cafeterias, moving vehicles, and in
classrooms while I was supposed to be studying for finals (to name just a
few). Yet the places we play are
sometimes just as important and memorable as the games. Why is that, anyway?
I am no exception to this rule. During my high school days in Wisconsin, I
spent many long and pointless hours hanging out at a place called the
Adventurer’s Guild. To this day, I get
dreadfully nostalgic about the place.
Around 1998 or so, it opened under the name Game Domain in a failing
mall with about 10 stores remaining.
The mall was eerily quiet, with nothing but the noise of the air
conditioning and recycled Muzak to break the silent monotony of empty
storefronts, and then you'd walk into GD and it was suddenly the loudest place
on earth. (My friends used to run
around the abandoned food court playing laser tag at 2 in the morning, and only
once got in trouble for it, but that's another story.) The place was gamer heaven--video and
computer games, pool tables, cards and books, weekly Magic: The Gathering
tournaments. When it first opened I'd
been playing Magic for around a year (and my Militant Feminist Enchantress deck
of entirely female creatures was the scourge of the North High lunchroom,
mwahahahaha!), and I started going there intermittently to meet friends and get
to know fellow players. Somewhere in
there the management changed, Game Domain became the Adventurer's Guild, and
the new owners decided to move their business out of the dying mall and into a
larger location very near to the local university.
It's "the Guild on Water
Street" that brings back some of my fondest memories. I became a fixture there almost by accident. In November of 1999, I dropped by the
just-opened new location for the first time, having been told there would be a
"2600" meeting there that night (and, more specifically, that a guy
in whom I was interested would be there...).
Hacker boy never showed, but I did find a rather large group of my
friends and acquaintances there, getting ready for the last session of their
long-running AD&D campaign. They
talked me into playing an NPC who turned out to be the major villain. It wasn't my first time gaming, but I
consider it to be my first real session.
I won't get into the details of the night (or the truly humiliating
death my first ever D&D character died), but suffice to say I was hooked
from then on, and started dropping by the Guild every Friday night to game
until the wee hours of the morning.
Those of you who have delved into my poetry on this
website may have read a poem entitled “The Game Room.” Well, that was the back gaming room at the
Guild, a truly cool (if somewhat unkempt) place where we hosted our weekly
campaigns. The game room had a nice big
table, plenty of chairs and couches (all of which had seen better days), a
marker board, and plenty of scantily clad elf chick posters on the walls, about
which I complained every time we gamed.
However, we had to share space with the broom closet, which is how the
friendly cleaning supply fights began.
However, we had to put a stop to those when one player ended up with a
broken nose after being hit in the face by a roll of paper towels thrown by the
GM. Ever since, the GM would keep a
roll of paper towels next to his screen to remind people to stay on track--and
as an idle threat, I suppose. At the
beginning of the night we'd walk to the Taco John's next door, buy a small soda
each for about $1, and continue going back there once an hour for free Mountain
Dew refills. Miraculously, we never got
kicked out.
For eight hours once a week, the back
room at the Guild became our stage. I
could go on for pages about all the memorable characters, beloved NPCs,
intriguing plots, and hilarious moments that we came up with there. But one of my very favorite memories is how
every time we’d enter the game room for the night’s session, the white marker
board would be positively covered in memorable quotes from the previous
session. We’d never know the context of
the quotes, or the stories behind them, the people in the previous night’s
group, or even what game they had been playing. But no matter what, we’d look at the quotes, and we’d laugh—just because
we were all gamers, and we knew where the others were coming from. Then we’d erase those quotes and start
keeping our own, leaving them for the group after us, hoping they’d smile at
them and start their game off well. And
to this day, I still keep quotes from all of my games, and hope people will see
them in the same way.
The night before I left town for
college, I drove by the Guild to see if anyone was hanging around and found the
door locked, the lights off, and the contents cleared out and gone. No warning, no notice, not even an "out
of business" sign. Nada. (I later found out they had abruptly lost
their lease to the university.) It
seemed oddly appropriate that the place where I spent so much of my high school
career would end with that part of my life.
I've since moved on and found new friends and better gaming groups, but
nothing will ever replace the Guild.
I suspect that ever gamer has a “Guild”
of their own—a beloved game store they will forever romanticize and associate
with their initiation into roleplaying.
And for good reason. Game
stores are special places; outside of conventions (which are an entirely
different column), it’s rare to find anywhere else where gaming is
so...mainstream. They’re one of the
only places on Earth where you can argue the virtues of elves versus dwarves,
or recount the adventures of your seventh-gen Lasombra antitribu,
without fear of retribution or weird looks. They provide something lacking in
other areas of society: a place for people with an unusual interest to come
together and get to know one another.
But despite all this, as Chris’s article
established, local game stores are in trouble. It’s hard for any small local business to compete with the prices
and the selection of malls, mega-stores, and Internet businesses, and game
stores have it particularly hard thanks to their very specific fan base. The Guild still exists in Eau Claire, but in
a much smaller storefront and as a less ambitious concept; it saddens me to
think other up-and-coming gamers in my hometown will be denied the same good
experience I had. The situation isn’t
hopeless yet, but it’s certainly not rosy either.
In other words, I urge all of you to
support local game stores whenever possible. Larger chain stores certainly aren’t an out-and-out Evil Empire;
they’ve done a lot to make gaming more accessible and affordable for those who
aren’t blessed with a neighborhood store.
Still, it’s places like the Guild that put a personal face on gaming and
possibly contribute the most to the hobby.
Think back on your own gaming experiences, and I’m sure you’ll
agree. Buying your RPG materials at
local game stores whenever possible will allow future gamers to have those same
great beginnings. If we don’t, who
will?
Copyright (c) 2001 by Beth Kinderman. This is my original work, so please respect it.