This year I went to GenCon. There were dice, cards, and game boards everywhere. And I loved it. There. I said. Out loud. Or wrote it.
I started playing role playing games back in high school. Back when teenagers were rumored to dying in caves in our own backyard (Michigan State University) while taking it way too far. Back when our parents were sure that Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) would lead to promiscuous sex, hard drugs, and ultimate death. Or some such madness. Looking back on it as a parent now I can see why they might have been a little concerned (albeit without cause). But I digress. After leaving my small circle of equally nerdy friends and going out into the real world (college), I stopped playing D&D. I’ve never gone back to it. I’ve been tempted, but I never have. In the interim I had focused all of my gaming attention on electronic games. While most of the folks that I played video games with had (at one time or another) been pen and paper gamers very few of them would admit to still doing it. It just wasn’t cool. Even in our little uncool circle. For a very long time gamers were thought to be unsocialized, pubescent boys with poor hygiene and CRT tans who slayed dragons and orcs in their parents’ basements. It was bad enough that we had to live that down but to then have to live down the image of the greasy haired white boy in the black hooded cape carrying around a plastic battleaxe would have just been too much. So tabletop gaming went away. If it wasn’t from Hasbro or Mattel it was just too…nerdy. And being a nerd was definitely worse than being a geek. And being a nerd to a geek was just unbearable.
Then something happened. Video games became more acceptable. B-list celebrities started advertising WoW on television; Beyonce, Nicole Kidman, Carrie Underwood, Lisa Kudrow did commercials for the Nintendo DS; and Robin Williams told the world that he named his own daughter Zelda after the princess of Hyrule. It couldn’t get much better (or more mainstream) than this.
With this new level of video game “tolerance” came something else. A resurgence of other kinds of games as well. Going into a local “game” store was no longer a guarantee that you would be able to pick up a copy of Halo or Final Fantasy. You might come out with a bag of dice and some brightly colored little figurines instead. While that was still fringe stuff the Germans were definitely starting to invade our living rooms. Klaus Teuber brought Settlers of Catan to the US and the floodgates opened for grown up boardgames. We had moved beyond Monopoly and Clue and into Carcasonne, Ticket to Ride, and Lost Cities. Board game developers even started marketing cheap (or free) versions of their games on smart phones and discovered that this just boosted their sales of physical games. Grown folks discovered that they still loved games and these new boardgames gave folks the “normalcy” of a board, but still had a lot of the role playing elements present. There were robber barons, westward (or multidirectional) expansion, and good old King Neptune.
Boardgaming was no longer the dirty little secret of the video gaming community. For years we had been playing games that were based on tabletop gaming rules and now we were finally able to bring those games out of the closet (so to speak). The steadily increasing numbers at tabletops gaming cons and their new family friendly persona seems to demonstrate this more than anything. Hell, anything you can buy at your local big box story has to be safe, right? (Now some “hardcore” board gamers won’t touch those games with a 10 foot pole because they are too mainstream, but that’s an entirely different post). If you’re interested you can even learn to play new boardgames through Geek and Sundry‘s Tabletop web series which is hosted by geek icon, Wil Wheaton, and regularly visited by a band of merry gamers of sci-fi and gaming fame.
Wow, all of that just to lead in to my GenCon experience. I was shocked to see that they were advertising childcare. Hell, I would never take my kid to E3, PAX, or even GDC. But there were a ton off kids at GenCon and they were doing cosplay. They recognized the other characters around, they paraded through the exhibit hall (with the daycare workers), and some just strolled around with their parents. There was a noticeable lack of scantily clad booth babes (those some of the attendees needed to be reminded that there were children about–especially a rather naughty Poison Ivy), but overall I would feel comfortable taking Pea with me next year. It was great to see children sharing a tradition of something beyond Candyland and Chutes and Ladders with their parents and seeing them excitedly run up to have their pictures taken with other attendees (who loved doing it as far as I can tell). Heck, I even had my picture taken with a pretty authentic looking Jade from Beyond Good and Evil (there was some video game presence) and two of the folks that I went with dressed as Finn and Fiona from Adventure Time.
Since coming back from GenCon I have not only spent a lot more time playing tabletop games, but have started to evangelize a bit. I have drawn a few new people into games of Catan and I even gave a copy to a friend as a bridal shower present (lingerie only goes so far at our age). Tabletop games are making a real comeback and I’m really glad that this game geek is finally getting the chance to let her “nerd flag” fly as well.
