Games, Games, Games...

As I mentioned in my post on my most recent Top Ten Film List, the amount of movie-watching I've done has declined over the past year or so. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the main one is that I've really gotten back into playing tabletop RPGs. I'd also like to blame RPGs for my lack of new posts here over the last six months or so, but, to be fair, I stopped blogging before I really started gaming on a regular basis.

However, RPGs do help to scratch both my "movie watching/reading comic books/cultural consumption-in-general" itch and my "be creative" itch, with the added benefit of being a heck of a lot more social than watching DVDs or sitting in front of a computer screen waiting for inspiration.

I had wanted to get back into RPGing for a few years now, but it wasn't until the end of last summer that I made a real push: I rounded up a few friends who hadn't really played much before and got them to give it a try, I started participating at nerdnyc.com, and I tried out playing games over internet chat. As a result, I'm currently in a Heroquest game through the Gotham Gaming Guild and a weekly Burning Wheel game. And I'm going to be playing in a Sorceror game very soon. Not only that, I've gotten the chance to play in a lot of pick-up sessions (much Trollbabe and The Shab-al-Hiri Roach and some Dogs in the Vineyardand Polaris) and playtest some in-development games. (I've even started tinkering around with my own game designs).

What's cool is that all this RPGing isn't about nostalgia: I'm not reaching for the kind of fun I had with these games when I was in high school and college. Rather, I'm able to approach the experience with a greater sense of seriousness, and (paradoxically perhaps), a greater sense of enjoyment: gaming is much more fulfilling to me now than it has ever been. And this is probably a function of my being more comfortable and contented with my life in general, and having a better sense of what I really want to get out of the way I spend my leisure time.