(no subject)

[the_rck]

During the drive down, Scott and I talked a bit about my problems with board and card games. I have a near phobic reaction when I try to play them. There are one or two that I'm okay with, things I learned to play as a child and know really, really well, but I can't learn new games. I also can play solitaire games of various sorts without trouble. I start to shake, I feel sick, I get a headache, and I have no fun at all. Role playing games, tabletop or LARP, seem to be utterly different for me. This puzzles some of our friends, and I've never quite worked out the whys of the situation. I just know that it's true.

Some of it is that LARPs and tabletop RPGs map to a different sort of activity for me. They're storytelling, improv acting, writing, performance, all things that I enjoy doing. Card games and board games are rules, right and wrong decisions, complex things built of little pieces that matter and that can't be altered after the fact. They involve interacting with other people on multiple levels that I have trouble handling. The competition doesn't work well for me. I find it impossible to relax at all while doing it. (I suspect that part of my reaction is a weird form of stage fright. I don't get it over performing on a stage, GMing or public speaking. Instead, I get it over this more intimate and choreographed form of performance.)

At any rate, in our discussions yesterday, Scott and I concluded that my big problem with board and card games is that I get obsessed with the form of what's going on. The details capture me, and I *need* them all to be right. I respond to every tiny details as if it's a matter of life and death. My body can't tell that I'm not really in danger, and my brain goes into crisis mode. All of that adds up to No Fun and, really, to those sorts of games not being good for me. I can watch other people play them, learn the strategies and form opinions on them by watching. As long as I don't try to play. Kind of like the difference between watching someone on a tightrope or a trapeze versus doing it oneself.

Tabletop games and LARPs are easier for me because I can put aside the details in favor of people interactions. When one tactic doesn't work, I can usually resort to others. (Hm... Fast talk didn't work. Time to pull out the weapons or the bribes or go invisible or....) It's also easier to come up with an approach that's different from what anyone else expects. Even when things turn out badly for my character, I know that that's my *character*. The character's not me. One I've played for a long time is a part of me in some ways so that losing it is upsetting, but it's still on the level of dropping a book in the bathtub (an out of print one, in some cases) or dropping the glass bowl I inherited from my great-aunt. I'm not happy about it, but there's no deep damage.

Role playing, like writing, lets me find outlets for my constant life or death anxiety that aren't harmful. Nobody really dies. Nobody's really traumatized. Nobody's tortured or loses their job or... It's fiction. In real life, I don't have anything to fight that I can grasp, comprehend and efficiently work against. In games and writing, it's possible. (I do write things that I might not enjoy as a reader. They're more stressful than I'd seek for relaxation. Writing them, however, helps a lot. It justifies how I feel normally in some strange way.)

There are games and genres of fiction that I'll never touch because they'd be bad for me. I will never play Paranoia, for example. It would wreck me because I wouldn't be able to pull back to the right distance. I can play Call of Cthulhu, even knowing that my character will almost certainly die or go mad. It's not losing that's the problem. It's not being able to grasp the problem, not being able to plan, not being able to do my best.

I expect that I could learn to play particular board or card games by simply forcing myself to play them repeatedly until I don't freak out so badly. I just can't see that it's worthwhile. I need that energy for other things that matter to me. It's not like a phobia of using the microwave (which I need to do often) or of visiting my mother-in-law (which matters to her, Scott, Delia and other people I love dearly). It's just one of the limits I accept on my life so that I can push in other areas.

Comments

[ceara.livejournal.com]

I have difficulty playing any new games, too. If I can manage to push myself past the first half-hour or so, I usually manage to do OK, but I almost never feel that the trauma of that first half-hour is worth the payoff of having another game I can play. In the past half-dozen years, I've probably only done it twice.

Role-playing, I've never really managed to force myself to try. I got so far as to have a character rolled up on two occasions, but always panicked out of actually doing anything with it. There are too many things about it I don't understand, and it is not the sort of thing you can figure out all the ins and outs of at leisure and in private, you have to do quite a bit of it during the game, and with people watching. I'm sure once you get the knack of all the mechanics and such of the playing, it's loads of fun (though I suspect the actual role-playing bit would still trigger my "speaking in front of people" phobia for quite a while), but that learning curve scares the daylights out of me.

[the_rck]

I think that stage fright/fear of public speaking is a very real barrier to playing the sort of games I prefer. I suspect that some people get around it by focusing heavily on game mechanics or by starting with the sort of game that has little in the way of people interaction, but it sounds like neither would work for you.

I'm not a fan of challenging phobias just to challenge them. I know people who feel that it's a good idea, but I tend to think that it's only worthwhile for things that affect function and quality of life. I find that not playing games only really affects my life at gaming conventions or when I'm with people who are rude about my preference not to play.

[the_rck]

Oh-- Does alcohol help at all with decreasing your misery in trying to learn games? I find that a small amount of alcohol can help me with certain types of anxiety. Learning games isn't among them for me due to the whole issue of alcohol making my brain fuzzy. My brain tends to assume that that relaxation makes me less able to deal with threats.

[ceara.livejournal.com]

It can, yes. Alcohol-as-social-lubrication has been a great boon to me since I discovered it. I never even try to learn a game without at least a little bit of help from that. It doesn't always help, but it does at least give me better odds.

[jss]

I'm curious; what about a card game that's deliberately unstructured, like 1,000 Blank White Cards? "The game consists of whatever the players define it as by creating and playing cards. There are no initial rules, and while there may be conventions among certain groups of players, it is in the spirit of the game to spite and explode these conventions, as well as to adhere to them religiously." Would that trip your anxiety triggers?

[the_rck]

I don't know. I've never had the opportunity to try.

[jss]

If we get the opportunity, perhaps we can try it some time.

[the_rck]

I'd like that.

We also need to find a clear time to get you over here for dinner. How are your evenings in July? I'll e-mail Mary and her husband, dspitzley to ask their schedule.

The next few days are bad for us due to visiting family.

[jss]

My July? Ick. In the short term: Try to get over the GI problem. This is seriously interfering with my ability to schedule. :/

Longer term: I'm out of town or unavailable the 16th-21st and probably working the night of the 25th. Some time that week (21-25) I'm probably having my permanent (dental) crown put in, the prep work for which is this afternoon.

[codrus.livejournal.com]

Have you ever tried the Lord of the Rings boardgame?

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/thelotr_about.html

I particularly like this game because the competition is against the board, not against the other players. It is a very social game, in that you don't close yourself off from the other players (an extreme version of that phenomena would be poker, where you want to not have any tells whatsoever). The table talk and group strategies of LOTR appeal to me.

[the_rck]

I've not tried it. Maybe I'll look for an opportunity to. It might work for me, particularly if the other players are supportive.

[retsuko.livejournal.com]

I like most games, but if I start thinking the rules are stupid, or there's no real strategy involved, I get bored and wander off (although I adored "Candyland" as a youngun.)

Have you played Apples to Apples? What I love about that game is that it combines a sort of role-playing strategy with a card collection-style game, which, every time I've played, is quickly abandoned to focus on the fun elements more.

[the_rck]

I've not tried Apples to Apples. My problem in trying games is that I don't know which ones are going to hurt really badly. Sometimes I can be sure that a game will be a problem. Strategy games tend to be really bad because my anxiety and my body react to every decision as if being wrong might result in death or serious injury. Knowing that that's ridiculous don't help at all.

[dspitzle.livejournal.com]

I was actually thinking Apples to Apples might work for you, too. More generally, the entire genre of "party games" tend to be rules-light, interaction-heavy, and have the advantage over RPGs of not requiring character creation time. As for Lord of the Rings, my suspicion is that there are too many moving parts, as it were, though you might find it entertaining as a spectator. What games are you able to play with minimal distress, or ideally with actual enjoyment? Often that's a good place to start when looking for other things to play.

The one practical reason I can see for spending some spoons looking for games that click for you is that games are one of the few things that I've ever seen parents and kids actually do together over the years, and those families who play games together regularly have seemed to get along better.

Oh, and hi jss113. I've seen you around here but didn't know you were you, as it were. Glad to see you back in the civilized world :)