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Jun. 26th, 2008 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckDuring 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-26 07:00 pm (UTC)