Gaming Community
Posted: Thu Jul 30, 2015 4:01 pm
What is ALFA? A group of players with a particular way of enjoying the NWN game? Or is it a gaming community that is presently using NWN as its way of gaming? There is an important distinction there. Last night reflecting on my PnP days, a thought occurred to me that we should all be part of a bigger gaming community.
In those days, I had a group of friends who also had friends, who knew people who gamed. Every kind of fantasy adventure game you could imagine: war miniatures, comic book role playing, Magic the Gathering card games, and more variations of D&D style games than you could shake a stick at. A couple of nights a week I’d find myself traveling to someone’s house to do one or the other, meeting new people and making new friendships. The neat thing about the experience was that I’d run into familiar faces in different places. I’d show up at a newly forming group on Tuesdays that was starting a Marvel game and bump into the guy who had the ranger in my D&D a year before.
One guy named Jim organized what we had come to call JimCon. Each year in the summer he’d block out 4 days to make a long weekend of gaming at his house. People would take a couple of days of vacation and we’d all invade. He had a calendar set up with different parts of his house featuring a rotation of various games through the long weekend. The basement was a massive stage for miniatures, the PnP games were mostly in the living room, and the dining room was a rotation of card and table top games. People signed up in advance for the portions they could make, and we’d all bring food to share, grill out, and stay up to all hours of the night, with people crashing on the floor all over the place. The end of the weekend featured an “awards ceremony”, with novelty prizes handed out for original game play and humorous occurrences.
It was a gaming community, and it was great fun. Nobody took it too seriously. We recognized that we all had more in common than what separated us, and worked out to resolve disagreements as adults. Honestly, however, I don’t recall there being too many serious problems. We all had enough real life drama and carved out gaming as our escape from it. It was a community of people that was first and foremost about people with a common passion, and secondly about the game, and it transcended any one game.
I lost that when my family relocated with my new job, though I still keep in touch with a couple of those guys via social media. When I saw the release of NWN, it occurred to me that perhaps the next evolution of a gaming community could be virtual; an electronic community using chat rooms, bulletin boards, and electronic forms of the games to connect. When I found ALFA, and its ambitious vision, I had hopes that it would evolve to become like my former gaming community. And that is how I came to be here.
What if ALFA was something more than NWN gamers focuses exclusively on all those pillars? In addition to what we have now, what if there was:
• Other styles of NWN going on (Non-Faerun, more action oriented, more campaign oriented)
• Forums devoted to other games, both electronic and traditional
• VoIP rooms where people meet, discuss, and even game PnP style across the internet
• Calendars where people advertise and organize to make groups
• Occasional in person events (ala JimCon), LAN parties, social events
Perhaps the expansion of the community could result in:
• Attracting cross-over players to the current ALFA PW Project
• Sharing infrastructure costs and work across a larger community
• Having a ready-made base to leverage the next good D&D game that finally comes out
• Bringing more of a sense of community
It wouldn’t be the end of what we now know ALFA to be, and everyone here could continue to do exactly the same things they’re doing now. But by first being a community of people who happen to game, and secondly offering this one particular version of one game, ALFA wouldn’t necessarily lose anything, and potentially gain a lot.
In those days, I had a group of friends who also had friends, who knew people who gamed. Every kind of fantasy adventure game you could imagine: war miniatures, comic book role playing, Magic the Gathering card games, and more variations of D&D style games than you could shake a stick at. A couple of nights a week I’d find myself traveling to someone’s house to do one or the other, meeting new people and making new friendships. The neat thing about the experience was that I’d run into familiar faces in different places. I’d show up at a newly forming group on Tuesdays that was starting a Marvel game and bump into the guy who had the ranger in my D&D a year before.
One guy named Jim organized what we had come to call JimCon. Each year in the summer he’d block out 4 days to make a long weekend of gaming at his house. People would take a couple of days of vacation and we’d all invade. He had a calendar set up with different parts of his house featuring a rotation of various games through the long weekend. The basement was a massive stage for miniatures, the PnP games were mostly in the living room, and the dining room was a rotation of card and table top games. People signed up in advance for the portions they could make, and we’d all bring food to share, grill out, and stay up to all hours of the night, with people crashing on the floor all over the place. The end of the weekend featured an “awards ceremony”, with novelty prizes handed out for original game play and humorous occurrences.
It was a gaming community, and it was great fun. Nobody took it too seriously. We recognized that we all had more in common than what separated us, and worked out to resolve disagreements as adults. Honestly, however, I don’t recall there being too many serious problems. We all had enough real life drama and carved out gaming as our escape from it. It was a community of people that was first and foremost about people with a common passion, and secondly about the game, and it transcended any one game.
I lost that when my family relocated with my new job, though I still keep in touch with a couple of those guys via social media. When I saw the release of NWN, it occurred to me that perhaps the next evolution of a gaming community could be virtual; an electronic community using chat rooms, bulletin boards, and electronic forms of the games to connect. When I found ALFA, and its ambitious vision, I had hopes that it would evolve to become like my former gaming community. And that is how I came to be here.
What if ALFA was something more than NWN gamers focuses exclusively on all those pillars? In addition to what we have now, what if there was:
• Other styles of NWN going on (Non-Faerun, more action oriented, more campaign oriented)
• Forums devoted to other games, both electronic and traditional
• VoIP rooms where people meet, discuss, and even game PnP style across the internet
• Calendars where people advertise and organize to make groups
• Occasional in person events (ala JimCon), LAN parties, social events
Perhaps the expansion of the community could result in:
• Attracting cross-over players to the current ALFA PW Project
• Sharing infrastructure costs and work across a larger community
• Having a ready-made base to leverage the next good D&D game that finally comes out
• Bringing more of a sense of community
It wouldn’t be the end of what we now know ALFA to be, and everyone here could continue to do exactly the same things they’re doing now. But by first being a community of people who happen to game, and secondly offering this one particular version of one game, ALFA wouldn’t necessarily lose anything, and potentially gain a lot.