Purposes

[forsyth]

I'm starting to question gaming.

This isn't some kind of like crisis of faith things, but it is pretty big. I mean, I've identified myself as a gamer for most of my life, it's been one of the touchstones of my experiences and the way I've met well, most of the people I know. But lately I've been wondering, what's the point?

I'm not being specific here, I'm pretty much a game-slut. RPGs of most any flavor, Magic, Warhammer, board games, Munchkin, video games, etc, etc, etc, I've played a pretty hefty chunk of them. But... I don't know. Part of it is I want to be accomplishing something, I feel like I should be, and really I'm not. Which leads into a larger problem which I'll get to in a bit.

But gaming. I stopped playing Warhammer a year+ ago, because I never got around to painting the stuff, and I wasn't enjoying playing, and I just didn't have the time to paint or play much. Honestly, I think I enjoyed the painting the most, but. I was out of Magic for a long while, but I got back in recently, and I'm enjoying it, but. I have tons of RPG books, many mostly unread, and haven't played D&D or anything in like two months. I've faded out of most of the RPs I was in on the GG forums, and haven't been involved on the IRC side much either. It's been... a damn long time since I did any RPing on Furc.

Part of it's time. Other things seem to eat up my time, mostly the internet. But not even doing things, just reading stuff, and spamming here, a lot of it. I haven't been writing much, aside from here, and overall, I kinda just feel like I'm wasting my time.

Which is, I think, the real thing. I don't think I'd be angsting about the time I spend gaming if I felt like I was doing something with, well any of the rest of my life. Accomplishing anything at all. Also, the fact that my job relates to gaming, and my job got to the point where my last day is Friday probably contribute to that, too.

Which is what it comes down to, really. When most of my day involves leisure activities like games, or selling leisure activities to people, a) leisure feels like work, b) work doesn't feel like it accomplishes anything. What do I accomplish by selling people R/C cars, trains, art stuff, whatever? I'm selling people plastic crap, mostly made in China. How does that do anything? How does that justify my existence or make the world better? It doesn't. I'm not making anything, I'm not doing anything, and I'm helping contribute to things that are wrong with the world, and distract people from important things. And distract myself.

Thinking about it, though, most jobs in the US are like that. Selling crap, ringing crap up, pointless stuff. We have better lives than 99% of humanity ever dreamed of, and we mostly spend them doing pointless things. I mean, hell, I drove like a total of 80 miles the past two days, and stayed up till like 2am, none of it accomplishing anything that mattered once the console was off or the pieces were put away.

So I guess the problem isn't gaming, it's me. Gaming is like dessert, it's great, but if that's all you do, it gets old, and you don't feel very good. And people have a need to feel they have an effect on their world. Or at least I do. Which has been the most frustrating thing at work, not feeling like anything is making a difference. So I need to find a new job, where I can actually accomplish something, or at least find some way to accomplish something.

And then I won't worry when I interrupt my posting to LJ to make a deck in Apprentice.

Comments

[evilcarp.livejournal.com]

It's always interesting to read your LJ because you have such a different outlook. As a Daoist, it's my intention to have as little effect on the world as possible, in order to escape creating kharma. But you have a great desire to really entrench yourself in the world and leave an impression. That's not uncommon for people, but I think it's more like a background thing for most people where it seems to be a driving force behind who you are.

There's lots of points to gaming. I don't lump RPing, video games, magic, etc all in to one group, though. There really isn't much of a point to video games which is why they usually bore me so quickly. The main point for them is to just relax. They're good when you're just not in the mood to do anything else but I think it's bad when people play them constantly. And when I do get sucked in to a video game (like I did with CoH recently) then it really does make me feel sick when I play it too much.

Magic is mostly a social thing for me. It was an excuse to get all the guys together when we couldn't come up with anything better to do. And building decks and thinking of strategy really is an entertaining mental excersize. I was also suprised when I found that playing Magic helped me in real life. All the memorizing of cards and rules, of figuring out how different cards work in different situations helped me with my current job a lot. It's hard to explain how, but we have an aspect of my job which requires memorizing rules for a lot of different things and knowing how those things interact with each other.

Roleplaying is by far the most useful of these three things. It's social and it has improved my ability to work with other people greatly. It's a creative excersize. It sometimes forces you to learn about new things; like when I played a WWII game and ended up doing a lot of research about WWII. It involves a lot of reading, math, writing, visualization; all things that really stimulates your mind. I think it's incredibly healthy. Once upon a time, when people had spare time, they spent it sitting around and just talking about things. If they were richer and had more leisure time, they'd talk for hours on end. Roleplaying is the closest I get to that now, most of the time.

RPing on the forums is a different animal than RPing with a group of people around a table, but it's still has many of the same aspects. I get burned out on it occasionally, so it helps me to go a few days every now and again just not posting.

But if you want to change the world, none of these things are going to help you much. If you really want to have a big effect on the people and the world around you, you're going to have to be prepared for a life of really hard work, of sacrificing your leisure time and fun, pointless activities. And it will be very fullfilling and someday you'll retire and then get a chance to relax and maybe not feel bad for spending a whole day not doing anything particularly useful. Lots of people live lives like that. Maybe you could go in to medicine and work for organizations that bring health care to people who can't afford to go to a regular doctor. Maybe you could join some group that cleans up local neighborhoods, or brings vaccines to kids in developing countries, or volunteer at nature conservacy groups, or tutor kids or start getting in to politics. I don't. What kind of difference do you want to make? What do you want to change? Who do you want to help? Maybe if you figure out some specifics, you'll have a good place to start.

[forsythferret.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not religious, so any kind of immortality I want to get is going to have to be a result of what I do, now. I don't necessarilly want to have my name in the history books or anything like that, but I don't want to die and have the world completely forget me. Assuming we don't get some kind of clinical immortality in my lifetime, which is possible, but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Besides which, I've never really been attracted to the whole disconnection, renounce the world thing, from any sphere. The world's here. We're here. There's no reason the world should suck, and no reason not to try and make it better. Humans are social creatures. Trying to pretend we're not or make ourselves unconnected doesn't seem like a good idea.

Which is all ironic for me to say, since I don't usually seem to feel very connected to people in practice,as opposed to the abstract, but.

I dunno, maybe not the perfectability of mankind, but the "Better-than-we-are-now-ness" of mankind. Which is also tied to the issues I have with the whole idea of Karma, which (to me) was transparently set up to keep people "in their place" because obviously they had "earned" whatever happened to them by their past lives. Which isn't much different than nobles etc saying they were ordained by God, I think that's one of the things most people in power end up doing, using religion to justify their position. But that's a whole 'nother rant.

I'm also getting an urge to travel, which too much D&D keeps making me think of as "become an adventurer". I think the whole restlessness thing ties together. But also the idea of travelling across the country sounds good, too. If nothing else, it'd give me a load of things to steal for writing.