Here's the back of my baseball card; My name's Nate, and I'm a twenty-year-old undergraduate student on the west coast. I'm a Judo enthusiast, an avid reader, and a hipster to an embarrassing degree. I enjoy long walks in the park, extreme laser tag, and pretending to be a time traveler. I've also been playing tabletop RPG's since I was six years old. This is my little contribution to RPG.net: a column to talk about how 20-somethings today act around and deal with tabletop RPG's.

Stereotypes

So to kick things off, I want to talk about stereotypes. We all know and have suffered from association with the gamer cliche: overweight, unambitious 30-something men who live in their parents' basement. Tabletop role-playing carries a unique stigma. Those of us who admit to playing role playing games are often diminished in the eyes of others, regardless of how closely aligned we are with the image of the average 'gamer'. It's unfortunate, but it's something we've all probably had to deal with at some time or another. Thankfully, that probably won't be the case for much longer.

I'll be the first to admit that my generation is more than a little desensitized. Things matter less to us; we're more transient in our desires and worries, and more willing to bend and break taboos and social mores, simply because those things were never emphasized. Our parents and siblings were the ones who actively rebelled, with the seventies and eighties producing a generation of people who had fought the system. My peers and I, however, grew up in the aftermath of those rebellions, in a world where the constraints of society and culture that had so chaffed our parents weren't quite so tight. We never had to rebel; we took for granted that it was alright to be different, that being weird and unique were not only acceptable, but valuable. The lines in the sand that previously defined our social expectations and hierarchies are still there, but they won't last much longer; the tide is coming in. I have personally known a hacker who was the quarterback of the football team, an out-and-proud lesbian cheerleader and yes, socially capable gamers.

All it takes is one push in the right place. In high school there was this kid who was ridiculously, absurdly popular. He always threw the best parties, went out with the prettiest girls, and wore the best clothes. He had the coolest parents and the best videogames. He was one of those people you hear about, the ones who were kings in high school. One day, he decided to play DnD.

I'm pretty sure that it was a lark on his part; that he just wanted to see what he could get away with at that point. And man, did he ever get away with it. He was a trendsetter, and he did what he was best at. Soon everyone was playing, setting up games and planning campaigns. Not just the classic gamers and computer club guys, but football stars, band geeks, and theater people. I actually heard a basketball player and a cross country guy arguing about why the warlock was better than the wizard. The entire school got in on it; it was a damn gaming revolution.

It didn't last for very long. Like any fad it lost steam after a month or two. But the effects were far-reaching. No one in that school ever looked at roleplaying the same way. Some people would still sneer or roll their eyes when someone mentioned a monster manual, but they'd lost their ignorance, and that was something huge. They had to admit that they had played, even if only once. And a lot of new gamers started exploring the hobby because of it: I know a few of the basketball players kept on gaming straight into their sports-scholarship dorm rooms, and they weren't the only ones.

The face of gaming is changing. I play DnD with a bouncer, a paramedic, a national guard soldier and a librarian. I have friends who routinely play with a group that's almost solely composed of attractive young women from my university's theater department. That same librarian runs a game that teaches kids DnD and gets paid for it. We aren't the same gamers we were before, and that can be confusing, and difficult. I know a good number of people who love RPGs but refuse to admit it in mixed company. But the games we all love have evolved over the years, and so has their audience. The stigma is starting to fade, and more and more people from every walk of life are getting curious. For all the doom-and-gloom that's been hanging around about the state of the industry, I see some hope in a new generation of gamers who don't care who you are or what you do, so long as you've got some dice.