CARDBOARD MANIFESTO
The host of the Five Games For Doomsday Podcast offers a love letter to what’s important about the hobby and what we have learned from a year of lockdowns and isolation
What is the purpose of gaming? Why do we a (when we’re allowed) sit around a table and fuddle with mechanisms? Why are more and more people being drawn to something so wilfully analogue, so wilfully last century? It’s because we are an outward looking species, we need others to define ourselves and so much of our lives are facsimiles of interaction, mediated through LEDs. We thrive through simply being in rooms with others and if we didn’t know this before, the pandemic has rammed this reality down our throats (along with all those biscuits).
Yet there is a struggle, we are being sent mixed messages. Social media doesn’t want us to rip ourselves from the screen. It wants us to stay fixed in a silicone world, to look ever more into ourselves until we see the void at the centre of our beings and scramble to fill that void with the things they want to sell us.
That’s why gaming is so vital, and as soon as we can we need to get out of our houses and into rooms and submerge ourselves in the buzz of people interacting.
Everywhere we turn on social media we see them. Memes extolling self love. They are usually an artfully out of focus picture of a beach or a cute cartoon. There’s a calming font that tells you things. It tells you that you’re great, you’re perfect, your choices are right. It gives you permission to indulge yourself. That indulgence often results in telling others “you are wrong,” “you are immoral,” “you are a heretic.” There is so much toxicity because there is a pronoun problem. ‘You’ is against our programming. ‘You’ is not how evolution has made us. There is nothing but arid interrogation in ‘You.’ We should really focus on ‘We.’
It is why so many are becoming fatigued and stretched out thin. It is why so many of us, despite our jobs and cupboards filled with stuff, are fracturing. It’s because we are being denied ‘we,’ we are gorging on ‘you’ and releasing that maybe there’s not so much nutrition in it.
This is why I’ve nailed my colours to gaming. It is why, despite the apparent desire for the community to tear itself apart recently, I am still so in love with what gaming brings and that is an avalanche of ‘we.’
As the year anniversary of the last time I went to my gaming group approaches I have been aching to get back into that room again. To play games with a myriad of people, to be annoyed by those riddled with analysis paralysis, to be ridiculed because I’ve chosen a hobby I’m so bad at. I’ve been dying to drink beer and have those wonderful, aimless conversations that you have with people you barely know. I’ve really been missing ‘we.’
Five years ago I walked the Camino de Santiago, and learned a valuable lesson. That without others we are nothing. That when we plant ourselves in a social situation we grow in the shining eyes and the laughs of the people around us. We find ourselves in others and with every meeple placed and every sigh at a bad hand we are doing what we were put here to do. To put ourselves into the world. There are many ways to do it but it is gaming that I have chosen and I can’t think of anything that can bring a group of people together quicker. These games, these collections of bits and ideas are engines of interaction and so are engines of humanity. We should hold onto the memories that games have given us and when we are allowed to, we should swarm into community centres and conventions and create a whole lot more. I can’t wait to sit around a table with loads of people and finally get that copy of Blood on the Clocktower played.
What is the purpose of gaming? It is to jettison the ‘You’ and to focus whole heartedly on the ‘We’ and it’s the magic inside these boxes of wood, plastic and cardboard that will help us do it.