It Slices! It Dices!

There's a certain amount of bigotry in gaming that confuses our sweetie. She's hung out with CCGers, AD&Ders, and the LintKing and I... and she's seen the inherent prejudices in each group. We discussed it tonight at dinner with some bemusement.

I had been fairly put out by the place that sold CCGs advertising itself so strongly to "gamers." The truth is that I'm clinging to outmoded vocabulary: I guess I should stick with "roleplayers" as both CCGers [collectible card games if you've been wondering] and computer game aficionados have claimed the "gamer" label.

There's a lot of folk who will prejudice themselves for or against folks who primarily play one sort of system...depending on the system's general reputation. [I make fun of RIFTS players. That doesn't mean I don't want to run a fabulous RIFTS game... but I'm um... different. Special.]

When I went up to the last of the four stores I went to on Saturday, I was sized-up. I know the look. The mental tape. "Ah, girl. Gamer. Looking for a specific book, looks conversant with the titles..." I don't know what particular meaning those traits had with him. I'm not going around being psychic.

Chatterbox came up to me after I said I had to get up to see if she was done cleaning up the living room, and she said, "You're not psychic." I blinked a few times. Apparently, I can't see through walls.

I'm being pigeonholed [boy, that sounds dirty. I hope it's the right term...] on-line for all the work I do on Amber. It's fair enough. I am running an Amber game. I work very hard to keep up my Amber stuff, and most of my friends are in the Amber community. It's just... When it comes down to it, I don't LIKE Amber all that much... Even though the campaign I'm designing is Amber-related, it's more habit than anything else.

At least part of it is that I can get people to play Amber... whereas I'm running into a lot of prejudices with other games. Unwritten rules, like women can't GM _Cyberpunk_. They can't be gritty enough... Women don't play high-math games. Women play soap opera styles...things like _Vampire_ or _Amber_...

[sigh]

Hey, any time you want to run a Cyberpunk game, I'm in!!!! It'd be a nice contrast for me, since I *am* that stereotypical girl gamer who prefers soap opera stuff like Amber or Vampire to you-bash-the-balrog.

True story: The last time we had a FTF Amber group here, the GM's girlfriend was a neophyte gamer. My raised-in-Shadow-but-not-new-to-Amber-by-now character was taking Rebecca's babe-in-the-woods character around the City, to get her acclimated. Naturally this involved a moderately detailed description of shopping. I was handling the description myself, since the GM had given me latitude to do so. The GM leaned over to my husband and said "You know, I could let them go on like this for the next hour, and they'd think I was a terrific GM..."

Just like that old article, right?