The Civilized Guide to Tabletop Gaming, page 6
The Sulk can do this sometimes because the player who resides within isn’t aware of it. Sometimes what these players need is simply the awareness that there’s a monster within that only they have the power to fight.
Be a Good Winner
I used to play games when my daughter was five. She is my own flesh and blood. I carried her in my womb for ten months prior to having her extracted from my body by a team of highly skilled medical professionals. I love this human being very much. I say this because I want to contextualize the following statement: I hated playing games with her at that age because she was a terrible winner.
My daughter would dance around, singing gleefully, “I beeeeaaaat yoooouuuu!” She’d randomly remind me of her past victories in nonrelated conversations. It would be bedtime, days after we last played, and in the middle of her bedtime story she’d interject with: “Hey! Remember when I beat you at Snakes and Ladders?”
My daughter at the age of five was a terrible winner. And yet I know adults who are comparably bad at winning. Actually, when I reflect on her poor tendencies as winner, I can’t really help but see myself, because I’m an especially terrible winner.
I once played a friend (and past coworker from a gaming store we worked together at) whom I hadn’t played in over a decade due to geography and circumstance. In that game I acted like a total dickbag, celebrating every canny move I made with excited jumping, squealing, and even air punches.
My husband and I play competitive events together, and in one particular event for a game that I was very new at, and purely through a fluke of math and modifiers, our shared one-to-three win-loss record still had me finish higher in the standings than him. I was ecstatic, and for the next week I referred to myself within our home as, “The Superior Warmachine Player of the Household.” I am the woman he married and the mother of his child, and yet for the week that behavior continued he had to remind himself why I was so awesome.
While in many cases my own outgoing and excited personality is a boon, when it comes to being a winner, I could definitely learn some restraint and empathy instead of acting gleefully unrestrained while proverbially kicking my opponent’s teeth in.
Don’t make your opponents feel bad about losing. You may want to play games with them again, and even though you’ve played better than them in at least one game, don’t let that win define your relationship with them.
Be grateful to your opponents for your gaming experience. Sincerely thank them for playing and being fun opponents; it’s the polite thing to do. Shake hands and acknowledge their best effort against you.
Offer to play a game of their choosing in the future. Don’t be the player who only wants to play games you win. Playing games of others’ choosing not only demonstrates you’re a good sport, but it shows that you value the relationship you have with them, even above winning. Value people over victory, so no matter the outcome, the people you played with will choose to play with you again. Sharing food and drinks after games tends to smooth things over pretty well. (As an aside, I know for a fact that cooking my husband’s favorite foods after being oh so delightful after the first Warmachine event we played at together did very much help him remember why he loves me.)
Be a Better Loser
Sometimes a bad loss or a turn of fortune can take a player from a reasonable human being into a big, ugly, tilted monster. Sometimes tilting actually affects whether or not you can win, because your emotions get in the way of your judgment and reasoning.
So here are the basics for you to avoid being a bad loser, and possibly prevent getting slapped so hard you can taste fillings the next time you lose a game.
Recognize That It’s Just a Game
Sometimes it feels like the stakes are higher. But when you boil it right down, the loss of a game doesn’t affect your life in any significantly detrimental way. Losing a game won’t cost you years of your life, your health, or the roof over your head. (If you’re risking any of those things playing tabletop games, you may wish to reconsider some of the decisions you’ve made to get there.) Getting mad about the outcome of a game is the ultimate exercise in futility.
Congratulate the Winner and Learn from the Loss
She beat you by being better and/or luckier than you. Accepting the loss graciously is really about recognizing what you did wrong and what the winner did right, or how much more lucky she was than you. Trying to undermine the win won’t make you better at the game, but recognizing what happened and how you can adjust for those conditions certainly will.
Measure the Fun You Had Rather Than Weighing the Outcome
A fun game is one where you’re enjoying it while you’re playing, not after victory has been settled. Look at the experience holistically rather than reducing it to the outcome.
If you look at the game as being an experience that you may not control all of, and recognize the only thing in your control is your reaction, you can take away the best parts of the game and leave the rest on the table.
Don’t Smell Like the Elephant in the Room
Let’s get real about hygiene. Gamer funk is a real issue. To illustrate, check out this excerpt from an e-mail newsletter from an FLGS:
“We would like to remind all of our customers that attend our events: even though we are a Game Store, there are certain hygiene standards that are to be followed. Taking a shower, putting on some clean clothes, and wearing deodorant before attending an event should be the norm, not the exception. Those who have body odor that is offensive to either our staff, customers, or other gamers will be asked to leave and rectify the situation. This is a general reminder to all.”
I once spent a summer working at a large-chain tabletop gaming retail store. On my first day of training, the orientation included hygiene expectations. I’ve never worked another job where that subject was part of the training.
It’s my observation that gamer funk isn’t completely a product of a lack of hygiene, but that gaming environments are also not generally conducive to keeping people from sweating. Gaming often happens in smaller spaces whose priority in design isn’t ventilation and temperature maintenance.
Playing the Game
The first time I attended AdeptiCon, one of the biggest miniature war-gaming events in North America, was one of the worst experiences of gamer funk I’ve ever lived through. I was attending the con mostly to play smaller games I didn’t have the opportunity to play in my local gaming area, but I had friends playing in the team tournament, where over 250 teams of four had registered to play Warhammer 40,000, the most popular miniature war game of the time. Between my own games I went into the grand ballroom where the team tournament was being held to stop in on my friends and see how they were doing.
As I passed through the doors, the smell of the more than 1,000 gamers hit me like a ton of bricks. There was so much sweat in the air that you could feel the difference in humidity when entering the ballroom from the hallway. It was rank. The situation wasn’t the fault of the gamers (entirely), but when you put that many people in close proximity, accompanied by poor ventilation, the smell is inevitable—and awful.
The worst part was that when I approached my friends and remarked on the smell, they didn’t notice it. Their brains and olfactory senses had grown accustomed to it. (I’m assuming this was some sort of survival mechanism. Had they recognized how bad the room smelled, they might have quit the event.) This is why being vigilant about your surroundings and being self-aware enough to notice your own perspiration levels are pretty darned important.
Even around a kitchen table, the number of bodies sitting for hours, eating, gaming, and socializing, all the while emitting sweat and heat—well, let’s just say it doesn’t keep people smelling their best.
There are certain things about your body you can control. Here are four rules to follow to keep the odor at bay:
Shower before you hit up your gaming night or event. This is especially important if it’s going to be three or more hours. You’d be surprised how badly an entire role-playing group can smell after a late-night, six-hour marathon session. Good gaming sessions include tension and stress, and those are sweat triggers. If you start fresh, you’re less likely to leave smelly.
Be prepared to mask your smell as the session goes on. A spritz of body spray or a freshening reapplication of deodorant can go a long way in making both you and your gaming colleagues more comfortable. Don’t overdo it; you don’t want to end up smelling like an elevator of old ladies.
Dress in layers. That poor maintenance of temperature in gaming venues mentioned earlier goes both ways. Wear your geekiest hoodie, with a T-shirt underneath. Peel layers off as appropriate (hopefully before you start sweating) and throw on a sweater if you find yourself shivering.
Hydrate with water and avoid drinking too much alcohol. One of the reasons at-home gaming groups can collectively pump out the funk is because they’re often drinking alcohol during gaming sessions. There’s a whole biological reason why alcohol makes you sweat. I won’t bother spending time explaining the metabolic processes as it relates to vasodilation and sweat production since you’re not here for a science lesson. But I will say that taking in water to both stay cool and keep your blood alcohol levels low will keep the funk at bay.
Smell is a real issue when it comes to gaming, and the more effort you put into not smelling offensively, the more comfortable you and everyone around you will be. That’s a good thing.
Be a Gracious Guest
Chapter 6 covers hosting your own gaming nights, but a key element to not being a dick is to be a fantastic guest when you go to someone else’s house to game.
Be Helpful to Your Host
I’ll be blunt; you’re a grown adult. You can put your dishes in the sink or dishwasher, and you can throw away your own garbage. Believe me when I say there’s nothing stopping you from helping tidy up after gaming night, including moving furniture back to where it belongs, putting the game away, and cleaning up the detritus of less gracious guests.
Ask your host if there’s anything she’d like you to bring; ice, snacks, or drinks are easy to pick up. Offer to show up early to help set up. Your host may or may not take you up on the offer, but she’ll appreciate it.
Also, use coasters if you’re offered them. It’s just good manners. Hosts who have coasters care that they’re used; trust me on this.
Be on Time
A well-organized gaming night presumes everyone who shows up will be participating. Being late means you’re likely delaying the game for everyone else, who are waiting on you. That means a later start, which also means a later end for your host. If you can’t be on time, give your host a heads-up as soon as you know there will be a delay. If you know you’re going to be late, tell your friends to start without you.
Be Mindful of Your Alcohol Intake
Gaming night should be fun and is often pretty uninhibited, but at the same time, a guest who has had too much to drink is not a good guest. For safety’s sake, if you do drink, have a way home that doesn’t involve driving. If your host has offered overnight accommodations because of your condition, accept. Sloppy gaming can be fun if everyone is into it, but if you slide into sloppy but nobody else is there, you can be a bit of a burden.
Playing the Game
I once had three gamers hang out in my hotel room and turn it into their own personal frat party. By the end of it, two of them needed me to drive them home because they were local and didn’t have a hotel room, and I was married to the other one. One of the gamers had thrown up in the bathtub; another had thrown up in the sink, clogging it. Leaving chunks of poorly chewed regurgitated chicken in your host’s hotel sink is the exact opposite of being a good guest. Mostly because your host will have to fish the chunks out of the sink with her bare hands in order to unclog it and avoid paying additional room charges.
Keep in mind that if all the players are good visitors, the host will probably want to do this again. You may have another regular hangout for gaming (in addition to your FLGS). On the other hand, if after game night the host’s house or apartment looks like New York after the Avengers fought off Loki, he probably won’t be so interested in repeating the experience.
All in all, being a good guest is about being considerate of your host and not making him do more work than he initially signed up for. He might not want to clean water rings off his table, or chunks of food out of his sink; either way, he’ll appreciate your efforts.
Don’t Be Touchy-Feely Without Permission
There will come a day where you’re walking through your FLGS, a convention, or some other gaming situation and you’ll see a game whose components are incredibly cool. So cool, in fact, that you’ll feel drawn to them, and you may feel compelled to pick them up. Here’s a rule to help keep your fingers from being broken by a stranger: Do not touch game components without first asking permission. Yes, that includes game components that aren’t being played with in that moment, and it is doubly important not to touch game pieces in a game in progress.
This situation is most common to games that have components that are customized, crafted, or painted by one of the gamers. It may also come up in situations with collectible items (like cards) that you might wish to see closer.
If you’d like to see something close up, open by positively remarking on the item and ask to see it closer: “I really like the color scheme you chose. May I pick it up for a closer look?”
If the owner says no, which is her right, walk away. If she says yes, ask her how best to hold the component, as she may know any weak spots or may not want too much pressure placed on a specific spot.
Ultimately, you have to respect the game’s owner. Remember your mother’s advice to look with your eyes and not your hands, and you may save a significant amount of grief (and having to find finger splints at the drugstore) in the future.
Lend and Borrow Games Responsibly
There’s so much more to borrowing and lending games than you’d suspect. If you’re borrowing and lending to a friend, it’s a pretty big exercise in trust. There are a lot of upsides to borrowing games: It gives you a chance to try a game out before you commit to buy it, and if you’re lending, it means your friends can get to know a game you like enough to have paid money for it. It might also get you playing with them without teaching them how to play (presumably you’re lending them the instructions as well).
But this good-faith covenant has the potential for pitfalls. Here are some tactics to avoid any difficulties.
If You’re the Borrower
If you’re borrowing, be clear about when you intend to bring the borrowed game back—the lender should never feel like his game is just being stored on your shelf. You need to take better care of a borrowed game than your own games—returning a game in a condition that is worse than the condition it was lent out at is a huge breach of trust. So don’t do that.
If you wreck a game or lose its components, you can sometimes reach out to the publisher and ask for those missing pieces. If it has them, the company will usually send them to you. If you can’t get the missing or damaged pieces, don’t just return the game to the owner without them. If you can, buy the game again and offer him the new copy or any of the components to replace the lost or damaged ones.
If You’re the Lender
If you’re on the other end as the lender, there are a few things you’ll want to do.
First, be prepared for something unforeseen to happen to your game. It’s never intended, but if a game is too precious to you to contemplate something happening to it, don’t lend it out. Similarly, your game may come back with all the components in the same condition, but it may not be put back in the box the way you like it and normally have it organized. Be okay with that.
Be assertive with your games. Sometimes you have to hound people who have borrowed from you to get your stuff back. If you don’t have the stomach to ask for your own stuff back, you probably shouldn’t lend your games out. You don’t have to be a mob boss, hacking kneecaps if you don’t get your stuff back, but you shouldn't be hesitant to follow up with your friends. An easy way to have that conversation is to ask your friend how she liked the game you lent her, which can lead you to telling her you need the game back as it was promised back to you.
Playing the Game
Stella is a particularly generous gamer and has willingly lent out her games and rulebooks to friends to get them interested in the games she loves. Unfortunately a couple of her friends had taken advantage of her generosity and failed to return her games in a timely manner. After an uncomfortable situation where a friend kept putting her off without returning her game, Stella did a few things to help politely remind her friends to give her back what she had lent.
She started setting up calendar reminders for her friends when she’d lend anything out (some on Facebook and some as e-mail event invitations), telling her friends that they help remind her who she’s lent what to while also letting technology remind people to give back her stuff. When she’d get the reminder, she’d send a follow-up message asking when her friend was free to hang out and play the game that was borrowed. If a friend didn’t like it, she’d offer a chance to hang out and just take the game off his hands. It gave her a reason to hang out with her friends, play more games she loved with them, and help them learn it all in one fell swoop, while also not being overly imposing.
