I’ve been thinking a lot about moving lately, both looking at my past and my future. Finding a group can be pretty easy when in an urban environment, but harder in smaller towns. And finding the right group can be tricky no matter where one lives.
While I first experienced role-playing when visiting with my cousins in Colorado, my gaming life really began in Houston, Texas. That’s where I lived when I was in my teens. At the time I was going to a junior high for performing and visual arts and it was easy to find a gaming group. I also made friends at a local convenience store with a Ghost ‘n Goblins arcade machine who happened to game. This made gaming through my teens easy and often. Well, easy in terms of friends; perhaps not so easy with fundamentalist family members. But that’s another topic for another day.
Following my graduation from high school, I worked next door to a gaming and comic store, a few blocks from a different gaming/comic shop, and in close proximity to two of the yearly RPG conventions. Houston is a good city in which to be a gamer, but one will need motorized transportation of their own. In my retail and higher education years I belonged to a number of role-playing groups and most of my free time was spent with various friends playing RPGs. The tail end of this time period overlapped with my first professional job as a web developer.
In 2000 I rode the dot-com bubble to the northern suburbs of Chicago. In many ways, I’m grateful that my hobby is a nerdy/geeky one. It’s often made up of early adopters to technology; and I was able to use the Steve Jackson Games forums to find a GURPS group in the nearby Shimer College. That said, my search for a new group did not begin on the web. I checked nearby game and comic shops as I had in the past; but most groups did not seem to fit my preferred gaming style (role-playing over combat; open-ended/sandbox over railroad plots). Finding a group in Chicagoland was much harder for me than finding a group in Houston. But, after a few months of searching and trial-and-error with some groups, and thanks to Internet forums, I was gaming again.
A brief aside: I’ve found it interesting that Houston, at the time I left, hosted three conventions a year just around tabletop gaming (and one could find gaming at its sci-fi and anime conventions as well). Meanwhile, Chicago had no easily-found tabletop gaming conventions, with most people waiting to travel to Milwaukee—and, later, Indianapolis—for their RPG convention circuit. I have since learned of other LARP and gaming conventions in the Midwest, but for the size of Chicago itself, few-to-none are available via public transport. Chicago proper is not a city where one needs to own a car… unless they want to attend a gaming convention.
During my past sixteen plus years in Chicago I’ve been able to maintain a gamer lifestyle in an organic fashion. I’d make friends in a group and even if there was a move or group split, there’d be enough people to start afresh. However, the time spent playing tabletop games as lessened over the years. Adulthood brings work, life, and other obligations that can take the forefront. I’ve been lucky enough to, for the most part, enjoy a game at least once a month. But, there was a time in late 2006 when I decided to seek out a new group separate from my circle of friends. I turned to the Internet once more.
Meetup and NearbyGamers were both relatively new when I began searching for a new gaming group. And, at the time, I was searching for a very specific kind of group. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite articulate what I wanted. I knew what I didn’t want (Dungeons & Dragons, World of Darkness, LARP), but those dominated most groups in my area. Yes, I was a hipster gamer and sought the little-played and the esoteric. I also had bad luck with the systems at the time. It could be compared to online dating. A message could be sent, only for it to go un-responded. Or the other players in question just weren’t a good fit regardless of the text of their profile. Thankfully, the groups that I was still a participant within began to re-flourish and I halted my hunt.
So, what prompted this post? What’s got me thinking about all of this? Well, I’m planning another cross-nation move in my life. This time I’ll be moving more west than north, as I plan to take the next steps of my life in the Pacific Northwest. While my voyage is still months away and I plan to continue gaming with my Chicagoland friends via tools like Roll20 (more on the digital tabletop space later), I’m also trying to understand the lay of the land, gaming-wise, early. The tools are more plentiful and populated than they were ten years ago and I’ve since shed my hipster attitude towards systems. Though I still have my role-playing and sandbox style preferences.
I was in Portland in October of 2016 and visited a few gaming shops, many of which offered gaming tables. The ones I visited, however, did not offer any sort of group-finding bulletin boards or services. Employees I spoke with suggested finding a group online then meeting at the store to rent their tables. It’s very possible that I was talking to the wrong people or that it will be easier to network once living there, but until then, I could at least do my research.
Meetup has become more popular and populated since I last used it for gaming purposes, though it’s more a way to find events that can potentially lead to groups than an out-and-out player/group finding resource. To return to the analogy of online dating, it’s more a way to find a dating event than scheduling an actual date. Not that I’m saying that’s a bad thing. NearbyGamers is still running and some folks are still on the message boards, however it’s difficult to determine how up-to-date or relevant some of the group and player postings are. No “last visited” or “last updated” dates are displayed on profile pages. There are a few other gamer finding sites, but few have actual listings. In my recent searchings I did discover Find Gamers, which doesn’t seem as densely populated as NearbyGamers, but does offer insight into last login and last updated dates on profiles. I’m not discounting the use of Facebook groups or RPG-related forums. Group finding exists, there, too.
In the end, I have no fears about eventually finding a group that fits my gaming wants. And, thanks to technology, I know there are some things I can do now to pave that path even before I’m there.
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