“Lia” by J

If you’ve read a balance of my posts and Jung’s posts, you may have noticed that we’re very much “on the same page” in what we’re writing about. In some areas, we have been on the same page since the day we met. Our late-night conversations during the first week of knowing each other showed that we were very much kindred souls. In other areas, each of us has had to stretch and grow to arrive at a “meeting of the minds.” Much of the soul work that Jung has been focusing on over the past three years has forced me to examine my own relationship with my soul. I am a much, much happier and more centered person having stretched in this way, but it was not always a comfortable process! I’ve had to drop many habits of deed and thought and question a lot of assumptions.

Jung has had to stretch in the area of games and gaming in order to understand the value that I saw there. To be clear, Jung loves to play, and everything she loves to do for play (painting, browsing bookstores, going to plays and concerts) I also love to do, so we always had more options for having fun than we had time for. Still, except for the occasional game of Scrabble (which Jung handily trounces me at every time), we rarely played board games together, and certainly never video games. When our twin daughters were born, I was excited that I would finally have family to play games with, but when S and J were younger, they were far more interested in drawing or playing with their toy horses than they were with playing board games with me. Soon another difficulty with games arose: they had a lot of trouble dealing with the winning and losing aspect of games. Recently, I bought us a cooperative board game (Forbidden Island) thinking that it would get around this problem, but I discovered that even when everybody wins or loses together, they still don’t like the winning and losing.

I guess this shouldn’t have surprised me, because as much as I love games, I have also had bad experiences with games. My father was an extremely competitive game player, which I think he got from his father. My paternal grandfather was a mathematician who loved chess. I remember visiting him when he was in his 70s and seeing chess boards set up all around the house. These were correspondence games he was playing by letter with people all over the world! I think that was when I understood why my father never liked chess. In the summers, my family would often stay for a couple weeks in a cottage that my maternal grandfather had built by a creek in Maine. The cottage had no electricity (and still doesn’t), so reading was difficult in the evening, and instead we would all sit around a table with kerosene lamps and play board games. Even though my father’s competitiveness (and my parents’ arguing) made the games less fun than they could have been, I still have very fond memories of that family time, sitting around playing games. It rarely happened outside of those summer nights, maybe only after dinner on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I do remember, though, that I never became comfortable with the winning and losing aspect of games. I didn’t like the idea that competition was all about “who was better” rather than whether I had improved. In other words, I liked the way that competitive play pushed me to improve my performance, but I didn’t see any benefit from feeling less competent than another person, and for whatever reason, I felt that the ultimate goal of any game was twisted into being able to brag that you were the best.

I remember playing early editions of the role-playing game (RPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) (around the time the Advanced D&D edition came out) and feeling the same sense of “togetherness” that I felt when playing board games in the summer with my family. This was a new kind of game, one where we could really play together to have fun and there wasn’t the same sense of “winners and losers.” The only problem was that I loved playing wizards but in the game, wizard spells were a precious resource. Being the kind of person who didn’t want to regret having used something up (I never actually stuck any of my stickers to anything either), I would habitually make my character save his magic spells and instead attack with his dagger, at which point I’m sure my friends were thinking I’d be better off playing a character like a rogue which was supposed to be using a dagger all the time. I’m sure it was this frustration which led to the death of “Mu-lu the Magic User” at the hands of his so-called friends. (This story inspired my daughter S to write the cautionary poem, “Do Not Kill Your Wizard” which I hope to convince her to publish in our blog at some point!) Unfortunately, my love of the game died with Mu-lu when he was betrayed and although I still looked through my old books from time-to-time, I stopped playing. Eventually my bright yellow backpack of books, hand-drawn dungeon maps on graph paper, character sheets, and my glass jar of polyhedral dice were all lost when my parents sold our childhood home.

Fast-forwarding to my life as a parent, I often brought my daughters to gaming stores in hopes of finding some game that we could enjoy playing together. During one of these trips, I must have spotted the shelf of D&D books and decided to show them to S and J so I could share a little of my childhood with them. I never expected what would happen next. As much as my daughters were lukewarm about board games and card games, they went nuts over RPGs, and especially Dungeons & Dragons. They have read every D&D book that our library system owns as well as many of the online articles that D&D’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast puts out. They absolutely love playing the game when we can get a session organized and S has even taken on the challenge of running her own game in the Dark Sun setting which takes place on an unforgiving desert world. A year ago, when I played in a game for adults, the morning after my game sessions they would always pump me for details of everything that happened. Now we even play Dungeons & Dragons Online together on the weekends when we can’t get a tabletop game together and I’ve found it a great opportunity not just to help my daughters with teamwork, negotiation skills, and resiliency, but also to just have fun storytelling together. At an age when S and J are becoming more-and-more conscious of wanting to pull away from Jung and me to assert their independence, playing RPGs together is an activity where they can treat me as a peer, where I may have more real-life experience to contribute to the team than they do, but they have much more accumulated knowledge about the game and its world to contribute from their hours of reading about them. It puts us on a level playing field and makes it easier for me to parent because I can frame what I say in terms of how it will make the game more fun, rather than simply, “I’m your father, you should listen to me.”

There are challenges to be had with online gaming, and we’re still working on the balances. I also want to get us all around the table to do more pen-and-paper RPGs, with its greater emphasis on visual imagination and endless possibilities. Problem-solving in particular is more fun in tabletop gaming because solutions aren’t pre-programmed like they are in computer games, and I especially enjoy watching my daughters coming up with innovative solutions. Unlike board games, however, tabletop RPGs generally take significant preparation time on the part of the person running the game, as well as a requiring a multi-hour block of time during which to play the session. Still, this is a priority for me once the busy holiday season is over.

So, I have gamer daughters after all, and that now that S is running her own game, we can bring Jung into it, too. Jung may never get the same thrill from playing her Elf Shamaness that the rest of us get from playing our characters, but she still loves being part of the game, and that brings me back to my childhood nights in Maine. Now, as it was then, the best part of playing games for me is the shared experience with my family, and I’m so grateful I can have that experience again.