RPGaDay 2018 Day 10: How has gaming changed you?
Gaming has probably been one of the top three influences in my life, so it's hard to narrow down exclusively what changes it has had because of the sheer magnitude of its impact.
(questions and image from autocratik.blogspot.com)
I feel a need to add an important caveat here: I've been a gamer for longer than I've been able to cross the street safely (though, in hindsight, my poor situational awareness may have been fostered by spending much of my formative years staring at a screen). My brother and I didn't get outside much, and we made up for it by making up stories, and making up games. They started crude and primitive, but they grew into the work that I've done at Loreshaper Games.
My first exposure to roleplaying probably came off the internet when I was pretty young. I discovered 1km1kt as a source of free games, and gave them a try even though they weren't like the video games I was used to. I remember the games there alongside Neverwinter Nights.
I didn't play seriously until I was in college, but I had a lot of flirtations with roleplaying and I was also keenly interested in the game side of it. I became obsessed with Battletech for a while, though I never really played it with miniatures, and enjoyed pretty much any CRPG that supported rich roleplaying experiences, like Sryth.
Then, in college, I finally found players who were interested in actually playing games on a semi-reliable schedule.
However, I've got a little bit of a weird experience in the sense that I started out with theory and then moved to practice. I was working on games before I had a whole lot of playing under my belt, and that gives me a different perspective than a lot of roleplayers have. I'm going to try to just distill what gaming has done for me in a few short statements:
Analysis
I think that it's definitely helped me be more analytical. A lot of people point to games as leading to creativity, but I don't think that's necessarily been my starting point; I came into games as a child, and I had a lot of raw creativity and imagination that carried into my games. Trying to make a game without creating a machine that makes foregone conclusions, however, was something that took a lot of skill and practice.
Mathematics
It also got me through more mathematics than anything else in my life, though I'm still not going out and doing calculus on a daily basis. However, I definitely have mastery of probability concepts that awes most of the people around me, something that's a testament to how useful it is to me (rather than any particular aptitude on my behalf; I'm fairly strong in math concepts, but not significantly so in many areas).
Storytelling
Basically all of my work with storytelling forms was inspired by roleplaying. I always enjoyed literature and telling and reading stories, but always from a layman's perspective. You can read a lot before you figure out an actual working system for breaking down stories, and that's basically what I did. However, at some point you realize that your games need to lead somewhere for them to make sense and be satisfying, and the characters all need to have a particular role and lend particular value to the story.
Dedication
I don't think I ever really dedicated myself to anything as much as I did gaming, and later teaching. The latter followed the former, and I think it was the skills I acquired while trying to make games that gave me the dedication to stick to my studies and succeed in the classroom. Now that I've been making games as Loreshaper Games for a while, I can say that it was definitely a process of personal development as much as any knowledge or experience that helped me make games that actually got finished and released.
Social Connections
Pretty much all of my friends come together to game on a fairly regular basis. While that's been more stressed as we enter adulthood (or, rather, independence) with our own conflicting schedules and obligations, it has been a source of a lot of opportunities for me to connect with people and keep in touch.