No, not that type, the other kind. Paper-and-pencil kind.The bastion of nerdy boys at school, most of which grew up to become wealthy somethings in IT. Now I imagine they still play, with more confidence to admit it, but no doubt still carrying the weight of the attached uncomfortable imposed shame.
I grew up as Dungeons & Dragons was first finding its feet in the 1970s. Another game, similar in most respects, was Tunnels and Trolls. This was my game of choice. I was playing at school with friends and remember those times as infrequent but so much fun. They were a frustrating challenge to be finally good at something outside of the harsh real world. To be a successful and powerful fantasy character. Could I counter my failure to be a successful and powerful teenager? Talking to a friend of the era he reminded me that it was just hours of arguing and sulking. The ethos of roleplaying was to immerse yourself in another’s shoes in a world that allowed greater freedoms and rewards. In reality it was an immature child’s quest to be able to kill monsters and amass riches. The rest of that character's existence that was meant to be part of the 'game experience' was an immaterial hindrance. Food, clothes, shelter, transport, comrades? Whatever – I just wanted a bigger, shinier sword. 
You could either run a game as a Dungeon Master (DM): the controller of a world and the narrator of every consequence affecting those within it, or a player-character (PC): your mind in another imaginary person’s body living in your DM’s created domain. You needed a DM to play, but it was not relished as a job. As kids we wanted to play, not referee. DMing was hard as well, because these games had rules; lots of them, and kids being kids didn’t want to be hard done by them. They also didn't want to lose, so most of the game was in sweaty debate about how your character could have survived that 200’ fall into a dragon’s mouth, or that the wall you just passed would have taken the blast of the ogres fire bomb attack rather than your now charred stumps of legs. As a DM, you needed to know all the rules to defend your decisions, and I never did. You also had to be a good story teller and have your friends respect to be able to gain their trust to shape the world you were all playing in during a game session. Whether I had that or not I didn't feel I did. I was mainly a player-character. I was mainly also a Dwarf character, and as a 6’1” stooped 13 year old, it was probably more escapism than I realized at the time.
The roleplaying continued into the end of my school days, then stopped. Life was not kind to the roleplaying enthusiast. Just check YouTube and a million send ups of spotty boys without girlfriends will seal every gamers fate. Loosers.
Some lucky ones managed to carry on with mature friends and even girls playing..not Steve with a mop on his head and a high pitched voice, but real ladies. I had no such luck, and roleplaying became a collection of complicated rule books and little metal figures in a box on top of the wardrobe.
Ford-wind 25 years....
World of Warcraft became known to me. BANG! There goes 2 ½ years of my life, sitting in front of a monitor at the expense of sunlight, my family, university and work. A Massively Multi Player Online Roleplaying Game (MMORPG)....
World Of Warcraft, or 'WoW' as it is more commonly known, is a on-line computer roleplaying game. You buy the game, sign up to a subscription then create fantasy characters. Then a whole world with countries, infrastructures, factions, languages and wars is free for your character to actually explore and die in. These characters start off as weak novices, and as you play you gain experience and riches, and through this become stronger, more powerful and respected by others also playing the game. In fact, most players seem to build their characters up to an impressive level and then go to one of the game's many cities and 'hang out', being both shiny and obnoxious. It is a real 'cock show' for most pre-adolescents playing, and it can be very bitchy. The factor of this game that sets it apart is the in-game chat facility. You; as a real life person, can type into a game's chat-window and have your character interact with other real life players and their characters. Friendships are made so are many enemies. Not all are roleplaying enemies, a lot are enemies because the real life player behind that character is just a rude twat, so you have branded them such and recorded it in your character profile. -Mordrik the Brave [Enemy] = stupid little boy that just called me a 'waste of game server memory'.
But when you actually get into playing, most of the interactions with the other players was great. You felt dirty at first, hiding behind your virtual character like an old man lurking behind a bush. Normally, after sharing some quest or other with another player, your 'chat' inevitably gets to the 'where are you from' part of the experience. Some basic life details are exchanged and I used to trembled at this point with the inevitability of what normally came next. 'You have daughters! How old are you?.....Should I have lied? Look at the situation! Night after night I was hunched in front my computer monitor nurturing my virtual alter ego. Guiding their every step. I was so proud of their/my accomplishments, always thirsty to further them some more. But I was a grown family man!....
"Did you see how I wasted that dragon? I was so dead, then, then….."
" Yes, but how old are you?"
"…"
"Hellooo…."
"……40….." .Silence, then the path leading from that announcement would be rent in two. One way led over the edge of a cultural abyss, with a child's shock uncertainty of whether this communication is what the nice policeman warned them about in school. The other way was to find another too-old adult that would led to pure relief and blessed vindication of your mature life lost to a game.
"LOL, I'm 43! I'm a Export Analylist from Stockport." they announce.
"Hurrah!! I'm sad too." I would reply with relief.
On the positive, my typing got so much faster. Hesitate about it in the game world and you'll end up wearing a spear as a hat. But the bastion of grammatical correctness that had stood proud within me for so long eventually faltered, buckling from the onslaught of so many tiny arrows to the heart in the form of 'geek-speak'. Gr8 – BRB - LOL – Same 2 U 2 . I resisted as long as I could, truly I did. You can tell the ones in the game that still held on dearly to their grammar. They were the ones with characters standing still in a frenzied battle ground, weapons hanging limp from motionless digital arms as others stab and punched them, their real world puppet masters defiantly typing away in long hand. Often this typing became the words of corpses, "Do not worry, I am coming..oh no, I am in fact dead..." and eventually your resolve would crumble and your first condensed phrase is typed. Doing this is like buying porn from a newsagent. Everyone does it (apparently), but it feels so wrong. Crossing over, becoming the enemy. When I eventually did it I didn't even own a hooded sweater, but there I was, LOLing with the kids!
Despite this, it was the interaction between players that breathed longevity into MMORPGs. Any game can become addictive, for a few days. But then the façade starts to drop, patterns emerge and are manipulated, and it becomes, well, just a game. When you introduced the human element, that the person you were trying to kill or beat to the treasure was a real soul sat somewhere in the real world, a tiny independent flame then powered the experience. Nothing was certain, and your payment to the game experience came from your social bank of rules. You interacted as a person, as you maybe would in real society. Greed, pride and honour steering your actions instead of your shallow inner-child, content purely to please themselves and beat the game.
Once, I was in a fantastical in-game land , trying to kill some fire daemons for the enchanted items they possessed. It was beyond me, try as I did until PC World almost got another sale for a replacement keyboard and mouse; I had been known to get a wee bit frustrated. Eventually the new 'chat' dynamic in gaming occurred to me. I looked up my list of game friends I had collected. Excellent, one that I had made previously whilst assisting her on one of her quests was in my virtual neighbourhood, a mere 10 minutes ride away. A quick in-game message requesting assistance and she was on her horse at full charge to my rescue. Half an hour later still and we were side by side, surrounded by the corpses of daemons, discussing the joys of raising teenage daughters and the price of petrol.
The down side, apart from a massive sleep debt and strained marital relations, was that tendrils of the game-play slipped into your daily life. I am ashamed to admit that within my kip deprived shuffle through each day my virtual and real-world experiences sometimes blurred. The use of compass directions to find places replaced phrases like 'next to McDonalds'. One morning I remember spying a wind scattered weed lying on the path. 'Silverleaf', I thought. 1 gold piece at current market value. But no. I realized that I was in the other of the two worlds I was living in, and it was in fact a Dandelion. 
My eager gaze dropped and unless I had a small zip lock baggie and gullible student friends, it was not in fact a tradable commodity.
I had been looking on Ebay at replica medieval helmets. Another subliminally buried desire reaching for the surface, brought into focus with my obsessive fantasy other life. My mind was automatically preparing defences to this potential purchase, lining up excuses on my tongue ready to defend my actions. "It would be a fascinating piece of object-d'art", I could claim. "The intricate design, the curves and construction evolving fundamental leaps in ancient engineering that eventually led to the technological marvels we take for granted today. From the Phrygian design, 600BC I think…" but from behind the one way mirror deep within my inner mind, the small boy that was in charge of my true intentions sat giggling and sporting his shiny new metal hat, and wondering if Ebay sold swords?
Just to refine the guilt I carried from my virtual world obsession, the game I discovered allowed you to see how long in hours you have spent within it. I had a peek, and realized one day that I had spent longer in the previous three months in ‘game-world than I have spent awake on holiday with the family over the preceding four years.
At the time is was engrossing fun, but It was not the same as paper-and-pencil roleplaying. It was again only really about the fighting, but it was controlling a fantasy character in a world of monsters and dragons. I didn't complain at the time.
It was becoming a problem though. I needed to give it up. Luckily, all those other little crapnoodles that also played around the world were ganging up on me and helping me with that decision. I was still not very good at ‘rules’, and how to exploit them. This meant that the average kid that played the game saw me as a constant N00B, not able to screw break-neck super-efficiency from my character’s abilities. The in-game swearing and put-downs from my game peers piled up. I found it harder and harder to play, as my resilience to the verbal onslaught of abuse was waning. I wanted to play, but as you advanced in the game, World of Warcraft required team play with other people’s characters to continue, and I just couldn’t perform at the required competence these kids demanded. Salvation was at hand....but at a price.
My best friend from those early roleplaying school days had accompanied me on the World of Warcraft joy ride. We had regularly played every weekend until the birds started to sing, and I pestered him by mobile phone throughout the week about what the weekend would bring. This journey was important and valuable as a road we could travel on side-by-side, enjoying each other’s company. But now I was leaving that road, and although still my best friend the opportunity to chat as we had must dwindle. What was that? I don’t know, but I feel guilty as hell and traitorous for leaving. My new direction was back towards old fashioned paper-and–pencil roleplaying, but version 2.0.; internet styley.
I had trawled the interweb for the fabled treasure of ‘online old-school gaming’. Was this a door back into my child-hood? I found an advert for a DM looking for players. I applied. I got a response and the whole thing fell into place. I could not give up an evening with my family commitments, but this game as it happened would be at the weekend, early in the morning! This is when I normally played Warcraft. The group advertising had a space vacant at their virtual game table, and had just started a new campaign. If I had been greased with goose fat I couldn't have slipped more easily into this opportunity. This time it was using Skype and online virtual whiteboards. It needed to be, as the other players were peppered right across the globe. When I am playing at 2am in the morning in front of coffee cups, a computer monitor and attached to the end of a mic/headset, my DM is in Japan at 10am, another player in Korea, Argentina, USA...So instead of 7 kids sitting in one farty room at someone’s mother’s house, we were 7 guys all sitting in our own farty houses.
It is real roleplaying, with my adult sensibilities teasing out the playing style that the games creators always intended it to have. I care for my old nag of an imaginary horse. I am influenced by what my characters deity would wish for; as my character interprets it. Am I hungry, tired, in need of home comforts? Not me, my character..it’s all getting mixed together..wonderful! I love it.
My friend was encouraged to play, but it is an undertaking. It is late in the evening/morning. I do a silly voice, so it may be scary/embarrassing to witness as well. I have embraced it with both hands, pulled it over my head and breathed deeply. It is yet another pile of sand to stick my head in to avoid the pressures of life. What a wonderful pile of sand. Who needs real life when you can hide in another? And I don’t even have to leave my front room or stick anything up my nose!
