Transcript
ENTJ. ISFP. ISFJ. The Enneagram. The Myers-Briggs. The Color Code. There are all kinds of ways to measure or gauge or categorize our personalities. Mine apparently is INFP. According to Myers-Briggs. That stands for Introverted, Intuitive, Feeling, Prospector. And it’s probably why, when I play skirmish games, I go into matches with the assumption that I’m gonna lose. And I’m totally fine with that, it’s my default setting.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we take the most esoteric and seemingly unrelated concepts and try to force them to relate to our tabletop hobby!
All right, let’s talk about personalities and wargaming. And about what we want to get out of wargaming. Or playing skirmish games. I never know what the right term is for skirmish wargaming or what the meta term is.
Anyway, let’s get one thing out of the way right up front: I am not a competitive gamer. Just like Uncle Atom. I’m not actually a competitive anything. And if I’m brutally honest with myself, it’s probably because of fear. Fear of having my spirits crushed. But more to today’s point, I don’t play these games to test or grow my strategic abilities – I mean, that’s sort of a side effect of just playing games – but I’m not on the Warhammer 40k try-hard circuit. Nothing against people who paint hard and play hard, that’s the cool thing about these games, there are lots of ways to enjoy them. I’ve just never been a highly competitive person, although I’ve been a tad jealous now and then and maybe I would have benefited from being more competitive in particular instances in my life, but we’ll get to that.
I play skirmish games to have fun and hang out with friends and put some of the terrain and miniatures I have to their intended use. You know, as opposed to their actual use of decorating the insides of boxes and closets. And I probably have what a certain controversial media figure might call an “agreeable” nature. Meaning, I dislike conflict. Specifically inter-personal conflict. Well, I guess that’s the only kinda conflict there is. But the bottom line is, it’s not entirely healthy to be so conflict-averse, but it’s not entirely terrible either. There are definitely situations in life where being comfortable with conflict is not only desirable but often necessary. And that’s fine, but for me, tabletop gaming is just not one of those.
When I’m gonna play a tabletop game, I want my friends, or in this case, opponent, to feel comfortable, to have fun, to generally just have a good time. Not like whoever’s in that siren going on right there. So I always go into a game assuming I’m gonna lose. Now that doesn’t mean I intentionally throw a game or not try to win, it just means that I set my expectations in a way that allows my losing a game to literally be no big deal. The win/lose portion of the game is not what I’m there for.
This is also why I like narrative campaign gaming, because even if you lose a match in a narrative campaign, your army or war band is still progressing, still gaining items and experience, there’s always a sense of being part of the game, win or lose. One-off matches are fine, it’s just that the narrative campaign workflow involves more cool game stuff after or between matches. Some folks might call me a Nerf player vs a paintball commando but hey, paintballs to the face are simply uncomfortable. I’m just not a Kushiel’s Dart fan.
If you get that reference … keep your chains and whips for yourself – no judgments! We just have different wirings in the ol’ pain pleasure center.
And yeah, you heard right, I just used the same gag reference in back to back videos. And no, I ain’t hiring a writer. Do writers get hired for things? Maybe I’ll hire GPT-3. Someday AI will just create all the entertainment and watch all the entertainment and we won’t need to be here.
Anyway another thing I tend to stay away from is rules lawyering. If my opponent and I encounter a rule we disagree on, the first thing I’ll do is try to parse the rule out with them to see if I’m misunderstanding something. And sometimes it’s not me, sometimes it’s definitely the other person who’s wrong! Either they’ve misread or misunderstood a rule and that’s totally fine because we all do that sometimes.
But when something like an argument over a rule interpretation starts to brew, I’ll typically just back off and let the game roll. Like, for me, getting hot over something like a board game is pretty silly. But I also know sometimes emotions just get the better of us. Now, again, I understand that a competitive match is entirely different. Not that emotions should run rampant just cause it’s a competitive match, I just mean that, in that arena, knowing and agreeing on the rules is basically its own skill subset.
I wonder if any players at like Adepticon or Las Vegas Open go full on John McEnroe at a table. In fact, I wonder if any 40k player has ever flipped a table. I think I’d pay to see that.
We’re all Jerry Springer fans at heart, you know it as well as I do.
Anyway this attitude I adopt for skirmish gaming I think is a pretty cool one to have just in the pursuit of having a great social experience, aside from the actual fun of pretending to be a general and making strategic decisions in this custom made little miniature world.
But this attitude can also definitely be a bad habit to form in life in general if used too frequently. I am 100 percent guilty of not trying my absolute hardest at certain things because of that fear of failure. I often assume I’m going to fail simply in order to not feel bad when I fail. And if I didn’t try my hardest, I get to tell myself, hey, it’s all good, you didn’t even try your hardest. ‘Cause, you know, it sucks to try something your hardest and not succeed or win or whatever. But over time, growing older, I’ve come to understand how that attitude – which is basically lying to oneself – can be pretty detrimental. I mean, right off the bat, you’re guaranteeing you won’t succeed if you don’t even try, right?
There’s a saying I came across probably 10 years ago, maybe longer, but it struck me with such resonance that I’ve never forgotten it and I wish I’d heard it a lot sooner: if you ain’t winning, you’re learning. And that is a mantra-worthy statement in my opinion. It also puts losing in the correct perspective so that you don’t just feel bad, but you can feel better because you know that losing is part of growing – in skill, in knowledge, in personal character.
Earlier I talked about personality types, and mentioned that I’m pretty introverted. I don’t know if there are data out there regarding how many extroverts vs introverts play tabletop games, my anecdotal experience suggests to me that there are probably a higher percentage of introverts involved in tabletop hobbies but that’s neither here nor there. The fact is, you’re gonna play and interact with your opponents in a way determined by your personality. And for me, the main goal of playing these tabletop games – I mean, any game, really – is to have fun. But “having fun” is never a direct result of “not putting in any effort” right? I mean, for something to actually be something, there’s gotta be some effort or some intention behind it. So one of the things I put effort into for playing games is trying to make sure my friend or opponent or whoever’s involved is having a good time too.
And yeah, this is weird but I basically feel a little bit embarrassed when I win a game. I know that’s ludicrous, because I don’t want my opponent to feel embarrassed if they win, I want them to feel good! I also don’t want them to feel bad if they lose, but of course I have a tendency to feel a little bit anxious if I think they’re feeling bad. And that, my friends, is a road … poorly travelled? Best not travelled? Not driven down? There’s a saying somewhere that I am not remembering. Welcome to my world.
Anyway, my point is that I know it’s a bad idea to feel like I have any control over how another person feels. I mean after I’ve done what I can to create a warm and welcoming personal environment. Even if it seems like it’s hard-coded into my personality for me to tend to not feel at ease until everyone else around me feels at ease. You just can’t control how someone else feels or thinks.
Now I mentioned this type of thing, this dislike of conflict or drive to be accommodating, can be detrimental in certain scenarios in life. One of those *could* be wargaming. We’ve all heard internet stories about “that guy” at the gaming table – maybe they’re a bully, maybe they’re a narcissist (says the YouTuber), maybe they weren’t taught any manners by their parents – maybe they just had something terrible happen in their life and stuff needs to get sorted. In this type of scenario, you know, a gaming or social scenario, I probably would advocate for just leaving a space if it wasn’t welcoming versus going to guns over some silly miniatures game. And this is not strictly about dealing with assholes, either. I mean, we’re all assholes at some point. Probably a lot more than we’re aware of. Conflict is always gonna happen, the universe seems to run on an engine of conflict, or maybe friction, but conflict is not always some kind of antagonistic argument, it’s often just two different perspectives or ideas meeting head on.
Now, I willingly admit that 90% of the video projects I’ve produced would have benefitted from me being more conflict savvy, or just more willing to engage in conflict, to be more obstinate, more resolute in going after what I felt was a better idea. There’s a reason most successful auteurs are often regarded as tyrants. That doesn’t excuse shitty behavior, but there is something to standing up for ones self that is important to learn. Working with, playing with, engaging with people is going to result in conflict at some point. Just the nature of humans. Or really, again, the nature of our universe. Of course there’s a sliding scale to the depth of conflict, and a lotta times, a conflict is just a waste of time or has nothing to do with what might be masquerading as the source of the conflict. Yeah, now we’re heading off the deep end but, let’s wrap this up.
So I play games assuming I’m going to lose. And I’m totally happy with that. I just like playing, the winning is completely ancillary to the game. In fact, I’m just gonna go straight aerosol cheese whiz here – the PLAYING of the game is winning, for me. Tabletop Alchemy, get your spray can cheese here.
So you know what I’m gonna say: go play something!
See ya.