Remember: Risk is a Gateway Drug
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
I don’t have a clue what that magazine cover is communicating–other than something about gaming–but I’m pretty sure that any male who reads that magazine will never get any closer than the girl on the cover to a real woman.
Sudoku, Chess, Scrabble and Pitch.
That’s all I need. And now that I think about it that does cover all the bases: puzzle solving, strategy, wordsmithing.. luck and skill.
It wouldn’t be males who would be reading the fictitious gaming magazine.
I’m howling at that cover…. TOTALLY hit the “make a thing aimed at teen girls and middle aged women doing this thing…which they actually like because it’s NOT our usual nonsense.”
Going off of the guys in my husband’s D&D groups*, if you’re looking for someone who will be a responsible father, actually get married before that point, and speak rationally about religion even if they don’t agree with you– look at geeks. Yeah, there’s a lot of folks who are on the “spectrum,” and if you don’t like geeky stuff you won’t get a lot of the jokes– but if you’re willing to listen, with charity and basic kindness, they will absolutely adore you.
Out of literally hundreds of geek guys I’ve known, over a wide range of fandoms, I know one that looks and acts like the Simpson’s comic book guy. He does mostly HALO, and if you give him the Mom Eye when he’s behaving badly he shapes up.
Mostly, geeks just tend to be shy, but willing to talk about something they think is really, really fun. This makes them preferred targets for cowards since they will frequently avoid conflict, and openly admitted the thing they care about– so they’re easy to hurt.
Tennis. Just can’t get into board (bored??) games. Or cards games–even Euchre, which I think is madatory here in Michigan.
Sudoiku feels too much like my job – I don’t want to take a break from putting numbers in columns to put numbers in columns.
If they made a gaming magazine targeted just at men, it’d look like…every gaming magazine.
Pinky, I can relate. When I brew beer I take few measurements, the minimum required, making it more of an art than science. Author Randy Mosher had the great insight of why engineers brew beer: “It’s because they need more art in their life.”
But I find sudoku is a fine mind sharpening exercise. And I don’t mind the number symbols. Maybe because (for me) letters, numbers, they’re all the same hexadecimal thing.
Lately I’ve been in a crossword puzzle phase, just to get away from numbers. They used to say that doing puzzles was good for keeping the mind young, but these days they say it’s more about variety, learning different skills and hobbies. The experts also talk about diet and exercise a lot more, but I can’t tell if that’s because they’re very mechanistic, or people are getting fatter and lazier, or it it’s based on improved science.
I’m out of the loop.
I don’t even understand most of the comments here, okay, just Foxfiers.
I like Monopoly & Risk and that’s it. I never ‘matured’ or ‘grew up’ or ‘out’ of these two games.
laughs Don’t worry, Tito, if I remember right you’re just a little too old to get into RPGs– Role Playing Games. You probably beat the Tolkien fad in college, right? RPGs are “Wow, Tolkien is awesome, can we play a game where we get to do that?”
I’m young enough to have dated my now husband on the video game version. 😀 (I’m middle aged, so not REALLY young, just– hey, not dying isn’t a thing to be upset about.)
Video games aren’t as strong of a filter, but they do tend to select for folks who pay attention, and make it easier to identify folks with…ah… bad character traits.
It’s like being on a bowling team with potential dates, but you don’t have to live near each other.
Because it seems amusing, I’ll try to explain the jokes.
Top left is standard riff on “Women’s Magazines,” ‘naughty’ and ‘spice’ mean next to nothing beyond ‘wooo, look, sex!’
Second is Rafael Chandler, he does a lot of video game writing and used a lot of historical resources, and… look, to folks who tend to have “God tortured to death on a cross” on their wall, I don’t have to explain that’s nasty, right? Even before considering how many folks here are familiar with English history? But some folks are shocked at how creatively ancient folks were horrific.
A ‘murderhobo’ is a character in a role playing game who goes around using massive violence as their primary activity. Their thing is “There is a challenge– can we kill it” and were notoriously prone to doing things like casting ‘detect evil,’ deciding an entire Orc village was evil, and slaughtering down to the infants. (was a result of poorly considered game design that had ‘always evil’ orcs but they were a race not a created group, originally)
move up to top right
Horrible pun on sex, self explanatory from there. “Evil Sect” is a standard villain for the fantasy adventure group. I actually just logged off of a character whose healer outfit is designed to look like a member of an evil sect in FF14, and it was close enough that another gamer had several frustrating seconds trying to attack me in a large group of the ACTUAL bad guys. (For other gamers– Lambs)
The DM thing is also a straight pull from Women’s magazines, usually so wrong that it may almost come around the far side as to be right. (I don’t buy women’s magazines, one of the guys in my first shop did; it was hilariously bad.)
A TPK is Total Party Kill. Basically, “everybody who is playing in the game has their character die, and they lose.” The insert of a Famous Person saying it is standard for women’s magazines.
It’s a point of contention for most of the folks who lead games, and there will usually be a great deal of internal conflict to try to be just in balancing “what the players chose” with “wow, they had bad luck/ I guessed how this would go incorrectly, it’s harder than I thought.”