Tabletop Vs. Video Games

I'm a Millenial. My first experience with games was my friend's NES, my first console was a SEGA Genesis, my life has been consumed by PC games since I was 13. I was an only child, so board games didn't really come to fruition for me until college. Video games are great, to some extent, but they have their limitations especially in the online world we live in.

My favorite online games don't exist anymore. Tribes 2, an FPS with jetpacks was my favorite as a teenager. Star Wars: Galaxies was my all time favorite MMO before I hit college. The worst thing about these games for me? I can't play them anymore. All the friends I made are playing other games and the games have no servers supporting them. When a great video game dies off, it's gone forever. When a great board game comes out: You can always break it out and play it again.

There isn't one big patch that breaks the game or a new expansion that you have to buy to continue having fun with your friends. There's a word that defines board games that isn't used often enough: Timeless. Sure some games go out of print, but if you own it: it's yours forever. The fun experience you had with that game can constantly be brought out of the closet and made anew. There's something magical about that.

Families come in all the time saying: Board games, great, a way to get my kids away from their video games. Adults my age don't say that. They see tabletop games as what they are: a stable platform to have fun with your friends. One that isn't going to disappear when the servers die. There's a reason tabletop games are having a revolution and it has a lot to do with people growing up with video games. We've had our fun with video games and still do, but sometimes you want to invest in fun your friends can have at any hour, in any place, without the need for software or everyone having a computer, controller, etc.

My regular Magic crowd nowadays constantly reminds me why I do what I do how I do it. They play through a tournament with the regulars and say aloud: I love coming here, seeing the same people, having rivalries with some and not being afraid to try out a new deck. There's something great about existing in a community that understands games like you do and finding people who want to do more than just play a game. The X-Wing miniatures crowd constantly seems to be finding new formats to play that aren't official, either to spice things up in between tournaments or just to find a way to make it fun to meet up with new players to the scene and keep the game fresh.

They've taken a mechanically simple game and given it new ways to be experienced simply because they love the game enough to change it. It's very reminiscent of the modding community of video games; wherein they love the original game so much that they've gone ahead and become developers for a community that is so into the game that they want to look on it with fresh eyes every time they boot it up.

There's always new video games out there where you can find some friends and play through a match, or co-op into a game, or group up in an MMO. Sometimes it's just more rewarding to sit down at my table, wait for my friends to arrive one by one; catching up on their week, then diving into an imaginary world of my own design that they get to experience as different every time. The breadth of experiences you can yield from a single night of gaming is pretty diverse compared to the types of experiences you can have in a video game. Typically a cool kill, a weird story interaction, or the teamwork your friends have in a video game is all that really comes up. When your character is the main character in an RPG, the story is the whole evening and the experience only tells the tale of all the hijinks you had to have to get there. At the end of the day, having someone sitting across the table rolling dice at you and seeing their face every week with new ideas is going to leave a lasting mark on your memory of what it means to play tabletop games versus simply the avatar that represents them on a screen.