Casting Shadows

Welcome to column three of David’s RPGaDay infographic! Tomorrow we will complete our third full week of this marathon event and start a gentle downhill slope toward the finish line and the month of September. Completing today’s prompt leaves us with just ten more days to go.

Why does this intro look so hard at the future? It’s the nature of the question for today~

#RPGaDAY2023 Day 20: What (rpg thing) will you still be playing in 20 years?

There are a few juicy interpretations of this question and its bold prompt (twenty). I have seen a lot of responses already today (and it’s fairly early in the morning as I write this) that speak of systems that will endure, games, groups, and even if the poster expects to still be playing two decades hence.

This year marks my 40th year of gaming. Ten years ago I got quite introspective (shocking, I know) about my 30th anniversary and was drawn to the things we had lost or were losing as gamers by not sharing our diverse cultures of play. In a sense, the capacity of the Internet to help us share and communicate seemed more in service to trends than to making traditions accessible. The few exceptions seemed to prove this rule.

Perhaps this helps underscore why I thought David’s idea to start #RPGaDAY was so (and remains) so important.

Twenty years ago, I was in Seoul in one of the memorable high points in my personal history as a gamer. I had finished a decade+ focus on the WoD, gotten closure from a 6-year multifaceted all-inclusive Chronicle, and was part of a big group of curious GMs who all wanted to explore new games in rotation. We played a lot of games!

Now, I am out of the big city and apartment life. We have time and space to rescue dogs. I am once again gaming with a crew of curious gamers and GMs in another high point. The pace is slower, the group is much smaller, and our focus is more on playing new games that give us the experience we want than on just trying new games. Time is in shorter supply, so priorities have shifted.

A huge change of the past twenty years has been the steady expansion of my interactions online regarding games and gaming. This blog started in 2010 and expanded into YouTube and other media. I have been involved in running online conventions, I have been a part of fantastic conversations that span both generations and the globe, I have become a partner in RPGaDAY, I have gotten to write and to edit for companies that I respect, and I have gotten to play and run some amazing games with cool people all over the world.

What will the next twenty years bring?

I think we can only safely predict more gaming. Will there be more writing?

Time will tell~