Most gamers I know are very well educated. Hopefully we can contradict and debunk some of the negative ones listed above in the process. Let’s look at what gamers are really like and try to establish some new stereotypes. Now that we’ve identified the most common negative stereotypes let’s flip the coin. Over time the fear and misunderstanding has declined, but some still hear D&D and associate it with Satanism. Religious groups used D&D as a scapegoat for the actins of a few misguided teenagers to smear the whole RPG community. This was a case of a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. In the 80s there was a lot of controversy around D&D being linked to Satanism and Devil worship. Our game takes place in our imaginations. We do not dress up, we do not engage physically with other players. It’s a whole subset of D&D-like RPGs where people dress up as their character and physically act out their character’s actions, including combat and magic. The only reason I ever played in the basement was because there was more room there than at the dining room table and I could be as loud as the game deemed appropriate, even long into the night when others were sleeping.įor the uneducated LARP is Live Action Role Playing. If you’re a fat, smelly virgin with no social skills then you must live in your parent’s basement, right? Somewhere along the way people assumed that D&D was played in the deepest recesses of people’s basement, as if exposing a gaming table to sunlight would destroy it (or the players). D&D and RPGs in general allow people who aren’t good socially to come out of their shell by playing a character. After all, if you can’t talk to people how are you ever going to talk to girls? It’s true that a lot of shy people play D&D, but I’ve found that they do so to overcome their shyness. I guess this goes hand in hand with the virgin stereotype above. That’s not to say that every gamer is getting some, but in my experience the reason some gamers don’t have a significant other has nothing to do with their gaming hobby. Considering how many gamers I know with kids I think we can safely debunk this myth. If you play D&D you’ll never get a girlfriend, let alone have sex. During cons a lot of gamers try so hard to jam pack as much fun into the few days they’ve got they go without food, sleep, a change of clothes or a daily shower. I think the stereotype persists because the only place a lot of non-gamers ever see us is at conventions. I’ll admit that I’ve seen (and smelled) my fare share of fat, smelly gamers but in my experience this is the exception rather than the norm. It’s a common misconception that all gamers are overweight and that they have issues with personal hygiene. So what are the worst gamer stereotypes? What are the things you’ve heard, seen or been guilty of yourself that shed a negative light on gaming and D&D? Once we identify them we can take steps to correct and debunk them. We do our part to shine a positive light on gamers in today’s post in which the “S” is for Stereotypes, good and bad. To make things even more interesting the title of each article will begin with a different letter of the alphabet. That’s 26 articles over the course of the month. The challenge is to write a new article ever day in April, excluding Sundays. Throughout April Dungeon’s Master is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge.
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