Geek By Proxy

There is a software called Team Speak that some people use while playing WoW, that basically allows players to talk to each other, instead of writing what you want to say. Due to the lack of a headset and microphone, my husband doesn’t use it, but keeps it on, coming through his speakers, when he’s playing. Sometimes, he asks me to keep him company. So, I spend a lot of hours doing my crochet, with the sound of Team Speak in the background. Now, people are having fun, when they’re playing, and sometimes funny things happen, so people laugh. Except for this one guy.

He doesn’t laugh, he says LOL. In the most dettached and bland tone of voice I have ever heard. The same he uses to say just about anything. I mean it has pitch variations, just enough of them so that you can recognize a genuine human voice. I don’t know if his thoughts come to him, in the form of sentences written across a screen, or if he just spends too much time on his computer, or if he has a direct interface between his keyboard and his mouth, but saying LOL instead of just, aah… I don’t know, laughing?

I’m around a lot of geeks, a lot of the time. Despite their strange and odd topics of conversation and the ocasional going off the deep end, they function pretty much as normal human beings (well, most of the time, anyway). This guy takes the cake for me. I cannot fathom whatever benefit is accomplished by what he does… but, hey, I’m not a real geek, right?

I first came in contact with RPG, soon after I started dating my husband. He wanted me to see what he and his friends were up to, in all those nights “he just couldn’t go out with me”. He had already given me a short explanation of what it was all about, which had registered in my brain like a “boys with toys” kind of thing… If only I had known that about ten years later, I’d be writing a blog about it!

One night, as he was preparing to leave for his RPG session, he asked me to come along and see for myself how it all went down. Half curious and half condescendent, I agreed. Fifteen minutes later I was entering a room within the grounds of his Engineering college, looking back at about fifteen male faces, all half puzzled, half embarassed to have a girl in the room, although I already knew half of them from some other contexts. They soon got over it, however, and they all sat down to play. It was an AD&D campaign. The DM invited me to sit down next to him, behind the screen, and he began the session. I don’t remember exactly what kind of characters each of them was playing, but I think there was at least one representative of each of the most played races, a lot of humans and … a minotaur.

Now you’ve got to remember that I had NEVER been in close contact with anything related to medieval fantasy before. And I had a grown man before me saying he was pretending to be a minotaur… with a pair of fifteen-inch horns. Not only that, they were all trying to get into a tube-like transporter, akin to the pneumatic tubes used by the postal service. It should be propelled by a giant spring coil attached to  the wall, that was completely ruined. I bring to notice that we were in a room full of engineers. So, they tried to fix it, so that they could use it.You can’t imagine how fast the conversation became a discussion about the physics behind a spring coil…

So, now, I’m looking at a guy who’s supposed to be a minotaur with fifteen-inch horns, discussing Hooke’s Law. By now, I’m laughing hysterically and completely sold on the whole concept. Two weeks later, I was playing my first character on a Shadowrun campaign and I haven’t stop playing ever since.

This little pearl of RPG history came to my mind, as I was writing this last post. Some years ago, some friends of mine were playing an AD&D campaign and one of them got engaged. For weeks, he would come in, play for a little while and them go off to meet his girlfriend, to take care of something or other relating to the wedding.

One of these times, he came in saying, “I can only stay for half an hour. We’re meeting the caterer today”. and he sat down to play. Three hours later, his girlfriend enters the room, with a half puzzled, half furious look on her face. “We waited for you for an hour and a half. What are you doing?”, she asks. He looks back at her, with a desperate stare, half dazed, “You don’t understand. I lost my spell book. I can’t leave till I find my spell book!”

She’s was a wonderful girl, and the wedding went on as planed. They’re still married, I think, though I don’t think he played much after that…

Men and women have a hard time talking to each other. That’s a given. No matter how bright you are, if you’re a woman talking to a man, or vice-versa, the words coming out of your mouth are going to trigger different concepts in your counterpart’s brain. Even the things we worry about are going to be different.The best we can do is find paralels and metaphors to relay different meanings. And that’s not always the easiest thing in the world to do. But there is hope.

The other day, during one of our D&D sessions, I saw a small light at the end of the tunnel, when a (male) friend of mine, who’s been playing a wizard, after spending some time looking at his spell list, says to the table, “Now I understand how a woman can say she’s got nothing to wear, in front of a closet full of clothes.” So there, they can understand what we’re saying. It’s just a matter of finding the right metaphor!