For the last couple of months, my hobby-life has been a bit up in the air. Not so much in the way of actually doing the hobby, far from it. I’ve been lucky enough to plod along, doing this and that, and getting some things done.
No, it has to do with the fact that after my old club died out, there was also a part of how I tended to hobby that died out alongside with it.
Forever and a day, I have always been into this hobby as a social thing. Sure, I enjoy the downtime of building, bashing and painting my figures – but it was always with a goal towards going out and meeting people. To play games and talk shop, as it were.
However, over the years, I’ve also learned that I’ve had gotten locked into an unhealthy approach to life in general, where my enjoyment of things had started to become wholly dependent on the whims and opinions of other people.
So too with the hobby, where little by little, I had accepted so many compromises with my approach to it over the years, that it ended up souring me on the whole thing.
But then an old friend came to visit.
Growing up where I did, I was completely cut off from any sort of hobby community, wherein I could meet likeminded people, and mature together alongside of. None of my friends were really into it, and the nearest town that had a group of nerds, was too far away for me to go – at least with any regular interval.
So when the internet came, and I realized that there were other people out there into this weird stuff like me – in fact, so many that they had a big convention for it in the capital – I was absolutely over the moon. And it was at such a con that I met my very good friend, Claus, who I ended up seeing at least once a year at Viking-Con.
We played with fully painted miniatures, told cool stories, and were engaged in co-creating worlds and characters together, in a shared play space. Of course, we definitely didn’t use those words to describe it back then – we just played wargames together.
And I think of this early time in my hobby life, because I’ve recently had a bit of a falling out of sorts that left me feeling very adrift. It was a falling out with a club, that I had helped create, but mainly it was more of a falling out with myself.
Whilst I had played many fun games over the years with great people, I had also played in tournaments, against grey plastic, without any storytelling at all. Over the years, bit by bit, I had slowly started to loose touch with what got me all excited about this hobby in the first place.
I had gotten into a churn, never really playing the kind of games that I wanted to play, and finding it hard and harder to get out of said churn.
Whilst I was very sad to see the club go, as it did just recently, I cannot help but think that it happened at exactly the right time.
I was suffering from a massive burn out that I hadn’t even realized, because I was constantly doing something. Always on the move, always prepping for the game day every two weeks, making plans, building and painting stuff. I barely found that I had the time to really enjoy anything, because I wanted to play so many different things.
A classic tale, if any.
The death of the club initially made me feel rudderless. Because now I didn’t have a fixed date to get stuff done for, for games that I was playing with people there. I was left to my own devises, and realized that I had no idea what I really wanted to play any more, or what even excited me about the hobby at all.
And it took me a while. I’d say around half a year, to really grasp what had happened inside of me. I found that I yearned for the things that I hadn’t really had the time to do over the last couple of years; invest in the spectacle of fully painted armies and terrain; share in the telling of stories and share our imagined worlds – but I lacked the mental energy to do anything about it.
It was in the midsts of this sorry state of mine, that Claus recently came to visit me.
We’ve known each other for many, many years but live in the opposite end of the country from each other. So we see each other, sparingly, maybe once a year. But this time around, it was exactly what was needed.
Not only did we talk shop, we also played games – exactly like the ones we used to do back in the day. It was a spectacle of fully painted miniatures an terrain, fully of stories, jokes and a shared experience that was really uplifting.
The main difference was, however, that we weren’t playing against each other.
Instead, he had been on a solo-gaming kick for a long time, due to practicality, which was something I just could never get into. But as we started talking, and playing, I started to see the light of why solo-gaming can be so great – and why it was definitely what I needed to do more of in my life right now.
Partly to help me break from those bad mental loops I was stuck in, and start to listen more to myself and what I wanted, and partly to stop me from getting more and more upset about not playing the types of games I wanted to play, because people around me weren’t interested in them.
Basically, I shouldn’t impose my own strict rules for how games should be like onto others, but I shouldn’t stop looking for the things that I love about this hobby either.
What had held me back was that I felt that solo-games could often become rather bland affairs, where you tried to pretend that you outsmarted yourself – and which were lacking a very important part of the whole experience to me; that of being social with like-minded people.
But I think I see it now in a new light. It is still true that the games themselves, can get to feel somewhat dull – at least to me – if you keep treating them as a regular wargame, where you have balanced forces fighting over three objectives placed down the middle of a sparsely populated table.
What Ivan Sorensen has done so well in his games, however, is to provide you with so many procedurally generated prompts, that it becomes more akin to playing with toy soldiers, rather than gaming with them. You start to do funny little things when playing, not because they benefit you tactically – but because that’s what that character would do.
And somehow, this was the little button that I had yet to push. I needed to realize that playing solo for me, and expecting an immersive tactical experience that I’ve been used to over the years, wasn’t really what it was good for.
What it is good for, however, is to help me get excited about building, painting and playing, all over again. I’m excited to start on my big project – which I’ll talk about in my follow up post – and still leaves me time and energy to get together with friends, and play games that excites us both.
And it is also good for me to have a regular game, where I can go ham on setting the scene and picture the story as it unfolds, making funny noises and take pictures without worrying that it’ll disturb other peoples enjoyment. It’s funny how sometimes, all it takes to see the world in a new perspective and rekindling lost joy, is to have an old friend come visit.
So thank you so much for your visit, Claus. I am revived, and full of excitement for a new hobby year, with a new sense of direction.
And thank you, dear reader, for coming along this far. I swear, next time around, there’s going to be less navel gazing, and much more hobbying!
