As a proud member of Gen-X I sometimes find myself scratching my head when reading stories from Millennial gamers. I understand that the hobby has matured. I also agree that some things we did in my younger years are 'so last century'...
I'm not here to poke fun at the nexus of gamer and furry that results in the weird fetishizing of goblins, dragons, and pretty much anything that can be remotely drawn anthropomorphically. I think every generation since people scrawled on cave walls has had its share of weird artists, Just look at the myth of the mermaid, that's hundreds of years old and Disney even made a movie (correction multiples if you count each version) about mermaids. We don't even need to touch on Beauty and the Beast.
What I am referring to is all of the social changes around the game table. The X-cards, trigger warnings, and emotional safeguards is what I am talking about. This stuff is downright weird to most of us in Gen-X.
Now, most of you have probably seen a few videos about growing up Gen-X. You know how we left the house at the crack of dawn and didn't return until the sun went down or how we drank from the hose. What you may not fully understand is that much like a Texas teen's dating range is based on the price of gas our social circles were extremely limited.
This isn't a rant about the time before the Internet or cell phones. It is an explanation of how different our experiences were growing up.
The average kid in the 80's was lucky if they had cable TV or a VCR in their home. If you only had broadcast TV you might receive between five and ten channels over the air. Aside from Saturday mornings and a few hours after school TV was for adults. Because of this we didn't sit in the house and watch a lot of TV. We were forced (sometimes physically by our parents) to go outside and play.
When Dungeons and Dragons was really hitting its stride in the 80's a lot of us played it with a subset of the friends we had grown up with. The same kids we spent 12+ hours a day with huddled in someone's basement to play a game set in our imagination. No board, no computers, just dice, pencils and a couple of bean bag chairs. If you had a clipboard you were way ahead of the game, if not you used one of your hardcover game books to write on.
No one had a phone to hide behind or distract them during the game. At most a couple of players might start an off-topic discussion and drag everyone into it but... Here's the thing, we were all friends before we sat down. We knew each other for years. There may be the occasional friend from outside the group brought in or a cousin visiting from a few towns over but, for the most part, everyone we played with we knew extremely well.
There were no mysteries related to what bothered us. Any weaknesses we had were well known to our friends and would either be used or avoided, depending on what we were going for. As an example, it was known among my friends that if I ate a certain snack food during our games I would ramp up the challenges (editors note: he became a sadistic psycho of a DM), while the lack of that particular snack meant it would be a more casual game.
Now let's take a look at the Millennial and younger gamer. These folks grew up with the Internet and cable TV. Cellphones were commonplace when they were children. With the advent of 24 hour news channels their parents were more likely to have them stay indoors due to the large amount of reporting on missing and exploited children that filled the airwaves.
With the deregulation of the telecom industry (and the cheaper prices for communication services) it was easy for the following generations to communicate in wider and wider circles. Forums popped up for kids TV shows and toy lines. No one really cared to check ages so these younger people were able to interact with ten times the number of people Gen-X could reach. For every old person pretending to be a young person online there were probably 10 kids pretending to be adults.
While these newer generations knew more people, it was mostly surface level knowledge. They didn't live through the same events the same way. They may think they did, but they didn't.
Gen-X lived a lot of the same experiences compared to other Gen-X kids in similar environments. The suburban Gen-X lived a very similar life to other suburban Gen-X kids just as city kids lived similar lives as other city kids. Things were different between city and suburban kids but for the most part things were the same if where you grew up looked the same.
With the widening world of online communication young people became exposed to more things but not to the depth of previous generations. With the ability to pick and choose from a large pool of peers these younger generations began to silo themselves. Whereas Gen-X had to get along with everyone Millennials and those who came after have been able to remove themselves from the local and find friends who live far away. They are able to form distant communities and remove themselves from the local.
This is why Gen-X doesn't need or particularly care about a lot of the new social systems Millennials have brought to the game table. These social tools are unnecessary for Gen-X. Gen-X gamers know who they are sitting down with long before any session zero begins. They know the prejudices and assumptions of everyone that they have invited to join them because they grew up with them.
Millennials are far more likely to play a game in an environment where they don't know anyone until they sit down at the table. In such situations you need to go around the table and make your feelings known. It's great that the hobby is growing and new players are playing.
Except this weird new thing where monsters are suddenly being morphed into non-monsters because of some strange cultural sensitivities. Remember, a hero is judged by the villains they oppose. Every living creature is capable of being a monster. Don't try and sell me on monsters just being humans in a different skin suit. All you're doing is stripping them of their culture to fit yours.