Gaming.
Outside of writing, photography and swimming, it's one of my favourite pastimes. So imagine my delight earlier this year when my coworker Sabrina Ede suggested running a monthly column about gaming in the simplymastery.
For this inaugural column, I would like to define gaming and give a general history of our millennia-old relationship with games. After all, we can't get into the nitty gritty of rules until we have an idea of the playing field.
Games of some form or another have been around as long as, if not longer, than humanity itself. In ancient times these games, both physical and mental, were often designed to teach children skills and keep the minds of adults sharp.
Formalized board games, however, didn't develop until the formation of more sedentary agricultural societies. If they existed beforehand, we have yet to find surviving sets and pieces, much less reliable rules.
Even what we know about some of the world's oldest board games like Senet, a game beloved by the Ancient Egyptians, is fragmentary at best. This game was first played around 3,000 years before the birth of Christ, after all, and the origin of other games such as the Chinese Go and the Roman (or possibly Persian) Backgammon still played today are even less certain.
One thing many of these ancient board games share, however, is a focus on strategy and moving or protecting certain key pieces. In Go your goal is to use your stones, black or white, to block in your opponent and control as much of the board as possible.
As the years have passed new games have risen to replace these ancient classics while still retaining that same spirit of teaching us strategy, cooperation and competition. Dice and cards have likewise been added and created their own games such as poker and bridge and Yahtzee and Craps.
Today there's a wide range of games for gamers, as they're called, to play. In addition to Monopoly, Chess, card games and the like, there are of course now video games. The first video game, Tennis For Two, was created in 1958 and during the 1970s and 1980s video games exploded in popularity through the creation of arcades and popular home consoles.
Parallel to the rise of video games and often directly influencing them was the development of the tabletop role-playing game, or TTRPG. Longtime readers will know I enjoy playing the classic TTRPG Dungeons and Dragons, but it's just one of many game systems. Pathfinder, Cyberpunk, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System (GURPS) and Imperium Maledictum, to name a few, all revolve around players creating characters with different abilities and playing them, rolling dice to determine the outcome of stories.
These TTRPGs are an offshoot of war gaming, another popular hobby that's exploded in recent years. These are games where players build, paint and collect miniatures of specific armies, real or fantastical, and then fight with them using rules and rolling dice. While Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000 are some of the best-known in this space, games like Bolt Action and Black Powder are also popular among war gamers.
Even everything I've listed here is but a fraction of the games and gaming systems created over the last 50 years. Indeed, part of the fun of playing these games is creating your own rules and systems to have fun with your friends.
Tabletop games have been a great way for me to meet and get to know people here in 100 Mile House. They are something I look forward to exploring in more depth and sharing with the rest of the community.
So, to quote the YouTube channel Play on Table Top, PLAY ON!
