The Game Is The Thing

I've been neglecting the blog - a combination of house refurbishment and lots of extra work, but also DMing a regular weekly game. I've remarked before that regular play somehow correlates with a diminished need to think obsessively and write about gaming. This seems to be the pattern.

You notice this a lot with football pundits who never actually played the game professionally. I listen to a lot of football podcasts, mostly put out by pseudo-intellectual journalists who think about the sport far too much (Second Captains is the best, for those who are interested, despite Ken Early having gone so far up his own backside it's unreal). One thing you begin to notice after a while is the really absurd level of detail that is read into the tiniest and most trivial of events - and the contrast between the very simple but cutting observations that former players and managers tend to offer about the game. 

(My favourite is the story Roy Keane once told about Brian Clough - that the most profound advice the latter had ever given him was, "Make sure you always pass the ball to somebody on your own team." But I also love the story about Harry Redknapp telling Roman Pavyluchenko to "Just fucking run around a bit." Alan Shearer had similar sage advice: if you're out of form, just make sure you at least "run around a lot".)

There is nothing wrong with this, of course. I love listening to Ken Early dissecting 30 seconds of conversation between Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher over the course of 30 minutes, or delivering a 10 minute analysis of a tweet by Neymar. This is what being a fan is about. Immersing oneself, wallowing, in the glorious mud of truly purposeless ephemera. But it isn't really football.

The same is true of D&D. Ultimately the game is the thing, not the discussion of it. Sometimes it's easy to forget that, especially when you get out of touch with rolling the dice. In the modern age there is no excuse not to set up an online game and play. Do it - you won't be disappointed.