Do You Remember the Time? The Pattern of a Hobby

Let's for a moment, talk about the pattern of hobby involvement throughout the course of a person's life.

Typically, as small children, we don't really choose our hobbies - they are chosen for us, by our parents. They take us to trombone lessons, play football with us, make us do Irish dancing, etc., and some of the time these activities 'stick' and some of the time they don't. When they do 'stick' it is partly to do with natural aptitude and partly to do with friendship groups, and partly to do with parental bloody-mindedness. For instance, when I look back at the childhood hobbies I participated in for any length of time, it occurs to me that some of them I really enjoyed (like cricket), some of them I was chiefly involved in just because my friends were too (like cubs and scouts), and some I hated but was forced to do by my mother (piano). 

Then, when we reach adolescence - say, by age 11 or so - we develop enough independence and wherewithal to choose hobbies of our own. Of course, sometimes what is chosen still reflects parental choice (an adolescent may discover that while he or she has been taken to, say, tennis lessons since the age of five and never really questioned it, at age eleven he or she actually really wants to continue of their own volition). But very often, what is chosen is something that parents find mystifying or troubling - like being in a heavy metal band, or boxing, or street dancing, or whatever. 

As adolescence transitions into late teenager-hood (say, age 15 or 16), there typically comes a fork in the road. At this age, hobbies either get abandoned - overwhelmingly the reason for this is becoming more heavily into girls/boys - or persisted with. There are lots of factors at play here. Often hobbies are persisted with if they are perceived as 'cooler' than others. People also tend to stick with their hobbies if they aren't in 'popular' cliques and don't have many options for hanging out, partying and so forth. Naturally, people tend to keep up hobbies if they are very good at them. (I know somebody, for instance, who grew up playing squash and discovered as a teenager that he was exceptionally good at it, kept it up, and got a scholarship to a university in the US off the back of his gift for hitting a ball against a wall really hard.) 

The fourth phase begins as people transition into being adults proper, at which point hobbies naturally tend to fall by the wayside (though this is obviously not universal) as attention shifts to work, dating, home life, and so on - and, in due course, often marriage and then children. Most people during this period become too busy to really sustain hobbies or at least to devote as much time to them as they would like to, and things become attenuated as a result. 

But this, in due course, leads to a fifth phase, usually when people have made it through the intensity of early adulthood, and have got to a fairly settled position in life. At this point, they start to take up hobbies again, finding they have time at evenings and weekends and perhaps want to make new friends (or meet new spouses and partners). Here they either develop new interests, or re-familiarise themselves with old ones.

The vast, vast, vast majority of RPG gamers are those who encountered the hobby during the second phase of adolescence. And whether or not they persist with the hobby through phases three, four and five, or else re-encounter it in phase five after a long hiatus, tends to result from how much magic was involved in that initial encounter. Was it love that struck them at age 11 when they first cracked open the AD&D DMG? Or was it just lust - or mere like?

For me, it was love - and I can still remember that era of my life, the period between roughly age 11 and 13, which seemed to be imbued with a kind of sorcery. Essentially all that my friends and I did, every day after school and on Saturdays and Sundays, was hang out and play D&D, Warhammer, Necromunda, Blood Bowl, Shadowrun, or Cyberpunk 2020 - or else go to a shop (Games Workshop or a Virgin Megastore) to gaze adoringly at figures or books we could never hope to afford. During that era, something was imprinted in my psyche, such that it would never quite be able to let me go - and it was this that ensured that, even though I abandoned my interest the hobby for some years in early adulthood, I was drawn back into it later on as I matured.

Looking back, I wonder what it was about that period that was so special. What was it that set the imprinting process in train? 

A combination of factors: the escapism that fantasy literature and gaming offered for a boy growing up in a boring town with no money; the fact that I was imaginative and bookish anyway; the fact that it was something that was mine and that my parents had absolutely no involvement in. 

But also the vignettes: buying Necromunda with leftover Christmas money from relatives one Saturday morning and bringing it home and playing it all weekend stowed away in the attic with a friend. The first time I opened the Planescape boxed set - I can still remember how my small brain exploded when I saw DiTerlizzi's art. Paging through the 2nd edition DMG on a bed in an Israeli hotel bedroom after having bought it earlier that day at a shop in Tel Aviv, with Offspring and Jeff Buckley videos on MTV in the background. Reading Lone Wolf books under the covers in bed each night with a torch. Ordering figures from Citadel Miniatures by post and frantically checking the post each morning before school. Buying fistfuls of cheap little gem dice and spending hour and hours rolling them just for fun. 

Being an 11-13 year old boy, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks. But this hobby made it suck a lot less. And that gives it enough credit, perhaps, for a life time.