The Children are Our Future

It is your duty and privilege to pass on the tradition

Twitter is rarely the source of anything good, but a recent conversation that a few of my friends got involved in on the platform yielded one of the most braindead takes imaginable. One of the dregs of the online RPG world, complete with his own AI art filled bucket of swill that can only be called a game in the technical sense of the word and a podcast that has slightly more listeners than The Carolina Panthers have wins, announced that his children are not allowed to game with him. While I firmly support the idea of keeping children away from this particular swamp creature, I can’t help but scratch my head and his opposition to sharing something he loves with the people that he should love more than all others. Roleplaying is a hobby, but it’s also a tradition. There is a traditional aspect to roleplaying that is similar to the oral storytelling tradition of old. What it comes down to is that the surest way to keep certain styles of roleplaying alive is to teach it to young players, especially your own children.

I have been a parent for just shy of a year and a half and the biggest lesson that I’ve learned is that parenting is an exhausting and unending process. You are never not a father and your duty is a constant one. For eight hours a day, I work at my civilian job, but I am unreachable once I walk out the door at 5 PM. There is no 5 PM for fatherhood. Fortunately, there is no greater fulfillment of your purpose as a human being than raising your children to be strong and Godly individuals. Part of that fulfillment comes from sharing your passions with your child and rediscovering the joy of your first experience with it through their eyes. When you show a friend or a lover your favorite movie or have them play your favorite video game for the first time and they enjoy it, you get a taste of that experience. When you see the delight on the face of a child, especially your own child, the joy multiplies tenfold. I was lucky enough to experience this back in August when I took my daughter to the beach. I have always loved the beach, but seeing her reaction, her delight in the waves and the sand and the sunshine, made me fall in love with it all over again. I see no reason to wall off other things I love from my daughter. Doing so would be to deny her quality time bonding with her father and deny me the privilege of sharing joy with my daughter.

Moving beyond the deeply personal, it is of paramount importance to the future of gaming that we teach young people how to play the game. The importance of passing traditions down to the next generation has been lost on many people, but every now and then you get people asking questions like “How come nobody quilts or cans anymore?” It’s the boomers who really put a bullet in the head of passing along traditional ways, but they also seem to be the ones scratching their heads as to why the old ways are being lost. Well, we as gamers who want a healthy gaming culture for generations to come need to be teaching our children and their friends how to play. Teach them young in a manner that is appropriate for their age and then build upon that foundational teaching. If your children and their friends express interest in this hobby, you should embrace the task of instructing them with zeal.

There are so many great examples of people taking the idea of passing this hobby down to the next generation seriously. Bill Barsh from Pacesetter Games passed it on to his son Ben who is now a designer himself. My friend Crossface is active in his community running games for RPG clubs. OrkusDorkus’s son and his friends are making roleplaying a full-blown phenomenon in their highschool. All of this is possible because good people took the time to approach young people at their level and introduce them to the hobby. If they had been too selfish or too lazy to take on that challenge, they would have been robbing kids of the opportunity to learn this game we all love. There are so many good reasons to pass your love of RPGs on to the next generation. Do so or risk it becoming a lost art.