Gaming with Friends

As you may have noticed, my interests in gaming span quite a few different systems, genres, and games in general. My biggest problems with this are two: first, when I see a new, interesting-looking game, I often become very fixated on the new game, or game book, sometimes to the point of losing any interest in previous games or ideas I was working on.

The second problem I have is that while my close friends are generally the people I feel most comfortable gaming with, they are also not very close to me physically. Here is St. Louis, I've had trouble making connections, at least in a gaming sense, so my nearest friends are 500 miles away. Lately, though, that seems like it may be looking up; I have some friends who recently got access to high-speed internet and a new computer. So there are some things that I will hopefully be able to try out.

First, with high-speed internet, I'm thinking gaming with some programs, like Skype, may be much more possible. The combination of VOIP and the internal chat mean that certain kinds of gaming will be easy, though I haven't tried it out; I don't know if any kind of easy image transfer is possible with Skype, though, and games that are more tactically oriented, such as D&D 4E, can't really get things across with the Skype chat.

I'm also looking into Google Wave, which looks like it may be promising as a means of online gaming. It seems to combine chatting, message boards, and mail all in one area, which would be a great help, though still misses out on things that require tactical movement.

As a more immediate concern, however, I'm thinking that I may start a message board for access to people I know to exchange some ideas about gaming. I'm not really sure how it will work, but when I figure it out, I'll be sending out invites so that people can show up, talk about gaming ideas and such, and hopefully give me a more active area to discuss gaming than what I currently have. I'll still have my blog here, for when I feel like yammering, though.