Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
I dated a gamer, Dan, for almost three years. …
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2002 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
I dated a gamer, Dan, for almost three years. (Ga'mer; n.: one who uses tabletop, live-action, or computer role-playing games for recreation. Connotation: usu. to excess.) His gamerness was virtually dormant for the first few years that I knew him, until he moved in with an active gamer and, by extension, a clan of them. I will not say that I learned nothing from dating a gamer. For example, Dan just pointed his readership to the quite funny gamer-centric Knights of the Dinner Table cartoons, which perform the niche comedy function quite well. (Zack showed me a KOTD comic book containing a parody/homage, Understanding Gamers, of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics.) I get the joke, and I wouldn't get it if I hadn't dated Dan.
Dan has a weblog now, a year and a half after I started mine (while I was with him). Until now, I always thought that he disdained such things. Just goes to show: another way that we misunderstood each other.
