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Another thread reminded me that I'm an old gamer (depends on your circles too, but at least here on Dakka). My gaming started pre-High School-like most I imagine. I'm not sure how many people are still in School and are dealing with the gamer moniker. I don't know if I can really offer any advice on dealing with the HS mentality and what not, I just lived with it, ignored it, get on and learn that life beyond school is much different that how life looks while in High School.

But I figured that there is enough gamer experience here on Dakka that I'm sure the older gamers have some advice worth hearing. Anybody have any tips?

You know i really didnt get into the hobby until last year now 24. So i cant really say how to deal with it. You are right though about life being a hell of alot different outside of HS. I can imagine the crap you had to deal with back then about being a dork or nerd for playing the game. Now though i had people ask what my hobby is and tell them and actually be curious about it.

my teachers actually think me painting models is cool. (considering i made one for one of my teachers...ya it looked like a centurion...latin teacher is awesome - i'm making a centruy form historicals for him but i digress)

its quite cool that, but friends and stuff think i'm a little geeky.

I dunno. I didn't play in highschool, but I still wasn't exactly one of the cool kids.

All I learned is the geeky chicks do more gak.

I also discovered 40k long after I was out of high school,I was in my late 20's (28),and considering my other habbits (dying my hair a varitey of bizzare colors,sticking metal in my face,getting drunk and falling out of windows),most people I knew considered painting little plastic men the least odd thing I was doing.

I started playing in junior high. Got lots of looks when reading Army Books in study hall, or class. Then high school rolled around and I started playing football, baseball, and wrestling. After that, no one really cared about my geeky habits unless they wanted to make some lighthearted jibes.

So, my advice would be to engage with the high school community. Play sports, join clubs, or just act like a well adjusted person and roll with the punches.

I generally don't talk to anybody about it unless I know they play.

Otherwise, no one knows about it, and I'd like to keep it that way, honestly.

I've gotten embarrassed a couple times when I had construction contractors in my house and they start asking questions about my miniature cities. It always surprises me too how often people actually know what 40K is, even if they don't play.

I started to play when I was 11years old way back in the eighties early nineties started with a Phantom Titan,then collected Chaos,Skaven,Orks, berserkers blah da blah da blah this and that.

Here I am now with my 3rd Marine army second ork army and a Imperial Guard army the hobby has never left me and I doubt I'll ever leave it.

If you don't start wargaming by the time you leave university there is a much smaller chance of doing it.

Partly because people tend to have formed their tastes and opinions of hobbies by then, also because real life gets in the way.

A lot of players are like me. They start in their early teens, continue through university and afterwards but at some point have to take a career break to get married, and so on. Then they rejoin wargaming after a hiatus. I spent about 10 years out of the hobby while I concentrated on work, family and so on.

The best advice is not to get rid of your stuff! When I came back to it, I found a lot of my games were of no interest to me any more, and I was able to offload them on eBay for good wonga which I reinvested in new stuff. OTOH, the main things I missed were the the things I had got rid of early on. I had a great Vietnam skirmish setup, 40+ US Army figures plus vehicles and choppers, which I sold to a friend. At the time I was glad to think they would be put to good use, however once I came back to wargaming I missed them and started collecting them again.

I started gaming in Junior High with role-playing. Once I got to High School my social groups were pretty well set into the 'geek' crowd and I started wargaming with Battletech and Starfleet Battles.

I was lucky in high school as most of my 'geek' friends were unwilling to be taunted by the 'cool kids'. Due to being generally smarter and several of the main group including myself were Aikido students for free thanx to one of our dads being an instructor, my immediate 'nerd' group didnt tolerate much crap. Quicker with witty insults and if the situation ever escalated to physical confrontations (which it did once in Junior High with a wrestler and once in High School against a footballer) we tended to still come out on top. So, my immediate group really didnt get messed with. We were still part of the 'geek' crowd, but we were honestly pretty well accepted. (we still didnt get the hot chicks, but our group had more than its share of the 'stragglers'...which was cool. Commander Endova knows what I'm talking about)

My advice, don't be ashamed of who you are. Learn to make fun of people that are REALLY into sports. (since this, even today at 38 years old, seems to be the crowd that really makes fun of wargamers) "Oh? You dont watch football? What do you do for fun?" Have your comebacks ready for these jocks. They make fun of your hobbies which are no more useless than thiers. At least we're creative and our hobby is mentally stimulating. Start with that.

In High School AND in life afterwords, you gotta stand up for yourself sometimes. People will only make fun of you for as long as they can get away with it. It's about being in a superior position over another. If someone jibes you about "nerdy" games and you cannot come back on them with some quick quip about their team or sports obsession, they gain just a little tad of 'superiority' over you. Walk away and they win. Come back with a wittier quip and YOU win. Nothing more empowering for a High School 'Nerd' than making the school quarterback look stupid in a battle of words. But do it friendly, not with anger, play the game....thats all it is, another game.

It's odd, I play warhammer,
but at school I have the "Nerd" moniker instead of "gamer"

Even though I am both stronger and fitter than most of the people that call me it.

The important thing about high school, no matter what you're interested in (destructive perversions aside of course), is not to be shamed into pretending otherwise. It's only a few years. You'll have more fun being yourself. I never had a problem getting dates, going to parties, etc, and never apologized for liking stuff like D&D etc. These don't have to be conflicting pursuits. What people often don't like about gamers/nerds/whatevs is not their hobby but their arrogance, filthiness, fatness, stupidity, backwardness. Don't blame these things on your hobby. Keep your interests and shape up on those scores.

dogma wrote:I started playing in junior high. Got lots of looks when reading Army Books in study hall, or class. Then high school rolled around and I started playing football, baseball, and wrestling. After that, no one really cared about my geeky habits unless they wanted to make some lighthearted jibes.

So, my advice would be to engage with the high school community. Play sports, join clubs, or just act like a well adjusted person and roll with the punches.

Or do what I did. Instill a healthy sense of fear into the preppy mongrel bastards.

I kept my hobby under my hat in school for the most part, barring art class where I would draw some sci fi style pictures with orks and space marines in them. But where I was from GW was not well known so no one ever knew what they were. I got slagged and beaten up a lot anyway, because:
1. I was a skinny, short smartarse
2. My dad was a policeman, and not a popular one.
3. I was very good at science, and generally well behaved at all times.
4. I ratted on bullies a few times when they were picking on my mates.

I started a gaming club when I was at school, not sure they'd allow a student to run one these days?

But regardless, aye did RPG's, Blood Bowl and Warhammer related games for two years.

Then when I left after sixth form, I ran it for another year as a non student. Once again not that easy these days.

So yeah, I never hid it, I was quite open and over those three years probably brought somewhere in the region of thirty gamers into the hobby.

Okay I'll admit I got some stick, but not really that much.

After school I continued running games clubs, one at the town hall for a games shop for about a year and a half until it closed.
Then another one at the Liberal club I organised myself for around two and a half years (also where I met my future wife,) until management changed.
I then ran one more for another shop which lasted about a year till they stopped selling GW.
Finally I ran one at the British Legion which I also arranged myself after losing the shop club, which lasted for nearly two years before the Legion was closed and turned into flats.

So not only did I not hide my hobby, over my time, I've introduced somewhere in the region to one hundred folks into the hobby and run clubs for gamers to come to. Which for someone running those clubs for a laugh, isn't too bad a feat.

Sadly since I moved to Suffolk in 04, two small kiddies and a full time job has made that impractical. Plus all the checks and stuff you need these days is also a stumbling block. I might run another eventually, but not until the boys are older now.

Oh and aye that was a bit of a ramble, but I have a cold, so I'm distracting myself from work.

I started a club of sorts in my hometown as well, but mostly it was just that I sorted out the boards and terrain for my mates and we all played in my house. When I went to university I started a wargaming club that is still going strong, which is nice. Nowadays I leave the club-running up to people who are better at it than I am.

When I was in HS, the "GW Hobby" didn't exist...

Did GW even exist??? (j/k)

Manchu wrote:Did GW even exist??? (j/k)

Yes, they did.
____

The sad part is that I had to Wiki when GW was founded in order to answer your question.

Darn whippersnappers!

According to your profile, you got in on the ground floor of 40k. Did you do any other wargaming before (i.e., while in HS)?

Still in school (secondary school in Britain) and keep it generally close to my chest apart from close friends. I'm not really part of a Nerdy group of Cool group (Most people in our year call the Chavs )British people will know what I mean). I play sports alot but I love video games and, of course, warhammer so I find a good medium!

Back in HS, Car Wars and "classic" counter-based wargaming like OGRE/GEV were big.

I didn't really get into minis-based wargaming until the 90s, and back then, GW wasn't nearly the monster they are today.

I teach HS math & run a gaming club after school. The club is mostly 40K players and other kids think nothing of it as far as I know. I talk about gaming with kids, and I think that video game "gamers" have made tabletop gamers more normal than when I was a kid. I have a stack of White Dwarfs, Sports Illustrated, Field & Stream, Discover, and American Scientific magazines that kids read when we have lockdown drills or after tests. Its always funny to see the cheerleaders reading White Dwarf.

On the "small world" of gaming: Just last week I was at a Turkey Raffle with my inlaws and the woman (60+yrs) across from us knew all about 40K and Fantasy and White Dwarf from her nephew who is 23. Probably because she's getting ready for Christmas shopping.

I didn't game at school.
Sure, we had some D&D playing nerds (what? - they called themselves that) but 40k wouldn't be released until after I'd finished High School (finished in '86 - 40k was released in '87).

I played a few games of WW2 and 'modern' with friends in HO scale on the odd weekend - but I wasn't a 'gaming every weekend' kinda guy (still aren't).

I am in highschool currently, and I play with a small group of friends. I do get made fun of for it occasionally, but never too seriously. Course that may also be because I'm on the football team. I am not part of the "cool" crowd but I am not normally considered a "geek". However, I also don't broadcast the fact that I play 40k.

I went to boarding school in high school in regional Queensland.

In my first year of high school one of the guys in my room had RTB01 and the 40k rules, and a guy in another dorm had some WHFB.

I, and several others started buying minis, rules, chopping out paper cut outs and sticking them to chopped up cardboard bases to play games.

We used to play in one of the classrooms and from the core of about 4 of us there were 30 or so playing each weekend when I left 5 years later.

Was never teased about being a gamer. Most guys loved to look at the models I was painting at the time.

aromasin
the problem with Britain is the infestation of chavs !
During secondary school it was kinda kept secret but in college, i may mention it on the off chance to a few of my good mates but they dont care.

And I don't care if people know, I always socialise with people and normally, most things wouldnt really bother them about the hobby.

I discovered it during school and got really interested into it. As the hobby wore on more and more of those so-called friends started to stop bothering with me.

At least I still have you, large pile of plastic and metal miniatures!

JohnHwangDD wrote:When I was in HS, the "GW Hobby" didn't exist...

Ditto

However D&D and Star Fleet Battles did. I actually started in junior high, and played mostly with older kids (highschool age).

Didn't play 40k until I was 29.

GG