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Old 05-23-2020, 09:45 PM   #71
Anthony
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
I know this pandemic has been terribly serious in other places but the world is not homogenous. Where we are there have been only 9 deaths out of a pop of 600,000 whicg is also one highly tending towards the elderly. Even people's doctors are telling them there just isn't that much risk in face-to-face contact locally.
The annoying thing about prevention is that you really don't get to see it do anything; there's no easy way to distinguish between "our countermeasures prevented X" and "X wasn't going to happen anyway".

It does seem likely that gaming is relatively low risk -- the odds of transmission during a gaming session I would expect to be fairly good (close quarters, extended period, lots of talking, shared surfaces) but they tend to be small stable groups so one person catching it would only threaten a small number of people and contact tracing would be easy.
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Old 05-23-2020, 11:19 PM   #72
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
The annoying thing about prevention is that you really don't get to see it do anything; there's no easy way to distinguish between "our countermeasures prevented X" and "X wasn't going to happen anyway".

It does seem likely that gaming is relatively low risk -- the odds of transmission during a gaming session I would expect to be fairly good (close quarters, extended period, lots of talking, shared surfaces) but they tend to be small stable groups so one person catching it would only threaten a small number of people and contact tracing would be easy.
Given the period where it's transmissible but asymptomatic, and that many gamers have multiple groups, that's potentially a very explosive spread among a discernable sub-population.

A prime recipe for outreak
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Old 05-23-2020, 11:37 PM   #73
namada
 
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
I know this pandemic has been terribly serious in other places but the world is not homogenous. Where we are there have been only 9 deaths out of a pop of 600,000 whicg is also one highly tending towards the elderly. Even people's doctors are telling them there just isn't that much risk in face-to-face contact locally.
The world isn't homogeneous, but the virus mostly is. That is, while your numbers look great, at this second, it can and likely will, change in an instant. If you're on the west coast, you're more likely to have the 'Chinese' strain, which is less deadly (seemingly), but if you're on the east coast, it's more likely the 'European' strain, which is far deadlier than the other. If you're in the middle of the country, it's a toss-up, it could be either, it could be both, that's hitting your community. Based on the stats you list, I'd say your local transmission is the Chinese strain, but that really doesn't make gaming face-to-face safe, just because it's less deadly.
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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
It does seem likely that gaming is relatively low risk -- the odds of transmission during a gaming session I would expect to be fairly good (close quarters, extended period, lots of talking, shared surfaces) but they tend to be small stable groups so one person catching it would only threaten a small number of people and contact tracing would be easy.
If you consider the threat of possibly killing your entire group and possibly their entire families, yeah, it's low risk. Go ahead. Take it.
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Old 05-23-2020, 11:52 PM   #74
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

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Given the period where it's transmissible but asymptomatic, and that many gamers have multiple groups.
Is that the most common pattern? My experience is that a lot of groups are pretty self-contained except for cons and the like.
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Old 05-24-2020, 12:31 AM   #75
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Is that the most common pattern? My experience is that a lot of groups are pretty self-contained except for cons and the like.
I'm in a college town: Corvallis - home of Oregon State University. Most of the townie gamer kids are in at least 2 groups. Many of the college gamers are, too. I've had two groups at the local game store for most of the last 4 years...

When I was in high school and college, in Anchorage, AK, I had two groups going most of the time, and sometimes played in a third.

Most of my players through these years have been in two groups as well.

I can't say it's demographically true overall, but yes, in my life, more than half the gamers I've run for have been in two or more groups at a time.

Almost all of those have been weekly games, BTW.

Most of my adult life, in fact, I've had two games, and about 1/3 of the post-college gamers have been in two groups or more.
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Old 05-24-2020, 05:20 PM   #76
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

This whole thing has certainly revealed how differently people adapt and handle online gaming. I'm involved with three groups that do lots of online communications, two of which are because of Covid, and it's impressive just how much different the experience is.

One group plays an online video game (Arma 3). There are over a hundred members, and session player counts start at around 80 and dwindle down to around 20-30 by the end of the night. Despite being in a notoriously buggy game (Arma), which we then load a bunch of mods on top of that interact both with the game and a third-party voice-chat program, and having a wide variety of communication options (Proximity voice, various radio options, etc), it generally goes off without a hitch. Communication is clear and easy, everyone knows when to chill to let others speak, and everyone treats communications fairly seriously, so we never have poor-quality audio or significant background noise (To the point that the very few times it has happened, it's generally been pretty hilarious to everyone involved).

Then there's my online physics class, where the professor decided to run it like a normal class, but on Zoom. It's a bit less than 20 people. We established early that everyone (Except the professor) sets themselves to muted and used push-to-talk to speak up, so we don't get a bunch of extraneous sound. The professor is running things wirelessly at his house, which often has someone else doing a Zoom meeting and other online activity, so his feed often stutters or freezes for a moment. Sometimes someone gets dropped and can't get back in. Sometimes someone forgets to mute themselves and we all get to listen to their typing or breathing or out-of-class conversation for a bit until the professor gets their attention and has them mute again. So it's a bit awkward, but it works well enough.

And then there's the smallest group: my online roleplaying group. 7 people total, and I don't think we've gone a session without some serious issue. Depending on whether one of the players is with the DM or not, only 2 or 3 people use headphones, so we very frequently have echo-back. I'm the only one who uses a headset mike: the others use phone or laptop mikes at arm's length (Or further), so audio quality is crap. The one time someone else tried to use a headset mike, it was of such cheap quality that it was giving feedback from his own headset. We're using Facebook's video-chat, because the DM is on Facebook and therefor figures we should just use Facebook everything for this (And no, it's not because of familiarity; he originally wanted to use Facetime because he thought that was by Facebook, and we switched to this when he found out it wasn't). There seems to be no push-to-talk option for this program (At least not on PC, though I can still click the mute/unmute button to fake it), and it tries to duck the audio of anyone who isn't speaking, with the result that if two people try to speak, they're both basically inaudible due to random ducking. The one time we've done mapped-out combat, he sent phone pictures of the battlemat as the combat unfolded, which meant long pauses any time it had to be updated and awkward flipping between pictures to get a full view of what was going on and where we were. (The idea of using a virtual tabletop program was shot down, first because the DM didn't want to pay for one, and after it was pointed out that there were plenty of excellent free options, because he didn't want to put effort into some new system for this temporary arrangement). It has, frankly speaking, been a mess, because basically zero effort has gone into trying to adapt to the situation and make things work.

It just seems bizarre to me that the largest group I'm in has the least issues, by far, while the smallest group I'm in has the most.
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Old 05-24-2020, 06:16 PM   #77
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Originally Posted by Phoenix_Dragon View Post
It just seems bizarre to me that the largest group I'm in has the least issues, by far, while the smallest group I'm in has the most.
Group 1 is video game players. Group 2 is college students. Group 3 is tabletop gamers.
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Old 05-25-2020, 04:09 AM   #78
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Group 1 is video game players. Group 2 is college students. Group 3 is tabletop gamers.
Oh, I know (Although most of group 3 are also video game players). But it's also the difference in effort that's kind of remarkable to me. I mean, there are tools designed specifically to handle this situation, and which would do so much better that what we're using and eliminate many of the problems we have, but some of the players are outright opposed to using them...
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Old 05-28-2020, 08:22 PM   #79
Mark Skarr
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

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Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
Group 1 is video game players. Group 2 is college students. Group 3 is tabletop gamers.
None of those are exclusive. In fact, it's been my experience that any one of those groups may belong to one or the other, or both. I tend to see group 1 having more problems at the start, but once they get the problems hammered out, they're fixed for the long haul.

And, as Phoenix Dragon points out, his Group 3's problem is more with the GM and their inflexibility as opposed to any, real technical problems. It's less a matter of the group and more a matter of laziness.
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Old 06-19-2020, 06:00 AM   #80
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Default Re: Has COVID hit your gaming?

We've been playing through discord
It's not that fun, but it's better than nothing
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