I hear/read, “It’s just a game,” from time to time. It is usually meant as a dismissive statement. This “elf game” hobby isn’t all that important, not really. Except it is, to me.

When I was 19, I was in an emotionally deep dark hole. I was depressed. Horribly depressed. You see, I had joined the Marine Corps a little less than a year before. I completed boot camp. Went to the school of infantry and on to the Fleet Marine Force. And I was disappointed, disillusioned and miserable. I found out that many, if not most of my brothers in arms were chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, ignorant, anti-intellectual, sexist, skirt-chasing assholes of the highest order. They were really good at their jobs. To a man, they could shoot and fight like the dogs of war we were trained to be.

If you didn’t want to get drunk, go get a lap dance from the strippers, play the same card game all weekend, watch porn in a room full of dudes, drive down to Myrtle Beach and pick up some drunk college girls or chase married women whose husbands were on deployment… then there was something wrong with you as far as they were concerned. I was, and remain, a nerd. And I will admit, I was as interested in casual sex and drunken tomfoolery as much as the next guy but I was dissatisfied with defiling myself all weekend. I found myself alone in the barracks, a lot. I didn’t have many friends and no one was particularly interested in what I was interested in. I became depressed and hated every minute of every day. Before long, I just wanted to die. Not long after that, I started thinking about how I could bring that about myself.

Fate intervened. I had brought my Dungeons and Dragons books with me from home after leave and was trying to put together a game group. It wasn’t going very well. One of the guys I knew in my platoon was telling me about this game Vampire: The Masquerade. I never heard of it but it sounded like fun and I was desperate. I managed to worm my way into the game, and it saved my life. I found a group of friends and we spent practically every weekend for the next year playing together. On deployment, we played every day that we weren’t in port or training. This group of guys became like brothers to me. I’m still in contact with several of them and we talk from time to time. If they hadn’t brought me in, hadn’t accepted me as part of their group to play, to be my friend; I know I would have never seen this side of 20. I couldn’t have dealt with it. That game group got me through the miserable days in the field, the stupid group punishments, the never-ending cleaning and polishing.

Yes, role-playing games are “just games.” But for those of us who find our best friends, our spouses, our careers, our fondest memories, our selves; It is far more than, “just a game.”