If you’re the gamer in your friend group or family, you often get asked about the various games you play, be they video games, tabletop RPGs, board games — I have lost track of the amount of times I’ve been asked to explain Catan to people — and you’re put in the position of serving as a sort of unofficial ambassador for the hobbies you participate in and enjoy. All this is something I personally enjoy, but it also leads me into dangerous situations where I have to try and figure out which games are the ones my interrogators would be the most interested in. I mean, if you’re being asked by a bunch of adults looking for a game they can pick up and play for an hour at night after the kids go to bed, I probably shouldn’t try and get them into Diablo 3, right?
I tend to try and tailor what I introduce people to along the lines of their interests, but I’ve also had pretty good success just tossing people into the deep end — when people ask me about tabletop RPGs I often just offer to run a game for them and let them experience it that way. And I remember, back when I was just starting out in World of Warcraft, it was exactly this — my wife (we weren’t married yet, but we were dating) literally just made me a character on her account and told me to start exploring, and here we are these years later and I’m still playing. Even got my own account.
So now I turn to you, dear readers — when you are tasked with introducing people to games, how do you approach it? Try and ease them into it? Just fling them into the deep end? Maybe give them a game you think of as emblematic of a genre, like Baldur’s Gate for CRPGs, or Mass Effect for action FPS RPGs, or Final Fantasy XIV for MMOs? How do you deal with being an ambassador to your hobby?