Post by Jarred on Mar 20, 2016 21:33:21 GMT -5
Hey Everybody, I'm Jarred and I'm a TBG founder and Board Member.
You'll probably be seeing a lot of me around here as I'm helping out as an admin for these boards.
So let's see, about me... hmm.
I've been a gamer since I first played River Raid on an Atari 2600 when I was five or six years old, and I've been into role playing games since I went away to Boy Scout camp in 9th grade and accidentally stumbled across a game of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in full swing in the dining hall late at night. Ever since then gaming (whether video, board, computer, or RPG) has been a central preoccupation of my existence. To put it in the words an old friend of mine once used, "If it wasn't for video games we would have cured cancer by now, and by we I mean our group of friends". At some point however it became clear that no one was going to pay me to play games of any kind (at least until professional D&D player becomes a thing) so I had to get a 'real' job. Through a series of misadventures I'll not recount here I ended up in human services. Specifically I ended up as a counselor at a fresh air camp for at-risk youth and later I got a job at a residential treatment facility working with adolescent boys. There I met a group of people that would some years later become the founding members of The Bodhana Group.
I've got two kids, one who just turned 10 and one who is about to turn 4. My youngest is a boy who has been bitten hard by the tablet gaming bug. He is the first in our family to grow up with a computer in his hands, and it's been incredibly interesting to watch him figure out how to interact with that device. My oldest is a burgeoning nerd in her own right, and started playing tabletop and role playing games in the last three years. I've got to give a shout out to bengrimm04 who introduced her to Camp Myth by Third Eye Games and Chris Lewis Carter at Save Against Fear about three years ago. Being my daughter she had been around people playing RPGs since she was born, usually running around in the background occasionally sitting on laps or rolling dice, but had never really participated prior to that. Since then bengrimm04 has been under threat of death and dismemberment if he does not run a session of Camp Myth at least once at every Save Against Fear. In fact, for her 10th birthday she asked if our regular gaming group could play Camp Myth with her - which turned out to be a really fun time for everyone.
I'm not really sure what else to say in the way of an introduction, except perhaps to take a moment to discuss The Bodhana Group in general. I'm a member of TBG because I believe that the two overriding passions in my life, human services and gaming, can and do cross over. Each of these pursuits inherently enhances the other. When I worked at that residential treatment facility we were scheduled to work 12 hour shifts every other Saturday and Sunday. These weekend shifts were brutal and draining and often either mind-numbingly dull or entirely the wrong kind of exciting (usually the kind of exciting that involves people trying to punch you). So I decided that if I was going to be stuck there for a whole weekend I might as well make the best of it and started running a D&D session with some of the kids. I had no intention of using this session as a tool to improve anyone's life or as an intervention of any kind. But almost immediately I noticed a positive effect on many of the participants. Not only were they motivated to play (the group started with about 4 and soon had more than 12), but they started relating everyday difficulties to situations we had discussed in-game. They began using problem solving instead of aggression. The experience was mind-blowing for me. So I promptly forgot about it for several years. It wasn't until TBG started to run Save Against Fear as a fund raiser that the idea of combining games and helping others came back, and so here we are. (I'll post a more detailed version of this story on the Testify board later on.)
So that's me, or at least the short version anyway. I look forward to getting to know everyone here and to have good conversations.
thanks!
You'll probably be seeing a lot of me around here as I'm helping out as an admin for these boards.
So let's see, about me... hmm.
I've been a gamer since I first played River Raid on an Atari 2600 when I was five or six years old, and I've been into role playing games since I went away to Boy Scout camp in 9th grade and accidentally stumbled across a game of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons in full swing in the dining hall late at night. Ever since then gaming (whether video, board, computer, or RPG) has been a central preoccupation of my existence. To put it in the words an old friend of mine once used, "If it wasn't for video games we would have cured cancer by now, and by we I mean our group of friends". At some point however it became clear that no one was going to pay me to play games of any kind (at least until professional D&D player becomes a thing) so I had to get a 'real' job. Through a series of misadventures I'll not recount here I ended up in human services. Specifically I ended up as a counselor at a fresh air camp for at-risk youth and later I got a job at a residential treatment facility working with adolescent boys. There I met a group of people that would some years later become the founding members of The Bodhana Group.
I've got two kids, one who just turned 10 and one who is about to turn 4. My youngest is a boy who has been bitten hard by the tablet gaming bug. He is the first in our family to grow up with a computer in his hands, and it's been incredibly interesting to watch him figure out how to interact with that device. My oldest is a burgeoning nerd in her own right, and started playing tabletop and role playing games in the last three years. I've got to give a shout out to bengrimm04 who introduced her to Camp Myth by Third Eye Games and Chris Lewis Carter at Save Against Fear about three years ago. Being my daughter she had been around people playing RPGs since she was born, usually running around in the background occasionally sitting on laps or rolling dice, but had never really participated prior to that. Since then bengrimm04 has been under threat of death and dismemberment if he does not run a session of Camp Myth at least once at every Save Against Fear. In fact, for her 10th birthday she asked if our regular gaming group could play Camp Myth with her - which turned out to be a really fun time for everyone.
I'm not really sure what else to say in the way of an introduction, except perhaps to take a moment to discuss The Bodhana Group in general. I'm a member of TBG because I believe that the two overriding passions in my life, human services and gaming, can and do cross over. Each of these pursuits inherently enhances the other. When I worked at that residential treatment facility we were scheduled to work 12 hour shifts every other Saturday and Sunday. These weekend shifts were brutal and draining and often either mind-numbingly dull or entirely the wrong kind of exciting (usually the kind of exciting that involves people trying to punch you). So I decided that if I was going to be stuck there for a whole weekend I might as well make the best of it and started running a D&D session with some of the kids. I had no intention of using this session as a tool to improve anyone's life or as an intervention of any kind. But almost immediately I noticed a positive effect on many of the participants. Not only were they motivated to play (the group started with about 4 and soon had more than 12), but they started relating everyday difficulties to situations we had discussed in-game. They began using problem solving instead of aggression. The experience was mind-blowing for me. So I promptly forgot about it for several years. It wasn't until TBG started to run Save Against Fear as a fund raiser that the idea of combining games and helping others came back, and so here we are. (I'll post a more detailed version of this story on the Testify board later on.)
So that's me, or at least the short version anyway. I look forward to getting to know everyone here and to have good conversations.
thanks!