Weird

As a teen, I was a girl gamer and I was part of an extremely active gaming group with a regional reputation. 

We played Friday night, all day Saturday often until the wee hours of Sunday morning and part of Sunday afternoon. We also sometimes met on Wednesday nights.

When I say regional reputation, I mean one guy lived four hours away and came in once a month and got a hotel room for the weekend to participate. Another guy who had moved to another city sometimes dropped in if he was in town for some reason.

Sunday afternoon might be as few as three people. Friday night and especially Saturday was sometimes upwards of twenty people and sometimes involved breaking up into two or three smaller groups each running a different game.

Gaming stores sometimes allow games to happen on the premises and that's one way to meet new people and attract new players, but most of this occurred at someone's house and floated around. No one had a family situation where they could reliably host it consistently.

Sometimes it was at my house. Sometimes it was at some soldier's house. Sometimes it was at various other core member's home or we sometimes got invited somewhere new.

No one had relatives who wanted that many people coming over that many days a week for that many hours. So we were always looking for a place to play.

Once and only once, we were told we could play in like the portico of some mansion in some bizarre hidden location I would have never guessed held a house.

We didn't know these people. I don't believe any of them joined the game. We weren't invited into the house. It was an awkward space to game because I think we sat on a stone floor outside with no furniture but sheltered to some degree.

It was not ideal and it was just socially weird.

I had no idea why they allowed us to go there and we weren't invited back and I didn't know if we offended them or just what.

I didn't know what they expected or hoped for. 

Looking back on it, I think if I hadn't been so naive I would have been suspicious of their motives and wondered if they were serial killers or something. But at the time, it never crossed my mind that they might have had nefarious intentions.

I don't really think they did but I'm sixty now, not seventeen, and I'm a lot more jaded. If offered something like that now, I would probably go "Um... WHY?"

The only thing I can figure out how to compare to is that I once made pizza from scratch for everyone when the game was at my house and ended up angry and feeling unappreciated.

I felt like delivered pizza cost too much and if I made it from a package mix, it would be dramatically cheaper and then I ended up not playing much and it cost me something in that it interfered with me participating and saved them a bunch of money and I never did that again.

So I don't know how access to that portico at that mansion even got arranged on some day when we were feeling like refugees not welcome anywhere and someone said "Oh, we can go here." And we went because we had no place else to go and I ended up feeling like that family must have felt a bit like I felt about making pizza and feeling unappreciated.

I never thought too much about it. It's not like I desperately longed to sit on a stone floor with no chairs or tables again.

But I always felt like there was some social disconnect of some sort between their expectations and whatever it was we did there.

They were apparently very wealthy but none of us really had a connection to them. Maybe they imagined they were do gooders, but they didn't know us and didn't trust us and didn't want to invite us in to have bathroom access or whatever.

It's not like some member of the group said "Hey, my cousin/uncle/whatever has a big house and..." So there was no path forward on hashing out what we needed, what they expected, etc. and that made it a weird one-time incident with no real explanation of anything.

I feel like somewhere in there is some lesson to be learned, but I can't quite put my finger on what.

Perhaps it's part of why I focus on people the way I do. "Throwing money at a problem" typically accomplishes nothing if you can't communicate, establish trust, learn what people need, communicate what you expect in return etc.