I just watched Cool Hand Luke last night, which taught me two core life lessons.
One, when you're playing Magic: The Gathering at least - "Sometimes nothing can be a real cool hand.". The other is that sometimes, especially when it comes to me trying to express words and ideas in a verbal form: "What we have here is a failure to communicate.".
All my life I've struggled with how I express words and ideas verbally. My writing's okay, and sometimes I can express an idea better in writing than I can through real speech. But while going to a speech therapist when I was younger helped me a whole lot, which gave me an uncomfortable empathy for the characters in another movie I saw recently, The King's Speech - my ability to communicate effectively and also receive some information is hampered significantly by that horrid condition I was born with that is often referred to as a "made up disease" when it isn't really a disease at all. Diseases are fatal, what I have isn't.
It's probably why at first a lot of my blog articles were waffley and made no sense on the first parsing. I really did struggle with communication even in writing for a time. But worst of all, particularly when explaining rules to a new game to people, I struggle with that too.
It's something that affects many gamers, much less people like me with genuine difficulty in even explaining difficult rules in a well meaning way that may misinterpret aspects of the rules which are game changers. I find it far easier to read and understand a book than a board game manual, maybe it's the fonts and pictures that clutter my mind, maybe it's the chains of numbers. But it's something that often somebody else has to read over for me, and even if I don't get blamed for screwing up the course of a game because of my failure to communicate, I feel terrible for not being able to understand the rules of a game on the first read like other people can.
The worst part of this is where I'm sitting in my board game guild group playing Eurogames because that's what they want to play that night - and I'm utterly bewildered by how the economic system works, I get my butt handed to me by the banker players every time because while they understand the rules, they haven't really made the effort to make me hope I can understand with them how the game works.
And this is the daunting thing that's prevented me from trying out Earth Reborn. If something has clear instructions and easy to store components I'll play it, but even instructions for punching out the tokens and putting them in the box weren't included. I really want to play Earth Reborn - otherwise I wouldn't have bought it - but the rules and background clutter my mind almost as much as the massive amounts of components that have to be stored in the box in a specific way. I have the equivalent of the anti-OCD, where instead of having the compulsion to organise anything into a very specific order that may not make sense, I'm overwhelmed by the pile of stuff in front of me and sometimes don't know where to start while organising it.
I'm sure I'm not alone in being afflicted with a failure to communicate game rules properly, and it worries me that this inability to communicate core ideas whether on or off the table is affecting my life so much, that I feel ignored or worthless in terms of how to deal with life and the humans that inhabit it. Not that those plastic Ameritrash pieces have any pity for my poor mind either.