Ask GMs about their pet peeves when it comes to player behavior and one of the first subjects to come up will be the dreaded smartphone. The modern cell phone, whether you’re an i-devotee or an android enthusiast, is a modern marvel of technology. In your hand you hold something that was science fiction just twenty years ago, but it’s also a tiny device full of huge, shiny distraction.
It’s bad enough when you’re having a conversation with someone only to realize they’re paying more attention to their phone than they are to you. News articles and editorials bemoan and exaggerate the loss of the millennial generation as they become disconnected to the world around them while plugged into something intangible within their phone. There’s no denying the smartphone (and by extension tablets) has altered the social landscape in many ways, and I am sure there are some ways we won’t even truly recognize or understand until we’re a decade down the line.
On top of all of the mundane concerns, now add the amount of work and time a GM puts into prepping and running a game, and it’s no wonder the smartphone ranks so high as an annoyance at the game table. But is the phone the problem or just a symptom of a different issue?
Despite these legitimate concerns and frustrations, I think smartphones get a bad rap. There are plenty of valid reasons to have a smartphone or a tablet at the table. Tablets can provide you with your gaming library in PDFs at your fingertips, while there are phone friendly apps that also provide gaming tools. Don’t underestimate the research capabilities either. There’s nothing like being able to quickly look up the words to a Lewis Carroll poem when trying to play a slightly creepy child, or being able to find the lyrics to the song your demon hunting metal band is covering to try and destroy a Prince of Hell. Finding a quick reference picture for your character or whatever else you’re trying to describe can also be invaluable.
If some of your players’ attention has turned from the game to their phone, rather than immediately taking affront, take a step back and determine whether they’re being rude or if you lost their engagement. Even if it’s a little bit of both, there are ways to draw them back in. Maybe the initiative order for combat has been taking too long. Perhaps it’s been too long since something interesting happened in game that their character could interact with. If the characters split up, maybe you’ve spent too long with one group and it’s time to pay attention to the other players. As with any distraction, find the way to draw them back in and they’ll put down the phone.
The biggest problem with the smartphone isn’t so much the distraction it provides as how engrossing that distraction is. When bored players doodled in the margins or played with their dice, it was easier to get their attention back on the game. It can be tempting to try and ban smartphones and tablets from the table altogether, but I caution against that unless you’ve got very specific reasons for doing so and have player buy-in. Otherwise, a frustrated and tyrannical edict may alienate some of your players. I know I’m less inclined to be generous to GMs that try and boss the table around.
What have your experiences been with smartphones and tablets at the game table? Complete distraction, useful tool, or somewhere in between? I’d be curious to hear how other GMs have resolved smartphone problems that popped up at their game table.
I have one player in our KAP group at the moment (hi Marina if your reading this) who I often see surfing on her phone. I realise this is my fault however.
We have a large group of 8, some of whom are very into the political side of things of court. Marina usually has a more straight forward appraoch to dealing with those who mean her character harm, maybe that should be ‘straight edged’, and the idea of courtly intrigue is unattractive to her more often than not (with one or two very enjoyable exceptions).
So as GM i have a choice – one player can be very distracted for a while, another two are very engaged, and the rest of the party are ‘OK’ or I can deny the two most politically active PCs their chance to do what they are good at… its a tough choice, but I try to balance out the intrigue and the action as best I can, and try not to get too upset when Marina has obviously not been paying attention because I didnt make the effort to let her know that we have left the castle and its her turn in the spotlight! 🙂
You’re at least aware of the choice before you and you know when to switch up the content of the game to rotate the engagement around the table. 🙂
Remember those people building towers with their dice or reading rulebooks looking for character options and magic items in the middle of a fight? Those are the very same people.
These things aren’t only a problem for GMs, believe me. I teach university ESL, and many of my Chinese and Korean students will bury their noses in their smartphones at the earliest provocation. One reason I like to get to class early is to kick off some conversation to get their attention off the phones and get them into English-speaking mode, but short of banning the phones from my sight I don’t see a complete solution.
There probably isn’t a complete solution. There is a certain degree of etiquette and social awareness that can be taught to students and younger people (god I sound old), but to think we’ll be able to complete eradicate the presence of the smartphone/divided attention is futile. And, in twenty years, it’ll make us sound like the luddites that used to whine about computers or gaming consoles. Or, going back even farther, about the written word (Plato apparently complained about future generations losing their ability to memorize knowledge since it would be written down.)
My group LOVES their tablets. With Pathfinder, they all have herolab to use a sheet. But, they start checking mail, playing Hearthstone, going on facebook, reading articles, and not paying attention to the game. I find it rude to the GM and bad as a gamer. If you talk try to talk to a PC whose player is immersed in their screen- you have to repeat yourself a few times to break through.
This said, I’m the millennial in this group, everyone else is over 30 or 40. I’m the one with a paper sheet and notebook to track stuff (though it is a very solid bet grad school hurts the tablet acquisition and herolab fees).
Hehe. Yeah, I always roll my eyes a little when people are absolute about how certain generations behave. While there can be trends, there are no absolutes. I know people of all generations that buck the trends of what is considered ‘typical’ of that generation.
I haven’t had a real problem with it. I use my iPhone for rolling dice, if I’m using a paper character sheet. I use either an iPad or my laptop for running games, including having the rules pdfs, rolling dice, having my adventure plots, etc… When I play, I often bring my iPad so I can take notes, etc.
It’s a reality of the modern world. If you don’t like it, you can yell at the players to get off your lawn, but you’ll lose that fight. If you have the sorts of DBs that float off to social media land in the middle of something, just play around them or give them something character-threatening to do RIGHT NOW!
Distractions at the gaming table have always been an issue. Back before modern, ubiquitous cell phones players would pull out a book, sketchpad, knitting, etc. when they disengaged from the game. Nothing new there.
Boredom being the chief cause of disengagement is also nothing new. And it’ll always be with us. Despite the GM’s best efforts to keep the action going, balance spotlight time, etc., there will always be some part of the game that doesn’t engage some player.
But I’d argue that cell phones do present a material change from the past, in three respects:
1) Cell phones entertainment is typically more engrossing than, say, doodling in the margins of your character sheet or building dice towers. Once players get engrossed in their cellphones mode it’s harder to get them back out.
2) Many of the apps and content people use on their cellphones involve audio, which even at low volumes can become a distraction to others at the table. There’s one particular player in my LT group I often have to remind, “You know, E., we can all hear the cat video you’re watching.”
3) Part of the modern cell phone phenomenon is that our tolerance for feeling a little bored has dropped to near zero. It used to be that if you were waiting in a line or waiting for your turn to come around, you’d expect to wait quietly for a while. Maybe you’d watch the environment around you, listen to what other people are doing and saying in hopes to learn something, etc. But now there’s a short fuse on feeling disengaged. After a few seconds of not feeling stimulated, out comes the cell phone. This represents a sea change because it’s greatly increasing the frequency of distracted, disengaged behavior.
Wow. Makes me miss my last group. I think we all had smart phones and no one abused them or got lost in them.
Partly because my age is making me sensitive to people on my lawn, and partly due to my theater background, I have a feeling I’d be pretty harsh about smart phone abuse at my table.
This article reminds me of my brother, who back in the day would always start reading the GM’s large comic book collection when he got bored, which was often.
Ah, the get off my lawn stage. 🙂
I’m definitely irritated with players who are not there to play and would rather be doing something else, but I do think there is a fine line between abuse and realizing the game got less interesting for a particular player. Not every GM can satisfy every player, but I think it makes us stronger GMs when we can understand where we may lose certain players and try and develop the skills to draw them back into the game.
I find it noticeably bad when someone is “going through something” and can’t focus on the game. I’ve told a group that life has come up and I can’t make a game before. If you show, you’re expected to participate. Just stay home.
If someone would rather be doing something else, I’d ask them to leave. I catch you on facebook- I ask how I can better engage you; I catch you again- I ask what’s up?; I catch you a third time- I’m sorry, but we need to talk about expectations so we both have a good time.
Since the people I game with are also my friends, I will give more slack if I know they’re going through something. Perhaps this comes from being well past the stage of needless drama you often see in high school or college, but I know if someone is going through something, it’s a major issue and they need the support of their friends. Sometimes, they may need the social engagement of gaming night even if they can’t give 100% to the game itself. We may game together, but the friendship comes first.
As you mention offhandedly in your article and as several comments expanded on, this is often a boredom thing. Per Blackjack #3, some players get bored very quickly these days.
The biggest issue is that when their boredom directs their attention to a screen, the problem becomes self-reinforcing. At first, they’re still hearing the table conversation… mostly… but after a minute or two, they’re not participating at all. Once a player’s all the way out, it takes a lot of effort to draw them back in (since they miss subtle cues and prompting), and even more effort is required to get them caught up on what they missed while they were at the table only physically.
Honestly, as a GM, I can deal with people soft-opting out. Where it gets dangerous is when other players get resentful about backing up, re-explaining and so on. Grumpy players policing each other about device usage can be a circle of hell.
I sometimes cross into this. I do it more playing Magic, where stuff is happening to you! It may be a casual game with multiple opponents, but ask for a break if you need to talk to someone- don’t ignore the game because you are texting.
RPGs I feel similarly, if there is something going on- it can be addressed. If the game isn’t meeting expectations- it can be addressed. If you would rather be online rather than here- please leave.
It never occurred to me to ban smart tablets or phones. It doesn’t seem viable. Maybe in a larp, I’d ask that the sound be muted, but that’s a different environment.
In home games, we’re aware that sometimes, working during the week tires folks out. I had a tacit understanding with a fellow gamer. We both gm’d. Sometimes, he’d doze off during my game. Sometimes, I’d doze off during his. No harm, no foul — it wasn’t pure boredom; it was exhaustion and cat-napping when we weren’t required to be active. I’ve tried ways to avoid dozing during convention games, with mixed success, and have concluded that those small energy drinks are NOT a viable option for me (they gave me the worst hangover I ever had).
Tablets and phones are often extremely useful in game. “Wait, would the word ‘robot’ be used in 1912? — Lemme look that up.” “Okay, here is what that part of Tibet looks like. Oh yes, it is gorgeous, isn’t it?”
The flip side is that if there’s something I’m hoping to keep secret that can be looked up, I can’t assume it won’t be, and I was stunned and pleased that one particular thing in a Trail of Cthulhu never got googled by my players. Turned out they thought they knew the answer and happened to be wrong. Sadly, when folks started to realize that they were wrong, someone googled it, learning it out of character and acting a bit on that knowledge. This was a) really annoying AND b) no big deal for the same reason — they’d already gotten a friend NPC to do the research and were going to get the answer. So, no big deal really, but sheesh, they could have waited two minutes of real time for me to say, “Okay, he gets back to you and says…”
There are folks who’ll play a game or answer email or whatever. So long as I can pull them back into the game easily, no big deal. If it takes longer, well, I will probably growl a bit, and probably shouldn’t, because, really, no big deal.
The one time I got seriously annoyed was when a player a) didn’t want to have me pull his PC into a scene because he was playing Angry Birds AND b) didn’t want to give another player that player’s cell phone back — which the player needed to look up his character sheet online — because the first player was using the second player’s phone to play Angry Birds because the first player’s cell phone was out of power.
The thing is, it wasn’t a bad game, and the first player, far as I could tell, enjoyed the game, and he certainly brought a lot to the table. It wasn’t personal. It was just really, really, really annoying. I did veto him holding on to the second player’s phone. That’s the closest I’ve come to vetoing technology.
And, at that, there are worse habits. One player, when he was a LOT younger, would pick absent-mindedly at the gaming table, and we would all veto that, on the grounds that it was doing actual damage to the table. Moving on to origami or electronics was a step up.
And even that pales before the most bizzare behavior I ever saw, at a gaming convention in the mid-1980s: One of the players took out a lighter and proceeded to try to set the tablecloth on fire. The rest of us stared in sheer disbelief, none of us finding our voice to tell him to knock it off. Fortunately, he did not manage to start a fire.
Okay, that bit with the Angry Birds player would have pushed me over the edge a bit. It’s one thing to be distracted, but another to refuse to come back to the game AND have it not even be their device.
I’m curious about the fire starter. Did he get thrown out of the game or con after that? Or was everyone too shocked to do anything about it? 🙂
We were too shocked. As far as I know, no one said anything to anyone with any authority. I hope if there’d been any actual fire, we would have snapped out of it!
Yeah, I might’ve flipped the table if someone had told me that.
I haven’t hard TOO much trouble with this, overall – one player who would occasionally space out and play Candy Crush Saga annoyed me a bit, but he seems to value his gaming time more now that he has a kid and less free time to play games in. Otherwise, there’s little to no phone usage in the games I’m involved in, and if someone does bring a laptop or tablet, it’s because they’re going to be using it for game stuff.
Haven’t seen it in the comments yet, but I have actually found smart phones (heck, even a little casual X-Box playing!) to be an excellent focusing aid for my “ADD” player.
In my experience, players with ADD will zone out for lack of input – not over-input. So assuming the player actually cares about the game, a secondary activity gives him something to do during those parts of the game that aren’t holding his attention, allowing him to keep one ear on the game when it would otherwise be searching for something to do.
Of course, jumping back in at the right time (without asking for information to be repeated) takes maturity on the part of the player, and relies on an understanding GM as well.