Dig where you stand.

Over on G+ a Swedish larper by the name of Elin Dalstal of recently mentioned something in one of her posts that I really liked.

This is where the digging comes in. ”Dig where you stand!” is Swedish proverb. It means sort of ;”Start with your own community's knowledge and skills”, ”“Start with what you have skills for, with what you know!”, ”Take charge of the problem yourself” or ”Work with the local community”.

This struck me as something the RPG community could learn from.  Especially when it comes to local real life communities and not just the ones that have developed online.  Not to mention showing support for those who are already doing this.  Hell it's something that I need to do more often as well.

With the advent of the internet and it crawling into everything we do I've noticed the collapse of old fashioned local gaming communities.  While in no way am I saying doing things online is bad, I don't see going that direction as your only outlet a healthy way of doing things. The close knit feelings that used to develop among gamers seems to be fading out more and more.  Something that I feel needs to be fixed.

Even I'll admit to slowly pulling away from the locals and being more at the keyboard in the last few years.  Now I've managed to keep some ties nice and strong as well as helping promote the local game scene as best I can.  Pushing local game publishers online, attempting to bring a local game con back to the area, things like that.  But its not nearly as much as I used to do, and I miss that.

There needs to be an effort, a movement, to get gamers back out in the local communities.  After all that is where many of us started and its where we can still bring several more back into the fold.  Forming local communities, keeping in touch with each other and building a strong local base.  Revive small local cons again, use the online tools at our fingertips to create contact points for locals, promote each other and what they are good at.  Rebuild a strong base community from the ground up once again.

So what can you do to 'Dig where you stand' in your local community?