board games & golf

[brainwane]

I grew up understanding "golf" as "a game rich people play while doing low-key industry networking." Indeed I know at least one executive woman who learned how to play golf tolerably well in order to acquit herself well when invited to play by colleagues, clients, etc.

Here in NYC it feels like game nights/board game afternoons are the golf of the programming class. It's kind of assumed that you can play socially, there are gaming circles that also end up serving as industry networking. And you can invite a coworker to a game night and they'll understand that it's social, and not a date, and it's ok if they play really badly as long as they show good sportsmanship.

Is it like this in other cities too?

Edited to add: By the way, I am someone who loves a few board/card games and doesn't love most of them and is willing to play many of them if that's what everyone else in a group of visitors wants to do, and I believe I recognize many of their virtues and their downsides. What I'm specifically curious about is what other cities have this same kind of scene.

Comments

[brainwane]

Thanks for the data! That's my recollection from when I lived in Berkeley and SF, too. I wonder about the Bay Area and Santa Cruz as opposed to, say, Los Angeles....

I think cycling and rock climbing are the shared hobbies of a lot of coders, including people who enjoy the exercise-y dimensions and -- especially for cycling -- the tinkering dimension. (There's that bit in the Jargon File mentioning the preponderance of hiking boots, quoting some other writer joking that hackers wear them "in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the machine room.")