There are many sorts of ironies. E.g., it is sometimes hard to make people understand that one can simultaneously be a pacifist, and love games — or fantasy, horror and science fiction, for that. I even intensely dislike all forms of competition, and like to lose, just to make the point. How can I then like games? Well, I do not like all sorts of games, nor do I play the games that I do in particularly competitive ways (some fellow role-players of course might want to abandon the concept of “game” altogether). Nick Yee says that he has not find proof for Richard Bartle‘s “Explorer” type to be validated in his RPG study. Well, we might be a small minority, but we do exist. I am waiting for the Middle-Earth Online just for the opportunity to explore the land, see the places, to get another way of imagining “being there”. That is fun. That is life.
Btw, what is reality? Do you know it? Just remembered one neuroscientist explaining his thesis how our basic brain state is dreaming: our brain is actively generating reality, constructing it. We are not just receiving information from outside, we are actively projecting our own conceptions and gestalts of its character “from inside”. And that is why fantasy is our fundamental condition.
(Another piece of irony: MEO is advertised as the “first Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game based on The Lord of the Rings”. Now that is a slight miscalculation, if I ever saw one.)
While writing this, I found the tunes at RadioDarvish.com. Now this site rocks.
frans goes blog 