For the epic win - rambling through worlds, gaming and real
Real life is hard, confusing and oftentimes, not very much fun. People receive conflicting messages on what is good, what is worthwhile and what they should be doing every day. One day it is okay to ask a woman in the library for a date; the next day it is creepy. People should be thin unless they are fat but both states of being are unhealthy. It is awesome to make a lot of money, but the love of that money is the root of all evil. People should be kind to one another unless it is economically unfeasible to do so. Abortion is wrong, but the death penalty is okay. People shouldn’t kill, but they should eat copious amounts of meat. Global warming exists; “Look! I’ve got a snowball! Now tell me about global warming again.”
It doesn’t matter whether or not the people doing the speaking actually understand what they are saying. They put their opinions and beliefs out there until the airwaves are so filled with stupidity that the only real solution is to hide someplace where the rules are clear cut and easy to understand – even if the rules are somewhat more complex, they can still be looked up and discussed usually without too much of a brouhaha. Games provide this opportunity. Before the Internet provided socially awkward people who preferred to be inside a place to go, Dungeons and Dragons was a way to step out of the real world with its complications and its stupid people. It provided an escape to a place of fantasy where anything with enough effort and perseverance and a little luck, was possible. The group of intelligent nerds gathered for an evening of world exploring may not have been able to affect much outside of the dorm room where the game was being played, but inside, they were creating a whole new society. They were righting wrongs, finding treasure, gaining new skills, and they were being themselves or someone that they wanted to be seen as. This was a group of people that had come together to tell an epic story and have adventures that would live on in memory 20 years or more later. And in every adventure something totally improbable happened. Someone rolled a 20 on a 20-sided die and scored a critical hit severing the rope with an arrow, hamstringing a giant beast that would have otherwise killed the group, or accomplishing some other seemingly impossible task. Equally awesome, but on the other side of the die was the critical miss. Rolling a 1 on a 20-sided could result in the most epic of fails, especially if the person running the game was a master storyteller. Either way, these events provided lunchtime conversation fodder for the next week at least, and the games and their stories provided a way for a group of misfits to bond because it was something to bond over. D&D is not gone, but games like World of Warcraft are bringing people the same opportunity to affect change in a world where they are valued as more than a human resource. People do something every game that gives them the opportunity to improve their skills. They go up in level, gain more knowledge and become more powerful. They learn throughout their sojourn, and each individual is important to the world. That importance is sorely lacking in an age where the assembly line and corporate profits has taken over and people have become replaceable and unlikely to learn anything new during the course of an eight hour work day. And in these games where people are valued over everything else, the players can experience an epic story, with an epic group, that gets an epic win – a win that while improbable was completely attainable for the individual. Games foster a feeling of empowerment that people lack in the world because a person’s worth is no longer a person’s value but how much he or she takes home in a year. It is time for people to take back their ability to get the epic win in real life. It is time for society to change so that the epic win comes through doing something good for the world with the friends that people enjoy having around them. It is time to remember that epic wins come best through teamwork and through those who are willing to help others. |
|
|
Inspired by:
|