“Give me a few minutes, I’ll
come up with something.”
Two friends have entered a
MMORPG (or whatever they’re called) in search of adventure. There are crowds
milling around the starting point, trying to form companies. In their efforts they
find characters (people) who are jaded with the limited ‘quests’ available;
they have become dissatisfied but cannot quit. It’s what they have to do with
their time.
There are others who shun
the friends because they are low-level characters; they are proud of their own
imaginary power, imaginary riches, imaginary accomplishments. Others are only
there for imaginary hook-ups with people whose real faces they will never see
and who will never be seen themselves. Everyone looks more or less alike,
despite their player character individuation choice.
The friends decide they will
go out into the wild and try to level up a bit. Even the ‘wild’ between quest
locations is much the same after a while, despite random location generators.
After slaying about a hundred identical wild boars the journey begins to pall.
There is no thrill, only grind.
One friend observes that’s
part of why people play the fantasy game: to have an adventure that is more or
less in their control, but in which there is no real … well, adventure. No real
danger, nothing to lose but time. Some sort of score-keeping payback for their
efforts, but no tangible reward, but also no real spiritual reward, either.
They enjoy the control and the ‘glory’ they do not have in their real lives.
That is not what the other
friend really wants; it is not the kind of thing he finds in Tolkien or LeGuin
or Gaiman, despite some surface similarities. He wants wonder and wisdom and
seeing the world out of different eyes. It’s not simply killing orcs or getting
treasure; that kind of fantasy is just a type of sauce some less demanding
people prefer on their adventure. Ladle out a different sauce and it’s just
Grand Theft Auto with wizards. The kind of Fantasy he wants can’t be found in a
computer-generated RPG. You’ll never find ‘a new road or a secret gate.’
[It might be added that the
game can only give the same kind of payback to the millions who play it, while,
though millions have read, say, LOTR since it was published, it can be argued
that no two readers have read the same book in the same way. This can be proved
by the multitudinous artwork produced and the strong reaction various readers
have had to it. It was only after the Jackson films that it became tied down in
many minds to a single common representation.]
The other counters that that
is not what the game is designed for, and even goes so far as to say that is
not what most ‘fantasy’ novels based on such games produce. They are the
equivalent of eating a bag of peanuts while your stomach is yearning for a
meal; perhaps not satisfying, but better than nothing. The motions give one the
illusion of nutrition.
Exactly. But this is the
equivalent of choosing peanuts when there are real meals available all around
you. Peanuts are fine in idle moments, but you can’t live on them. This kind of
‘fantasy’ is not for him. The other agrees, and suggests they not voyage to a
save-point but try a visit to the bookstore instead. The next moment the ‘wild’
is empty.
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