Roleplaying for Psychology

I have received some messages in the past from people who were under the impression that I believed roleplaying could better teach people about the world than direct experience. I have received more messages of this sort recently and have decided to make something very clear.

Nothing surpasses direct experience. Yet there are many experiences which cannot be achieved in reality. There are challenges, questions, and decisions to be faced only in roleplaying. Therefore I believe that people learn not about the world, but a great deal about themselves via roleplaying. Most importantly, they learn that they are more complex, more unique creatures than they had ever (regardless of anything) believed. This improves the person and thus improves people.

I do believe this. Our minds have evolved to a point that we can understand even those things which are not possible, and there is extreme personal merit in those things.

Even as an atheist I take this sentiment to heart:

'We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed, only by myth-making, only by becoming a "sub-creator" and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic "progress" leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil.' -- J.R.R. Tolkien

Because it has everything to do with every one of my passions unless I am distracted by the word 'God'.

Chimaerician Contention

When musing the design of a world, I usually become stuck in an ideological struggle with myself between applicability and abstraction. The two are certainly not mutually exclusive, but interference does occur between them, and managing that is my greatest difficulty.

I enjoy abstraction because it can provide manifestation for thoughts. Abstract creations can embody an idea entirely inapplicable to reality yet nevertheless cognitively conceivable. Abstraction can also present applicable concepts in a way that encourages a certain perspective otherwise not easily attainable, if at all. In my mind, abstraction does not hinder applicability, but by opening new perspectives not necessarily pertaining to reality it can lead to unintended, unanticipated, and therein perhaps detrimental misinterpretation which may squander the intent of the work.

I am frustrated with this, tonight.

I have lately been designing a world I am currently calling Kimaera, from the Latin chimaera, which itself is from the Greek khimaira. I took a compromise. Anyway, Kimaera is, quite simply, my dreamworld. Not in that it is a world I would like to exist, but rather a world which has existed, for some reason, in my mind (while sleeping) for as long as I can remember. It is not particularly interesting in terms of storytelling possibility or visual intricacy; yet because it has been the realm in which all of my dreams have taken place seemingly since I was born, I figured that it may be worth exploring consciously.

A reality like this is naturally quite surreal, and I find myself asking why I am bothering to construct it. Like most of my creations, it is hardly the type of thing that one would sell. Stories and experiences are published, not the settings in which they take place. Kimaera is a new effort and I have hardly put the kind of work into it which I have poured into Aeramar, but this concern applies to both Kimaera and Aeramar, anyway.

Air Taxes

The few truly open virtual worlds have shown that there is no reason it cannot be done in a thematic fashion as pioneered by the MMO industry. But they remain graphically primitive, mechanically unstable, and completely without theme by the very virtue of being open virtual worlds. They have the atmosphere of dreamscapes. Also because they obviously do not get the kind of funding that more... gamey projects receive.

This is why, for years now, I have been gaming only enough to learn about the game and then spew words into the Internet through the majority of my time, because I have seen how memes can develop this way and I know that one person with logical and passionate writing can equal five blubbering fools without true arguments to counter with. Developers know this enough to be pushing in that direction in areas they can during times that they can, but they also need to survive and their publishers are not going to take every chance all at once. Several including Brad McQuaid have made themselves clear as to where they would like this all to head, and grassroots projects are always rising that try to do too much at once.

This happens. It is a bad time for people who want the end result now. We clearly go mad.

We are still early in this era. It is much like watching a process of biological evolution. Pong being an amoeba and MUSHs being trilobytes.

I do find some small need for immersive, though primitive worlds that are not necessarily meaningful, because immersive experiences that are meaningful and not necessarily entertainment are still developing, still mutating from their origins, still bubbling beneath the surface, and the transition is agonising much of the time. Hence, again, why I watch and comment more than I take part.

I have also frequently considered abandoning all of this indefinitely, despite my second-to-one passion for it, to focus on my other cause.

I knew as long ago as the age of thirteen that so-called 'entertainment' does not increase my enjoyment of life. It increases my urge to churn the mess until it evolves. To provide my own direction. To get my hands into the 'gaming' industry and breed it my way, or to continue my acting career, or to take performing magic back up again, or to return to the nature of the little stand-up routines I was doing at Jester's here in Westfield. These are thing I know I could do, and they would improve my enjoyment of life, but not only would they not pay bills and buy food (in fact, most likely kill me), they would also not satisfy my insane compulsion to do what I think is noble in the long-term rather than short-term pleasantries. Writing books or opening a living foods establishment would do that, but also, most ironically, kill me with money.

Because you are charged to breathe air in this world.

Yet these are not new thoughts of mine, obviously. That does not mean that I will cease casting my spells.