I'm sitting here, alone, with only my old kimono for company. Good thing the connection's pretty stable today, or I'd be a bit annoyed again; the dog's asleep, and I can't really relate to my grandfather and grandmother's conversations.
Another petty argument with mom last night--she threatened to rescind all my gaming priviledges, which of course I (or the gamer side of me) didn't want to happen. Like all other petty arguments with mothers, you kiss and make up after around 5 minutes (the worst was only a day). You can't blame mothers either, you know they love you but they just don't seem to understand the life of a gamer (or even a one-part gamer like I am).
They'll never understand that for a gamer, the online life is as important as the real life, and without one, there wouldn't be the other. It was never just a mirror, for mirrors just reflect, but they do not cause change on either the real or the reflected side.
Virtual worlds, I believe, is like the whole genre of fantasy in the arts: it's our dreams as kids, spilling over into the real world. It's the nearest thing that our dreams can come to a concrete form, our dreams of worlds where we could be justice and treachery, where we can become both ruler and pauper, with only one phrase uttered online/in-game and one click of the mouse.
If once we had authors and artists, now we have game developers. If once we saw ourselves in the shoes of a wizard slaying dragons or a elven warriors, now we are the wizards and the warriors.
Online is also the unification of our shared myths and legends--there's the concept in lit (I can't remember the exact term right now) that some myths are common in many cultures, such as the Great Flood and that of the Celestial Maiden. Pick any one game, and you'd see echoes of myths and legends mixing into one cohesive mix--if not in the storyline, in the design of the surroundings. Take Ragnarok Online for example--you have everything from Asian (Payon) to Western (Prontera) and even Middle Eastern (Morroc).
Sometimes we can't avoid the negative sides of our selves spilling over into these virtual worlds, too. We have people metamorphing into tyrants, their dreams of power overriding the dreams of others. We've had people who've dreamed of becoming strong irl becoming strong in-game, and exact revenge over those who they've think have oppressed them, including many innocents along the way, not realizing that it was them merely oppressing themselves with hate.
But since online is a spill-over of our offline lives, we can't avoid the reverse, too. We've heard of friendships and loves budding in the evergreen forests of any given online game and blossoming irl (or sometimes broken hearts as well, like in the case of the chixilogs). There's also the issue on RMT, where the rich irl are also the rich in-game. We've had people, wishing to be rulers, but being unable to do so because of society and the system irl, giving up their lives offline because they've found fulfillment in-game.
This is what always shows in the media--the sordid stories of people giving up their real lives just to play.
Yet we forget to ask, why do they do forsake their offline lives? Maybe because they've found a voice online; when offline they aren't heard. Maybe because they have the power in-game, and not irl.
And maybe, to bring them back, it's time to hear them and help each other build our dreamworlds irl too.
This post is written for the first week of the gmtristan.com Group Writing Project. Want to join? Clicky here.
1 comment:
It's a great post. I'm really behind on my reading, I was hoping to make comments on the writing of all the participants of GM T's writing contest but, well, things got in the way. I hope you don't mind but IMHO, this is the best if not one of the best posts on the topic. May the Midgard Sun always shine on you. :)
Post a Comment