I was watching Ben Shapiro's Sunday Special last week. He had Jordan Peterson on, and the discussion was both fascinating and enlightening.
For gamers especially, the call to adventure is recognizable. We continually seek adventure through our characters, if not in everyday life. The mythic struggle that's in all of us, yearning for expression! It seldom gets talked about, except in games, art, and religion... but it's a vitally important aspect of the human condition.
As I've talked about multiple times, the reason for roleplaying at all is immersion - to feel as though you are there, on some level, taking part in what's happening. To experience another world and everything that goes with it. Like the movie Total Recall, you get to vacation from yourself.
There's more than that, of course. After addressing the ridiculous comparison of Peterson to Red Skull, their discussion veers from psychology to politics to philosophy. Blogger hides the video if you're on a mobile device, so I'll include a link to the YouTube video right over here.
BTW, the title of this blog post is a direct quote from the video, around the 8:30 mark.
Please, feel free to post your thoughts below...
VS
p.s. If you haven't joined us on Facebook yet, there's a relatively new place to hang out and discuss what's going on in gaming culture - Conservative OSR & RPG Group. See you there!
"Fantasy is not so much a suspension of disbelief as it is an acceptance of our own unconsciousness. Fantasy is as old as man, beginning back in our animal history when someone had the first abstract thought. In our Western society, empirical data and rational thought have become the touchstones of experience. This is worse than cutting off half your body. The fantastic is easily half of the universe, whether you count galaxies and nucleotides or court a demon in a pentacle.”
ReplyDeleteGreg Stafford
"I believe that magic is art, and that art, whether that be music, writing, sculpture, or any other form, is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words or images, to achieve changes in consciousness… Indeed to cast a spell is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change peoples consciousness, and this is why I believe that an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world to a shaman."
Alan Moore
Keep on keepin on, cousin :3
Great quotes! That reminds me to watch that Disinformation conference from 20 years ago.
Delete20 years gahhhhh!!!!!bzowniws!!!
ReplyDeletelife is short!
fun is long :3
im sorry disinfo eventually disappeared...id have so much fun riffling through all the crazyfun conspiracy stuff
another one i really liked too was deoxy dot org...that was a psychedelic hyperlink diy living smorgasmboard
now i guess the world is like that? as Douglas Rushkoff the nerds won and the straights are the marginalized and fringe lol
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete