What we always fear and loathe
Becomes of us...
Repay the visit of our loss,
Reset the marks again.
The turning point,
The turning point...
Seems to be holding on.
-Dark Tranquillity\'s \"The Same\"
Before I reach into the heart of tis post, let me define imagination: any mental process that alters concepts more than it gathers them from memory. That is to say, if I imagine a building, cut it in half and put the lower half on top of the upper one, that\'s not exactly a process of imagination, nor is coming up with a four-armed god. However, if I were to take simple elements like protons and electrons and build them into a living creature, it\'s called imagination, because I\'d be relying on my own thoughts a lot more than on my memory. Repeating myths is not imagination, nor is replacing names and shapes while preserving their essence. Keep this in mind as you read... Without understanding this, most of what I say may seem absurd.
Over two decades, the underworld of plagiatism has grown from a mere cottage industry into a great dungeon of intellect. Snickering little goblins shifted through the dark recesses of what we call the internet, where all manners of ideas plundered from the surface world were buried and composted. Lord of the Rings, somewhat of a plagiatism of old legends, which perhaps owed its success as much to its as to its originality, was shredded -and the fragments stolen- so that an uninspired d00d might try to replay frodo\'s adventures using a die and a spreadsheet. Countless fresh dreams were interred among the scraps of honor, war and gambling. When Chainmail and some later games lost their strategic value, heroes had to come to the rescue. So they came: the brutish warrior was ushered in, along with the white wizard and the sneaky thief. They were dreams, lurking on the edge of consciousness, that many wanted to fulfill. By introducing some heroic stereotypes, the hope was to give these games a semblace of legitimacy, or perhaps just to bring the player into a familiar environment. It\'s much harder to go around hacking and slashing if you have to figure out what character you\'re playing first. Heroes came to the rescue, not of some princess in distress, but of a dead, festering kingdom in dire need of a figurehead. The pages of the Hobbit, torn, spit on and attached to a meaningless list of game features, sought to give some merit to otherwise worthless tales.
Count the number of \"fantasy RPGs\" that \"borrow\" from middle earth, without ever giving back... You\'ll find only a handful. Now, count the number that \"borrow\" from these games, and the number of games that burrow from the games that burrow from these games, and, well... It\'s a wonder that the fantasy label hasn\'t peeled off yet. Designers steal rules from the games they like, whether they know it or not; they steal settings, styles, and even quirks, either to feel their game belongs to the \"fantasy genre\", or because these things would be useful for some purpose. In a few lonely cases, they do it to provide a link between their worlds and the established norm - darksun, one of the few fantastic settings, did this. Most games simply do it because \"that\'s how things are done\". It\'s the case of Birthright, Ravenloft and Planescape, Warhammer, Ars Magica and Harn. Whatever little quirks they bring, they still do things the way they\'re done.
This should hardly surprise anyone... Imitation is almost literally the backbone of the average mind, and for the same reason people wear fashionable clothes, they also put on the ideas of their culture. For a \"fantasy\" culture, this is all but disasterous. Why is it, after all, that \"fantasy\" is now distinct from \"science fiction\"? When looked at from a clear perspective, science fiction all too often proves more fantastic than \"fantasy\" itself! It\'s easy to explain, I think... \"fantasy\" became associated with big heroes hacking away, just like \"RPG\" became associated with stat-bumping. And this is because people can more easily understand the concept of swords&sorcery than that of genuine fantasy.
I remember someone in these forums once asked for \"fantasy symbols\" (which were round and continuous) as opposed to squarish, well-divided \"sci-fi\" symbols. A person wanted to imitate fantasy... And this, perhaps, is the most eloquent example of why fantasy cannot exist in this game, or indeed, in most of the gaming culture. If something fails to resemble the old classics, it\'s not fantasy.
Gamers have been talking about \"cool ideas\" since forums were invented - bring stables into the game, add a playable race of dragons! Hell, bring the whole world into the game, with every inch of dirt, if you can, and slap some of Middle Earth onto it while you\'re at it. Designers have been using the same game mechanics for years without thinking of a good alternative - who needs a good alternative when you\'ve got work to do and sales to think about? Magazine reviewers hate originality - it forces them to put more time into a game than they might like to, just so they would have something coherent to write. Trained into comparing games rather than outlaying their features, most of them would regard the game as a hurdle, or, at best, a writing challenge. So-called philosophers lounge in their chairs and debate whether Aristotle would beat Descartes in single combat, never bothering to think beyond their well-established concepts. And let\'s remember that everyone was, at some point in his life, a gamer, a pseudo-philosopher and a reviewer... Some were even designers, in fact. To understand why imagination has been so neglected, we must start by looking at ourselves.
Far too many times, people rigidly adhere to the most baseless social axioms instead of changing them. It\'s why the japanese and former communists converted to democracy without essentially changing a thing - nobody was going to act like a real democracy was in place, anyway. We see this happen in every sphere of life, from science (where progress is constantly stifled by the academia) to big business (where social ties are far more relevant than wisdom). Games go along the same lines, unfortunately. There was a thread about economy in the wish list forum, where I mentioned that, in a setting where people created their own objects out of a limited \"creation points\" pool, every problem brought about by \"normal\" economics would be solved. One person called this system artificial. In a way, it is... It\'s made up, hence crafted as an artifice of the mind. I suppose many things could be called artificial when they don\'t fit in with established norms - even if, for their own settings, they\'d work splendidly.
But why haven\'t we seen anything like this in an RPG? In fact, why haven\'t we seen the countless settings that would be far easier to design than \"medieval fantasy\"? Perhaps for the same reason we see hack&slashes being advertised as open-ended worlds... \"Play out your fantasies!\"; \"Be anything you want!\"; So long as you want nothing more than a \"fantasy\" game, all your wishes will come true. Role-playing worlds could be many times as inspired and rewarding as they are now, and it wouldn\'t even take some miracle of thought to invent them... Just start asking yourself how a game might be built around the \"RPG\" concept, and in trying to find the answer, you\'re bound to build something original.
Why, then, has fantasy been lost, if it was ever in our grasp? The answer, it seems, can be found as much in the designers as the players. Namely - and I say this without so much as a hint of malice - you have no imagination.
That\'s the problem, really. Sure, you might have some imagination, but not enough for fantasy. It might be enough to invent men with ibis heads or flowers that blossom at dawn, but little beyond that. I doubt it takes a whole lot to \"get\" imagination (I actually consider it a technical skill), but people, for the most part, don\'t want it. They don\'t need it, really. They want to imagine things that are meaningful to themselves, rather than far-fetched ideas that won\'t seem to help them out anywhere. You don\'t want to role-play an alien mind, because it gives you nothing in return... Nothing except a new experience. A creature that can\'t feel human emotions or pursue human goals won\'t ever be able to satisfy your own. People may cherish fantasy in its most simple forms, as it could always half-fulfill their needs, but when asked to exert themselves and make something truly original, most will refuse. Not many people want to make a Darksun when the Forgotten Realms are at arm\'s length. Sure, the world might be less rich and varied without Darksun, but who needs it when there\'s adventure to be had? Forget originality! Just grab some loot, role-play your character or something.
People have long been asking for RP to be distinguished from the mindless hackfests of Ashedon\'s Call. I ask that we consider what fantasy means, and that we finally distinguish it from \"medieval fantasy\". We should stop looking at the classics as if they *had* to be ripped off. We should look at the list of RPGs available and read their little backstories until our eyes become so weak, and our minds so disgusted, that we\'ll swear not to look upon such hackneyed rags again. We have to understand that in the role-playing world, for the most part, there is no fantasy.
And not because \"nothing is new\", or some other baloney. To even say something like that is to ignore the obvious - five centuries ago, while people said \"nothing is new\" and pointed to their bibles, science fiction would have been new... Unfortunately, that these same people forbade it from appearing, busy as they were in rooting out technology. There is no fantasy, but because nobody supports it. People are far too content with their petty plagiatism to cherish anything original.
People want to play, not learn or invent. They (you, perhaps) want to escape life, to save themselves from problems they can\'t bear to relieve and to imagine that, somehow, their status in some little eden means anything beyond it. Most simply want to satisfy their social instincts and become the biggest dogs in a small kennel. Some would simply look for fun, not even bothering to justify this to themselves. Some, meanwhile, would rather play out interesting situations or experience new aspects of the human soul... There\'s still no fantasy in that. No, role-playing is not synonimous with fantasy. You can find tons of interesting situations in a perfectly unoriginal setting - the real world. Originality can certainly be used, but it\'s not needed. Indeed, it can sometimes hinder the constructive aspects of role-playing: if you play out an insurrection in a medieval country that has just fallen to the armies of an empire, you\'re still likely to hate the arabs struggling in Iraq. A simple, small world can be role-played in for years without losing any of its charm, and while role-players may proudly acknowledge this, it still hinders the imagination to an extent. It\'s almost tragic, how a wonderful aspect of a game can crush the splendor of another.
Nobody notices how badly fantasy is needed until it becomes part of the status quo. Suppose, for instance, that sci-fi and \"fantasy\" still haven\'t been invented today, and that modern MMORPGs offer a single race - the humans. Boring? Probably, but no one would notice it. After all, what could they play beside the warrior, the wizard and the thief that most of their games offered? The bard, perhaps? By being stuck in the dimensions of their world, however few, players inevitably failed to understand that there was more to fantasy than they knew - just as powergamers fail to understand the subtleties of role-playing.
Mindless hordes of followers bow to one another, trapped in a perverse game of short-sightedness and social obedience. In the midst of this, originality is lost. I bring you all a simple question: what are you going to do about it?
