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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Banshee16" data-source="post: 5297308" data-attributes="member: 7883">I suspect part of it has to do with a certain level of wish fulfillment. I had read an article talking about the falling crime rate in Canada.  One of the things the article mentioned is that with an aging population, it means we have fewer young males between 15 and 25.  As such, crime rates drop, as that demographic is supposedly responsible for the majority of crime.The chief demographic of customers for RPGs is males, I believe.  That's not to say that females don't play RPGs.  They do....but I don't think in the same kinds of numbers.It's entirely possible that RPGs give vent to the kind of action, violence, and hero culture type fantasies that might entertain males.  Look at many D&D games, and when it comes down to it, many of the games involve adventurers behaving badly.  Sure, they're serving the side of good...but they do so as vigilantes in many cases, and in means which would be completely unacceptable in modern society.  What if RPGs deal with topics like violence and action and war etc. because that's what the chief demographic likes?  And the chief demographic likes it because it's an interesting way to do thing which we're just not permitted to in reality.  It could be a form of catharsis.  Most of the gamers I've known have been pretty harmless, and not interested in getting into trouble in real life.  Frankly, I know that gaming helped keep me out of trouble when I was younger.  Or, that I was the kind of person unlikely to get into trouble, and as such, gaming provided a safe outlet for my time.  Take your pick, I guess.All that having been said, I'm by no means claiming that violence in RPGs dictates violence in reality.  But I think sometimes, the fact that you *can* have a violent resolution to a problem, and kick the bully's (orc's) butt without anyone actually getting hurt, has a certain appeal.  In real life, I'm nonviolent.  The closest I've come to a fight was like 15 years ago, where several guys in a bar decided they wanted to use my girlfriend as their toy for the evening.  When I said something about it, they decided they wanted to flatten me into a pancake and take her.  I got her out of there, I put myself in the way, and got us to safety via a passing cab.  The alternative, when it was 3 to 1 odds, and each of them was larger than I, was a nasty fight that could have the real consequences of my ending up dead or severely injured in a hospital, and my girlfriend undergoing a pretty horrendous assault.  I also had an acquaintance who claimed to have been attacked by a guy with a knife.  My acquaintance was a black belt in Tae Kwan Do or Jiu Jitsu, and broke the man's arm in self-defense.  Yet from what I remember he ended up in trouble with the police over it.  In a fantasy RPG, you can show monsters the error of their ways in a manner in which nobody is hurt, and there's a certain amount of fun in that.The final thing I'd say is that every group of gamers differs.  I suspect that for some, the violence aspect is their main interest.  For others, they like the personal interaction.  I've had some players who were only really *into* the game when it involved killing things.  When the action scenes were over, they'd walk away from the table and go play WoW on their laptop.  And I've had other players who didn't mind sessions where there was no killing.  They liked dealing with mysteries, politics, environmental challenges (rescuing NPCs from burning buildings...) etc.Banshee</blockquote>

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