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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 4944978" data-attributes="member: 59082">To HussarI agree, at least in terms of the general sentiment that "quality" trumps "originality," if the latter is no more than surface-level novelty. In a similar way that I prefer well-made "vanilla fantasy" to overly anachronistic "weird fantasy," especially when it veers too far away from what I was calling archetypal resonance. I have both Tekumel and the Forgotten Realms on my game shelf, but when it comes down to it I'd rather game in the Realms than Tekumel. You're kind of extrapolating here, Hussar. I do not think that doing something from scratch guarantees that it will be creative, and certainly one can do a collage of Hollywood icons better than one can paint an imaginary world on blank canvas. We have two separate things here: The artist and the medium. I am not saying that the medium determines how good the artist is, but that different mediums carry different qualities, and are more or less conducive to different kinds of experiences.I've given plenty of examples. Playing D&D--as a general rule--is much more creative than playing MMOs because one is, quite literally, creating while playing D&D. Creating what? Images. Imaginations. Inner worlds. With MMOs one is experiencing a virtual world, a simulation. To put it another way, with a tabletop RPG the GM and players are creating the Forgotten Realms, or Tekumel or Talislanta or Middle-earth or whatever-your-world's-name-is. When someone is playing World of Warcraft they are not creating Azeroth--they are engaging a computer simulation of it. Jack7's reply was interesting with regards to this. Reading a book is not passive in that you are actively creating imagery; as he said, the experience of a book is a co-creation of the writer and reader, just as an RPG session is co-created by the GM and players. The cool thing is that while it is a shared experienced and world, each person's (inner) experience is completely different. This is counter to MMOs, where everyone is in the same virtual world.Just to be clear, I'm not equating books and TTRPGs, or movies and video games. I am making a correlation, ala Gygax: that video games, in relation to RPGs, are what TV and movies are to books. I stand by that as a very accurate analogy; do you not see this as valid?Really? I agree, it is too simplistic--but so is your last sentence here. What do we mean by "making people dumb"? What kind of intelligence? And where are these studies? Who was conducting them? What are their pre-suppositions on what intelligence is, on what human consciousness is? Yes, agreed. I think the yearning for adventure, heroism, and imagination is pretty much universal. But I don't think that video games will, ultimately, satisfy that yearning. The don't go deep enough. Video games are like junk food; they are tasty, satisfy the initial craving, but are largely lacking in nutrition, leaving the individual wanting more.</blockquote>

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