Well, if that's a generous interpretation, your's is stingy.
Cute.
Jhaelen said:
Your opinion on Campbell aside (which I disagree with), do you have anything to offer regarding the OPs question:
Naturally. I wouldn't have much of a point if Campbell didn't have a bunch of adherents. Particularly among geek hobbies.
Although, ironically, it was the constant Campbell name-dropping, particularly by gamers, that really cemented my opinion, formed in college when I first became acquainted with Campbell's work. If it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't have given Campbell enough thought to really form much of an opinion about him. But it was obvious that most gamers allude to Campbell for the same reason Lucas did: to give their work the illusion of
gravitas. Because gaming is SERIOUS BUSINESS.
Jhaelen said:
What else would you say lies at the core of roleplaying? What is its essence in your opinion?
There aren't any famous quotes that I know of that really fit gaming all that well. That said, if someone were to put a gun to my head and tell me to make some kind of correlation, I'd go with these three.
From Caesar: "Alea iacta est" and "Veni, vidi vici."
Less flippantly, from Heinlein: “What did I want?
I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist, and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur – I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.
“I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, 'The game’s afoot!' I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and Lost Dauphin. I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake.
“I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and to eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be the way they had promised me it was going to be, instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is. I had had one chance – for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be – and I had known it and I had let it slip away. Maybe one chance is all you ever get.”
To me, gaming (as well as the reading and writing of all kinds of speculative fiction) is about the longing for something always beyond. A homesickness, if you will, for adventure, fed in virtual since real adventure, as Bilbo says, can be a nasty, disturbing, uncomfortable thing that makes you late for dinner.
