RPGs are part of the long tradition of collective storytelling. At their best, they are part of literature, however one defines the form.
"Literature is the art of teaching us how to be." (Dr Jonathan Barz)
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? ... We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
Franz Kafka
("I want an axe to break the ice..." ~D. Bowie)
"The truth of the matter was stories was everything and everything was stories. Everybody told stories. It was a way of saying who they were in the world. It was their understanding of themselves. It was letting themselves know how they believed the world worked: the right way and the way that was not so right."
Harry Crews
"For it is the doom of men that they forget."
fictional Merlin,
Excalibur
Fiction, especially participatory fiction, allows us to engage with dangerous, hazardous, and completely unsafe situations with the safety of knowing it is just fiction. And such unsafe situations encountered in such a safe and fictional venues, can teach us how to overcome similar situations when they occur in so-called real life.
Without literature and fiction to teach us things beyond our own time and place and comfort and culture, we can easy end up with only libraries containing nonfiction sections like the Sarajevo National Library in August 1992.