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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 3990311" data-attributes="member: 54707">Based on the very nature of the game (and how it is employed of course) D&D and other Role Playing Games have an innate connection to the real world which no artificially created virtual reality environment (given current computing and technological limitations) could possibly match.For instance in role playing games, as you hinted at earlier, all interactivity is both bio-mechanical and psychologically adaptive because all involved parties, including the referee (DM) are overlapping participants.No matter how complex the virtual environment that is artificial in nature it must forever remain scripted, until such time (if ever) as the mechanism of silvery and the milieu environment becomes intentionally adaptive and artificially and independently intelligent, and therefore potentially as flexible as human beings in that respect.Therefore if you have, for example six independent operatives (players) in any given gaming situation, they are not only reacting to each other, not only reacting (as well as co-directing, overtly or covertly) interactions with the referee, but also creatively and flexibly shaping and countershaping the overall background environment (as well as what that implies) and the strictures by which it operates. (Or restated more simply, the environmental background is as fluid and as adaptable as the participants decide to conclude it is, no VR environment has that potential in either reality or imaginatively.)But another important consideration is that in any given environment in which the objects (and subjects) of interaction are necessarily solidified (VR games), group interactivity becomes to some degree or another calcified around limiting psychological assumptions. But in any game in which independent imaginations are in operation (RPGs) and more or less free to some degree or another to interpret and re-interpret data flowing from any source, then each player is free to develop their own (perhaps significantly) independent qualifications and quantifications of gaming actions and events (and even characters).For example, when we see a castle in a virtual reality game, then many possibilities of what that castle describes, as well as implies, drop instantaneously away. A visual reputation instantly limits many assumptions about what the castle means, how it appears, it's exact structure, composition, etc. (Which also means that many background deductions regarding that castle can be instantly made by simple examination of the visual image and representation. A Roman Lime looks very different from a Venetian castle and so forth and so on.) When that castle remains a basic description in the mind of the parity trying to perceive the implications of what the castle may appear as or may be, or may not be, (even given more or less detailed qualifiers in language) then the castle retains many of it's basically immense variety of possibilities. (In other words seeing a thing solidifies it, imagining a thing by contrast widens possibilities and can, if the game technique is properly employed, deepen mystery.) And whereas each player may develop a basic or core or group set of interpretational parameters for any object or character encountered, each person also no doubt retains their own individual assumptions of what the object implies based upon the interplay of their own past experience, their own imaginative assumptions, their own real world experience, and their own particular psychological paradigm. Because of this it is possible to encounter in role playing games things that are both familiar in theme and relatable to past experience, and yet totally alien "in feel" and psychological impact.This means that role playing games can and often should be both more closely tied to reality, and yet still far more flexible as to what that reality implies, because the mechanism of interaction, both with in-game events, and with other players, is the imagination of the individual, and not a pre-scripted or preconceived virtual environment more or less wholly constructed by a third party from a limited set of possibilities.Therefore role play achieves two separate but inter-related effects which virtual reality can at best only mimic in scripted form, and it achieves these two effects simultaneously: it creates artificial and to a large degree independent and individualized worlds of the imagination, and it creates a psychological condition which forces each player to relate their own imaginative assumptions to their own previous and real world experience in order to function effectively in-game. Then it forces these varied interpretations of both reality and milieu, real and imagined, to interact with each other both through the general gaming environment and through the interactions of the various involved players.Artificially generated, pre-scripted, computer environments are therefore "hard" in this sense and their flexibility and rate of adaptation and fluidity is necessarily limited by their very form, whereas role playing is extremely fluid in comparison, but never as solid or easily graspable.</blockquote>

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