The Revolution Will Not Be Textualized

[benlehman]

I want to write an essay. I want to write an essay about role-playing games. It would be about how, in a media saturated age where everything tells us that entertainment should be expensive and done by pretty people, that tells us that our creativity is for shit, that we are by analogy for shit, and that even community needs a dollar sign, people are making their own fun. This isn't an idle passtime. What I mean by entertainment could also be called community or ritual or even, maybe, mysticism. It's something we need, as animals. It's making our own fun like making our own salt.

I want it to be anarchist, punk rock, beat poetry, early christian, hippy, hip-hop and everything else that has ever been awesome. I want it to be about radical fun, radical love, and radical people.

I want one of the lines to be "It's about creating community as much as it is about destroying society."

That's what I want today.

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

To clarify: I think gaming already is those things. Or could be those things. What I really want is the article to express those things.

yrs--
--Ben

[thickenergy.livejournal.com]

Looks like you already have the introduction.

[evilmagnus]

Meh, boring.

What's on MTV?

...oooooh! Shiney!

( not helping, I know. :-) )

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

:-P

When is your lazy ass getting to California, anyway?

[evilmagnus]

I fly out on the 28th April, picking up a lease, a rental, furniture and broadband on the 29th. Starting at Stanford on the 2nd May.

[thickenergy.livejournal.com]

Sure, fine, don't ask when I am getting to California. I know your TRUE feelings now.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

I would hope you would be happy not to have me fixated on your ass.

yrs--
--Ben

[locke61dv.livejournal.com]

What do I need to get you to write this?

Also - remember that liveblogging? I think I was over-romanticized on the concept, and still am, but imagine if that's somebody's role in the game: one person (or maybe a rotating role) will liveblog the game going on, and part of the game's contract is people aren't just impressing each other, but trying to collaboratively put on a show that can be stitched together (by a slightly skilled blogger) into something that people would read. So, the roleplayers are all self-producers/self-consumers of the fun, but are also producing it for others - so they are real producers to, not just a self-enclosed loop or something.

Am I on to something?

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Problem -- gaming happens too fast for even a good touch-typist to get it all down.

yrs--
--Ben

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

What do I need to write this?

Well, an advance payment from some awesome indie mag would do it.

That, or clearing my plate of my present projects (Polaris, Bliss Stage, Universalis v2, RPG Sales Data Project, find summer job).

yrs--
--Ben

Viva, viva, La revolution.

[aumshantih.livejournal.com]

I am so down with this message, sez Swami Immaculate Cattle Prod of Loving Non-Dualism.

[foreign-devilry.livejournal.com]

You should write it, so I can put it in Push.

[foreign-devilry.livejournal.com]

P.S. Can't do advance payment, but you would get paid that way.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

:-( Push is exactly the wrong sort of forum for this theoretical article which does not exist. Anyone who will buy Push already understands what I'm going to say.

The goal is to reframe role-playing like hip-hop or punk rock or beat poetry. People who are already role-players already get it, and those that don't I don't care about.

yrs--
--Ben

[totallypinkrock.livejournal.com]

whee that's exactly what it can be if we let it :)

-- bob the fighter (a Polaris fan)