Isn’t that why we’re all here? To make connections? I mean
on the Internet. Not in real life, God, no. Meatspace is gross!
Only kidding. After all, what is tabletop gaming without the
sights, the sounds, and the smells?
Again, only kidding. Mostly.
But I do want to point out that it’s not secret that gaming
brings us together, over a shared activity, a shared vocabulary, a communal
liminal space, written by committee on the fly, and managed through random
arbitration. That’s gaming, in very clinical and not-sexy terms.
The magic of gaming is our ability to link up our neural
networks to make that communal space. My narrative and your inner eye, bolstered
by your fellow player’s comments, creates this amazing stage that you can see
and also interact within. It’s a dream space, where you pull back to see
yourself in the space, and then zoom back into your avatar’s head to speak
words, engage opponents, and interact with other players.
There is nothing else like it. Video games can simulate that
experience, but you are limited to what the development team decided a scorpion
orc would look like. You don’t get any input into that. You also are limited by
how you can interact with the monster and the world. If they don’t want you
climbing the walls to get out, then you don’t climb the walls until after the
big bad monster is dead. Talk about a railroad!
Our connections to the shared experience is a kind of
alchemy, and I just now realized that the church people from the mid-1980s were
right all along. It is a ritual, though not a satanic one. It’s this
intentional mental space you put yourself into that allows the dungeon master
to feed you input via visual and auditory stimulus, and you engage with that
artificial reality as if it had gravity, mass, and weight.