A man can be himself only so long as he is alone.
Arthur Schopenhauer
I was reading an article in the latest Hugur (the Icelandic Journal of Philosophy) on Shopenhauer (an old favorite) and I started a weird train of thought.... 'If Tolkien is Hegel then Schopenhauer is Lovecraft' - actually I'm pretty sure the latter two had a number of things in common and the German's 'Will' and the American's 'Old Ones' are related for sure.
Anyway, that's not what this blog is about.
Recently I became aware of the fact that the MoMA had decided to include video games in its collection for 20th. century art (Article on that here) . About time, and pretty obvious to me, not so to the high priests of canonical art, wherein painting, sculpting and writing (art) novels=art - creating games, writing fantasy or sf=not art.... etc. etc.
Now I started teaching my RPG class a few weeks back, and we started with Dungeons and Dragons, and now we are playing World of Darkness. It seems clear to me that the original creation of D&D is a very significant cultural event; setting of a wave of creativity that is still going very strong - from many of the concepts of gamification, to Nordic art Larp to the online universes of World of Warcraft and EVE (interestiongly included in MoMA's selection of video games) . And of course more obviously in the wide variety of the table top role playing games played around the globe today.
The endless array of source books, character sheets, novels and the unwritten adventures played out by groups through the decades form a cultural sphere that has at least many of the characteristics that more traditional art has - and shares with contemporary art a certain democratic quality - where the 'artist' is much less important as an individual than the participants and lines of all sorts are blurred. As I browsed a little I find that I'm not the first one to think about this, however, I'm confident A LOT more could be said on gaming and art - and if Pacman belongs in MoMA - D&D most certainly does!
The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience.
Gary Gygax
