World making and art making

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 

Leaving Mundania

I was inspired to sit down and write by one of my  cultural heroes, Cory Doctorow, by his comments in this interview, on how blogging is a powerful mnemonic device. This interview also reminded me of what I, of course, know to be true (not least now after reading Outliers) that practice makes perfect, and thus, by writing this blog I'm not wasting time from other stuff I could do in connection with either my job as a teacher or my role as a graduate student.

Anyway, I finished Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark just recently. This is a non-fiction book about Larping. It's a very interesting read.

The subject is fascinating. We get to know all kinds of different approaches to larping, from the traditional foam weapons and calling out damage to the weird and fascinating world of Nordic Art Larp. Stark has no previous knowledge or experience with table top RPGs so this also makes for an interesting and fresh approach.

The writing is personal and captivating, even moving in places. I especially found her confession concerning how she resents the fact that her husband is not her first reader to be moving, and it made me wonder how that will have gone down.... (208).

I highly recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in gaming, and the weird and wonderful variety of human endeavours.... It serves well to quench prejudice people have against this hobby, even though I see a number of problems in getting started - mostly problems concerning time and effort. However, her discussion of the so-called 'free-form' format, a mix between larp and table-top, is something I'm definitely going to look into...