∞;5200468 said:
I posted this once and everyone ignored me ):
Nobody likes your threads.
I'm just kidding, Jezza. I like your threads.
The video itself left me cold overall and even made me physically cringe at points, such as at the "how dice saved civilization" story, courtesy of Herodotus. Which is a shame, because I liked some of the very basic ideas she was going off, I just found her to take them in some unconvincing directions. I do believe, similarly to the speaker I imagine, that fiction serves as more than just an escape from reality; that it is a way to interact with our reality on different terms and therefore gives us new tools to interact in this world. I also believe video/online games are truly unprecedented in how they allow the audience -really the participant- to interact with the reality of this fiction. These are things that need to be researched and discussed. I do not think, however, that from this we can make the straight transition to "We need to make the real world more like WoW so that people will play."
Simply enough, the draw of WoW as the speaker states it, which is what gives rise to many of the positive traits of gaming, is that it is built around the accessibility of "Epic Wins", that ultimate payoff of all the positive change the gamer has poured into the game. But this world isn't. That isn't to say "epic wins" or something like them aren't possible in this world, they occur--but there will be no epic win to world dependence on oil, even if we do avert total disaster. Nobody wants to play this game, because it's a downer, and saving yourself from yourself is no fun. We also like war games, but we seem to have finally decided it's time to withdraw troops from Iraq; apparently it's just not the same thing.
So no, I don't think tricking gamers into thinking Earth is the new Azeroth is a valid solution to our problems. Making them think the same way about Earth's problems as they do Azeroth's maybe is a first step, but there will still be a steep learning curve; I would suggest supplementing it with a much wider range of fiction, from Tolkien to Beckett and onwards. Maybe then we'd start to have a wide enough perspective of worlds as they could exist to deal with the world as it exists now.
