Divinity of conversational games
What follows is more or less insane. I've had these thoughts for a while now, and have decided to try and write them down, not to convince you that they hold water, but because I think it's important for us to consider why we play TTRPGs. Read on, you have been warned.
Conversation, to me, founds reality. One might think of mere verbal exchanges, but when an apple falls from a tree, is information not exchanged?
'I am here', says the apple to the ground, striking it. A declaration.
'As am I', says the Earth to the apple, repelling it, causing it to split, or bounce. An affirmation, and a declaration in turn.
The bird that calls to my morning window through the miles of frosted half-light is conversing with me. It calls, and I hear. I become aware of it, and all the space between us, and of the gladness in my heart at its tiny music. These things are important.
Every exchange affirms -- in fact, constructs -- a reality. When I smile to my fellow in the street, and he smiles (or perhaps just looks vaguely) back, I affirm him, and him me.
'I see you, grey fellow, who hurries against the wind, hat low, shoulders crunched from the cold. I see you seeing me. We are both real.'
I remember the coronavirus epidemic, where I went a month or more without conversing. I did not open my mouth, nor look out my window. These were low moments, where my sense of reality began to slip. I mean this in a literal sense. Time blurred. I could not distinguish dreams from true events. The value, or meaning, of my existence, evaded me. I believe that conversation is vital to us in every form because it anchors us to reality, and provides us a lever with which to shift it.
A conversation might not simply collectively affirm what we observe, but achieve something higher. It might actually birth something new.
When a man paces through the woods alone at night, and hears a noise not natural, coming from a place where nothing should rightfully be, and he runs to escape it, the source of that noise is given substance. It called out to him, and he replied. Through him, it calls to everyone he tells about it, and when those others risk the darkened woodland paths, they, too, engage a conversant made ever more real. It would take a new conversation to change this reality; perhaps the chatter of floodlights all night long to slice open the dark spaces between those ancient trees. A new statement, a new paradigm to supplant the old one.
The analogy of the woodland spirit alludes to how roleplaying carries a genuine spark of the divine. Words at the table carry a different weight than a day-to-day conversation.
Say we meet at a party and start to talk. Most of what we do is insubstantial, affirmations at best. I query you, and you answer me, and I affirm by saying 'Uh hum,' or 'oh, me too.'
It's possible you'd say something I disbelieve. Disregarding what I'd most likely do(feign agreement and either change or exit the conversation), we might go back and forth between our differing realities for a bit, and, if we're lucky, walk away with a synthesis of the two. Achieving harmonious exchanges like this is admirable and vital, but it is not divine.
There have perhaps been a half dozen conversations in my life that that flowed to me like a river, delivering powerful thoughts that seemed to have rushed forth from some place wholly exterior to us. I'd wager you can recall something similar. Deep and frenetic discussions between individuals, energised by some mysterious force greater by far than the whole of the conversants put together. Not just saying and agreeing or disagreeing, but creating. Conversations where we witnessed something wholly, entirely new enter the world.
I'd put it to you that, outside of those rare conversations, the greatest density of genuinely generative discussions can be found in roleplaying games.
We sit together at the table, and I say there is a room. Maybe it's a dark room, and it's full of 'debris', or so I say. You respond with a question. 'Is there a ladder among the debris?' I consider the question, and whether it would be reasonable for that to be true. I decide it is, since this is a construction site, and reply to that effect.
We create a reality together, something outside of ourselves, original, ephemeral, completely unique. It is beyond us, and yet it dies when we stop talking about it.
This is what I mean when I say 'the divine'. In the same way that the attraction and repulsion of heavenly bodies constructs our firmament, our words cross the gulf of the table to construct, in webs of awesome threads, a microcosmic universe all our own.
Moments of gaming contain the same elation as those rare conversations in our life that thrum with a sense of total originality, of pure unfetterable truth.
Maybe that feels too grand for you. Perhaps these little make-believe games that we play don't have to fit into a great cosmic paradigm. I respect that, and thanks for reading anyway. But regardless of whether you agree, please ask yourself: 'why play?' I think it's an important question. I'd love to hear your answer.