RPGaDay 2019: 30 Connection

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.

I’m freaking myself out, here. We are the architects of the Matrix, every time we gather over Cheetos and Mountain Dew. And like Neo, our character sheets allow us to bend, and sometimes break, the Matrix for our own means. But none of that happens without our implicit and explicit connection to one another.