In the Game...

I got invited into a different world the other day, and decided to accept the invitation for a variety of reasons.  My buddy Trevor was building what he called a campaign, a scenario set in one of the structured realities of the gamer worlds.  He said it was based on Mage: the Ascension.  That name means little to me, I have no point of comparison.  But it might mean something to you. 

For several years now the question "what has happened to imagination?" has been an ongoing subject in my quest to understand the world seen.  Imagination is a prime tool of human survival, the skills of survival among the most rapid of evolutions, I'm interested in seeing how imagination is faring among the youth in these days of compression and homogenization. 

Where the gamers play in a world created of imagination it is a very structured imagination, there are some rather large books dedicated to the "lore" of the world.  Of course these volumes set the parameters of the play, the rules governing the various encounters and situations, rules applied according to the fall of ten sided dice, the number of dice rolled set by the number of factors bearing on the point to be decided.  From a technical standpoint the game is actually rather complex.  But little to wonder at, so is the real world.  Equally, the number of dice rolled is influenced by the "character" created in advance of play, a character defined to a nicety, a great many categories ranging from the physical attributes to the mental to the magical graded in steps ranging from "dork" to "demi-god" to paraphrase the manual. 

The manual was a point of interest to me.  When the section dealing with creating the character you'll play is stripped of the elements of fantasy fiction, the mythic and the legendary what is left is actually a decent job of translating the DSVM (the big ugly book of psychology) into layman's terms, presenting the concepts complete with a context to create easily seen contrast.  There is no way anyone could play very many campaigns without beginning to see their real world self, their deep self, in terms defined in terms of functionality.  Whether they know it or not the gamers are obviously people who are not adverse to introspection and self knowledge, two attributes very much proscribed by the true tyrants of the real world.

Each campaign is the creation of the game master, his scenario, his the final and absolute authority over the physical structure and events presented to the players within the world of the game.  He rolls the dice which represent for fate, chance, it is his to define and describe.  Of course this puts both his imagination and his mastery of a complex set of rules on full display for the other players.  It is easily seen that a successful GM is a power within his/her social circle, a leadership position won by merit rather than arbitrarily awarded by some external authority.

Children's play is the way children prepare to meet the world they'll be entering upon reaching adulthood.  The worlds created in these campaigns are obviously intense, competitive, violent up to and including supernatural forces, they are everything the social forces of the real world have been attempting to eliminate from the children's imaginations for many decades now.  The fact of the popularity of these games is proof positive of their failure.  Those who decided to usurp the children's play as a tool for social programming will come to regret their attempt in the end, these games engaged in by those deprived early in their childhood are far more intense and realistic than any cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians scenario played by those of my generation on a summer afternoon between fourth and fifth grade.  Far more intense.  Only history will tell how the scenario of the real world will play out: will the gamers be seduced into docile complacency, their energies spent in the make believe world of their games, or will they form the cutting edge of a well trained and well disciplined revolutionary army? An interesting question indeed. 

Oh, and the game?  As a gamer virgin I built my character to reprise the attributes of one of my fictional characters, the hero Wayne Tarkell in my novel Takiea.  The game began with my character regaining consciousness alone in the dark... wet... dank... a storm drain beneath a city become a battleground.  Two hours of play later finds us fifteen stories up in a hostile hospital engaged in rescuing one of the other players captured by the evil Federales.  It has been revealed that none of us are naturally born humans, we're tank raised mutants genetically modified to serve the Federales as totally expendable super soldiers.  The question left hanging is what gave us, myself and my fellow players, amnesia?  Why am I apparently full adult while the others appear as children even though the ID tattoos on the back of our necks indicate we are of the same age?  How did we win enough mental freedom to revolt against those who created us?  Big questions, but not important at the moment.  The session ended with us having just liberated our comrade: paralyzed, bound into a wheelchair and wearing a collar of some sort that appears to plug directly into his central nervous system.

When we resume the first objective, the obvious objective, is to get the fuck out of this hospital alive, win enough of a head start to make it back across many miles of hostile city to our side of things where the rebels are making their stand.  Make it back carrying our wounded with us.  My fellow players wondered, at the time, why I specified we leave the roly-poly little security guard running the surveillance cameras in the hospital alive rather than just kill him when we captured his station to provide the hacker among us access into their security systems.  I did have a plan in mind: he's not much of a much, easily intimidated, but on his security cameras he's watched myself and my buddy Azric neatly kill four of his fellows, he like everyone else wants to live through this... stick a pistol in his ribs and he'll walk us out, give that critical instant of confusion to engage and destroy any who get between us and freedom.  But, before we leave?  I want the hacker to attempt to locate and download to some portable form any and all information available on those damn collars... I want a backdoor into their damned walking prison cells, gain some ongoing value from our numbskull compadre getting himself caught... might prove most useful later on.  *grin*  All other things aside?  This is fun :-)