I think some Role Play communities provide a framework that allow people to get what they need from it. Ideally, they should. That is the spirit of role playing and role playing games. Those that don’t allow that quickly die out.
Role playing is an example of intention coupled with desire. The assumed purpose of any action is more freely and individually arrived at. All role playing actions are ideally undertaken because of personal desire. Could the role play last or even work at all if they weren’t?
I find I often don’t wish to actively role-play, but I like to explore strange environments and Role Play sims create those types of environments.
So here is the big and potentially mind bending question. Could “real life” work under those role play parameters? If not, why not? What are laboratories or research and development facilities other than role play environments?
True. Googles main facility shows this truth quite obviously, as does the Pixar studio. Could they be as successful as they are without this trait?
Often Role Play sims mirror real life too much with all the power struggles. Indeed, and those who try to assert real life ignorance impoverish their real life as well. Strip not just their Role Play, but all of their experience of anything real it might have had to offer.
That’s the power of Pixar. They want their employees to experiment, and fail. Experimentation is 90% failure. Indeed, it had to fail or it never would have started. Failure being a point of view. They can’t intentionally cue in to what would allow them to succeed, because the success only happens when other people begin to respond to it, recognize and enrich their role playing premise.
Every project they take on has an element that is “impossible.”
Honestly, every big success got that way not because of what they physically did, because of their concrete results, but because of their role played, their role playing premise. People buy into the concept of Apple products even if the actual product doesn’t deliver. People buy into the concept of social networking even if an individual service actually offers only bare bones value like Twitter. Twitter is huge, and it’s defining trait is it allows you to do very little. It didn’t offer anything new. If anything, it took it away.
It feeds people’s narcissism. It provided convenience. Actually, only peoples imagined perception of it fed their narcissism. The service itself holds no such feature. Most of what we buy, most of what we think we want, is for imagined reasons. They are even studying this scientifically. This is why they want to crunch things like purchasing behaviours, and social networking data. Your efforts to better your life, your motivations, are almost entirely based on self image rather than on the actual value of anything.
But you did not create your self image, nor do you maintain it. Your self image is something you derived from socialization, from that system they call “real life.” Whether it has any basis in reality or not, you believe you are what people expect you to be. You believe conditions are the way people tell you they are, and your innate capacity for empathy and fear backs that up. They do really believe what they tell you about what’s happening, even if they don’t genuinely understand the events any more than you do,
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~