04 febrúar 2010

Úr grein um D&D í The Believer, sept. 2006

Hallur benti mér á þessa grein, hún er góð lesning. Þessi efnisgrein kveikti allavega ljós hjá mér:
Here I am tempted to advance a wild argument. It goes like this: in a society that conditions people to compete, and rewards those who compete successfully, Dungeons & Dragons is countercultural; its project, when you think about it in these terms, is almost utopian.[22] Show people how to have a good time, a mind-blowing, life-changing, all-night-long good time,[23] by cooperating with each other! And perhaps D&D is socially unacceptable because it encourages its players to drop out of the world of competition, in which the popular people win, and to tune in to another world, where things work differently, and everyone wins (or dies) together. You will object that a group of teenage boys slaughtering orcs and raping women doesn’t sound like utopia. Granted. But among teenage boys whose opportunities for social interaction were otherwise not great, D&D was like a door opening. Forget for a moment that behind the door there were mostly monsters and darkness. For us, for the people who played, what waited behind that door was a world, and the world belonged to us. We could live in it as we really were; we could argue about its rules; we could learn how, by working together, to get the better of it. For some of us it was a lesson: the real world could, on occasion, and by similar means, be bested. For others of us, who never really left the game: at least we had a world.

Ég held að málið sé ekki það, að samfélagið byggist upp á samkeppni eingöngu, og að leikurinn sé mótvægi gegn því. Samfélagið byggir svo mun meira á samvinnu heldur en leikirnir okkar gefa til kynna, og það er spennandi að geta kúplað sig útúr stóra heiminum og inní einhvern einka-heim, einsog gaurinn talar um, án þess að allt þurfi að miða að absolút endapunkti, þarsem einhver ,,sigrar".

-b.