[Prestidigitweeze]

I consider MR to be a place where people converse textually, which means that our interplay is often a hybrid between writing and speaking. But (possibly because of the number of older people, e-book creators and aspiring writers here) conversation sometimes leads to depths of recollection that can be profound if only for the post writer who is actively conjuring their past. I often think of a line by Alice Bradley Sheldon (a/k/a James Tiptree) that once explained to my child self the slow-building conversation of older people: "Every word and cue wakes a thousand references."

For many users, forum-speak is a (circular) necklace beaded with cliches. This is understandable, since the aim is for us to participate modestly in a hobby, not to dazzle one another constantly with our lightning rods of inspiration (innuendo intended -- showing off is a tedious rooster tough-off), which means that the mind and imagination tend not to be exercised on the level provided by a decently written novel. Being here is worthwhile, but it can't replace the imaginative exercise of being totally submerged in a world of narrative, thought and sensory-image-triggering language.

It's simply a question of the level of exercise. At their best, novels can be an intense and sustained imaginative workout, whereas even inspired conversation is like a short walk with multiple interruptions.

As for gaming and the validity of discussing it here:

I became interested in it as a direct result of reading Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch as a kid, then talking to hypertext novelist Michael Joyce at a symposium at Brown University in the early nineties. The first web page I ever created (in 1995, I think) was a hypertext story called "Matterland." Creating it made me especially sensitive to other forms of hypertext narrative, which meant that, just after writing the story, a visit to a friend with a Playstation gave me the sense we were on the verge of refining an immersive new art form. I don't see games and literature as strata of high and low culture so much as art forms with differences and similarities. As specific sensory stimuli become easier to recreate artificially, we head toward a first-person art form in which (in the most obvious structural applications) we are the protagonist and our interactions with the environment determine the narrative. Somewhere between the rail-shooter and the sandbox lies a completely different sense of evolving story than we've had before. And while games, like films, are easiest to create with a massive budget, it's going to become increasingly easy (as with film) to do sophisticated work at home. Canada has the right idea in the sense that their universities and government support academic, composer and artist programmers who wish to create experimental and metanarrative games. Many people think that multiple-choice novel-like games are played out, but I suspect that that's largely because the blockbuster franchise has done to popular gaming what Spielberg and Lucas did to film: Made audiences temporarily intolerant of eccentricities and lower budgets. Truthfully, the evolution of stochastic multimedia narratives is ongoing. Even a Grand Theft Auto game recreates the geographical space of an entire city in which to have apparently indeterminate experiences. In the near future, even the apartment dweller who claims to hate games will take refuge in multimedia vacations, in which a place like Nice or Wellington is lavishly recreated for the bedroom tourist. Now imagine that same re/creation of a world in terms of richly imagined post-dystopian novel. Games like Fallout 3 (and Portal, obviously) have touched on that already -- as has Rule of Rose.