Monday, September 25, 2023

The Cosmic Purpose of Role-Playing Games

If your sessions are anything like mine, a lot of ludicrous stuff gets said by the participants. RPGs put people into imaginary situations via dialogue. That means people will say things in an RPG session that would never be said in any other context. Therefore, RPG play taken as a whole is a sort of Unique Utterance Machine. We are collectively reciting the Nine Billion Names of God, the spoken version of the Tower of Hanoi, the oral Library of Babel. The last RPG played will exhaust language itself.

3 comments:

  1. I was going to say creating strange microcosm realities that the multiverse can't get any other way... but the unique utterances is good, too.

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  2. And sometimes, we're the monkeys with the typewriter, doing the exact same thing. Only sillier, and sometimes funnier.

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  3. Anonymous2:17 PM

    "overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out."

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