What Matters

Below is an excerpt from How to Run: An Advanced Guide to Managing Role-playing Games. This may be short, but it actually took considerable time to hammer down this paragraph, and to fit it into the book. My personal belief is that it explodes a myth that has hung around role-playing like an albatross since its inception, perpetrated by those who do not really love the game:

"We are often told that gaming, as well as most recreational activities, exist as an ‘escape.’ Common wisdom says that role-playing exists to offer a distraction from the so-called real world—but I would argue this strenuously. What matters is not what we fly from, but what we fly towards. A frivilous activity may cause us to forget for a time, but an activity that absorbs our consciousness, that we pursue with a will, that we set upon as a journey or as a vocation, because it is what we would do had we the resources to do this thing and nothing else does not rely upon an outer existence to be avoided. I do not role-play because my life is awful; my life is wonderful, and yet I role-play because I love to role-play."