Artistry

Being here is half the game.

I don't want to disparage the age we're living in.  I rather like it myself, being one who considers the "good old days" to be a time of creaky, backwards technology and social standards.  Often, I think back on memories of the world when I was pre-teen and such, and wonder how we managed with the terrible content on a black-and-white television, the lack of computers and the painstaking agony of having to record everything using pencil and paper.  I guess we had the 1950s to compare it to.  Admittedly, it did seem very modern at the time.

Still, while there's nothing wrong with today's culture, it nevertheless breeds habits that I find myself evaluating.  Right now, as I drag myself away from Oxygen Not Included and my latest downloads, I must confess I'm often a slave to the immediacy of convenient gratification.  Whereas once upon a time, I had to wait a week to see the next episode of something, or make a visit to a store to buy the complete set of, say, Band of Brothers, at any time today I simply have to conceive of the show, remember I haven't seen it in a decade and, there you are, all in my possession and ready to watch.  I call a company like Skip the Dishes to bring me food, I pause my game on Steam, I check my email to see if anyone loves me, then settle in to watch.  It is a nice world.

But while day after day passes with such marvelous comforts, intellectually and otherwise, I am reminded by the end of each day that hedonism such as this has its limitations.  When I will think back upon this year, five or ten years from now, I won't remember the steaming breaded chicken or the time I last watched Nix and Dick undermine David Schwimmer ... I will think about the posts I wrote on blogger or the other work I put together on my world.  I'll remember what I wrote, because this writing can't be served a la carte.  There's no one who can do it for me; which is why it is this particular comfort, this power to reach out and have others read me, that is truly the best part of living in 2020.  It is the things we do ourselves that is most gratifying.

Following yesterday's post, I felt I owed an explanation to you, my Gentle Readers.  Between episodes, and game play, while making dinner, taking a shower, enjoying a walk outside in the -37 C weather we're having today, I've been thinking about why I didn't quit D&D.  It is easy enough to say, "because I loved it," but that's only an evasion.  It doesn't say anything.  It doesn't explain why.  Or why I've given nearly 41 years to this game, instead of to something else.  Why, when I was done with school, and married, and had a daughter, didn't I think that my free time was gone?  Why didn't I put aside childish things?

To see D&D as a childish thing, I would have had to see writing as a childish thing.  Or acting.  Or that the musicians I knew were wasting their time, along with the poets, the artists, the dancers and the other performers I knew in the 80s and 90s.  I saw no difference between capturing a moment in fictional time through the medium of preparing and presenting a gaming session, and doing it in the shape of a novel, or rehearsing to present fiction on the stage.  And since I did those things in the company of people who were unrestrained about giving their lives to those arts, and prepared to die rather than give it up, it didn't seem strange that I had simply chosen another mode of expression.  True, drama offers the possibility of fame and wealth; and so does writing novels ... though not for most.  And those I knew who thought they were doing it to get rich were almost always the first to quit.  The rest of us kept at because, well, because.

That's still an evasion.  It's easier to give one, however, because sometimes with true love, it's difficult to dissect what's there without making an ugly mess of it.  But I'll try.

Of all the things I loved doing most as a kid ~ and here I mean, going back to when I first became conscious of being a person, when I was five or six ~ I would have to say that expressing myself was highest on the list.  I loved to be heard.  I read voraciously, both fiction and non-fiction; I soaked up films from the television whenever possible; and I asked questions of anyone who would give me an answer that wasn't "because."  [see?  I know an evasion when I hear one]  In turn, this gathering of information piled up in my head and ached to flow out on my tongue ... which it was not permitted to do nearly as often as would have pleased me, because I was kid and growing up in the early 70s when adults still said with a straight, un-ironic face that "children were meant to be seen and not heard."  Talk about why the good old days sucked.

By the time I was twelve, the log jam of having things to say broke and I began to write things down, effusively and all the time.  I didn't fall in love with writing because I loved words or because sentences are beautiful, descriptive images, but because I had a ton of shit to communicate and hey, that's why we invented words.  I'm still communicating, constantly, because I still have a great deal to say.  That is why this blog, and the other one, and the wiki, combine together to make such a prodigious pile [sometimes, some would say, a pile that steams ...].  Because I like to express my thoughts; I like to have my thoughts heard and read.  I like others to know what I'm thinking.  And so that I deserve to be heard, I like my thoughts to be things worth hearing.

D&D was a remarkable, unexpected medium that simply materialized one day, like a bomb dropping out of the sky and destroying my cathedral of thoughts.  The manner in which the game was realized, through talk, and bound by fixed limits, which were fuzzy because of the dice, took hold of a particular set of skills that had already infected my consciousness.  I had always been in love with maps and geography, and here was a game that applied that specific knowledge to worldbuilding.  I was quick-witted and creative, able to speak and think fast on my feet, and here was a game that rewarded those skills with role-play.  I was exhaustively and obsessively well-read in literature, science and history, and here was a game that drew on those subjects like a pump drawing water.  It was like I had been training for a decade so that at 15, I'd be ready to play.  I don't need one hand to count the number of times something similar to that has happened.

Once I got myself sorted, and began to understand the deeper aspects of the game, I flourished as a DM.  I loved the expressive power and complexity of imagination the game enabled.  And once I hit that time in my mid to late 20s that I described in the last post, when people began to fade away, there was no way I was giving that up.  No way.  Even then I was surrounded by people who said it was just a game and that it was childish, but I knew they were wrong.  A children's book can be childish, but that doesn't make every book so.  The way that most people played D&D then, and the way that most play it now, the game IS childish.  But not my game.  Not my world.  I don't believe that my D&D design is any more childish than George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and frankly I think it is far less so ... and no one out there is saying that Martin should have put childish things aside and quit writing.  Entertainment is one of the most important things that humans do for one another; it is a gift.  Just as Band of Brothers was a gift, from those ready to take the time to write it, adapt it, perform it and make it ready for me to see it.

I don't understand those who cannot understand how essential art is to the health and wellbeing of others ... and how that effort can never be "just" anything.  Through D&D, I can express myself, and illicit emotional response from my players on levels that I can hardly dream of doing through direct writing.  Granted, I try the latter constantly; but with D&D, the shaping of thoughts, tension, elucidation and epiphany are far more profound and esoteric than what I've been able to do with words.  People remember moments in a game for years and years; they remember what they did, they remember what they felt.  They remember the experience as though it happened in their "real" lives ... which, of course, it did.  The monster and the treasure may have been fictional, but the breathless anticipation, the pain of dying or the shouts of joy, those were authentically real.

I will not give up an art form because others are too busy to appreciate art.