Although very conflicted about the game experiences I want to prioritise, I’ve been realising over several days how very much I feel “done” with Dungeons & Dragons (and the myriad clones, derivatives, and mirrors of that RPG). At base, it’s being “done” with that particular blend of gameplay and generic ‘fantasy’.

That said, I also yearn towards a different flavour of ‘fantasy’ as a genre. It’s a more grounded and realistic pre-modern world where people live in villages, or perhaps some still wander as nomads in the wilderness. But it’s a human world, a place where some imagined earlier experience of what it means to be of our species can be had.

It feels like a world where spiritual experience and the danger of the wilderness blend to provide a texture that we can only imagine. Perhaps it’s a hankering for the mythic and primal, I don’t really know. It almost feels like a welling up from deep within the self that is so buried under civilisation. Jung would have understood.

It’s at times when I feel this draw that I can understand why people sometimes prefer to role-play alone. When it was never about a story, when it’s really about experiencing something that there is no other way to access save through the imagination, that is where the role-playing game rises to the fore.

Imagine that world which, for those who live within it, is more real than the illusion that we pretend is civilised and superior. It’s real because they walk the paths of the forests, or across the hillsides, or through the waist-high grassy fields, and they know the smell of the wild and the sounds of the life all around them.

Becoming a character who lives in such a place, which although earlier in technological development is richer in that sense of connection to the environment, appeals to my imagination deeply. I shy away from our history and long for an era before we measured time in a deliberate sense.

Perhaps it’s just a fantasy to imagine such a world. But to play with the idea is appealing and a welcome departure from the “realities” of the 21st century. Is it wrong to want to create and inhabit a place where people are formed into communities and want to protect each other from the wildness that threatens to overwhelm?

Just a thought.