Games, Not Worldviews

One troubling trend in many hobbies is the adoption of a game, movie, cartoon, or other media property as a worldview. You get feelings like, "If this is okay in D&D, then it is fine in real life." If the media is well known, the fandom around it mutates and becomes justification for real-world worldviews and potentially actions outside the game.

None of us carries around longswords, but you get this self-justification of real-world violence through justification carried over from games and movies. Well, if Captain America would do this, then I should...

I swear, we are back to the Superman thing in the 1950s, where kids are jumping off roofs with pillowcases tied around their shoulders. Only today is it seen as perfectly fine for adults to adopt superhero justifications for their real-world actions.

This is the danger of "identity gaming," where the lines get blurred between fantasy and reality, and some cannot handle this, and fantasy becomes reality. You even see this careless corporate "you in the game" marketing through art in many of today's games that "looks like us" and pushes the idea that the people in the game are modern people thrust into a fantasy world.

Any time I see these "modern people" in "fantasy worlds" in game art, it is a red flag to me. This is the most toxic form of marketing in gaming, and it needs to be called out.

I prefer games that show dwarves as dwarves, elves as elves, and that have an internal logic to the world, and an attempt to make the world the game shows as different from our own. It takes a lot of creative control and discipline to maintain an internal logic and consistency in a game world.

Some of the newer cozy games do this well, and should be commended for maintaining that consistent worldbuilding and careful crafting of an experience.

If a game takes special care to craft an entire Elven (or rabbit, hedgehog, or other cozy backgrounds) culture and world, and gives us that to explore and uncover, that is remarkable. If another game tells us, "Elven culture is actually a parallel for this real-world culture," that is so low-effort and dumb that it's another red flag.

Plopping modern people, hairstyles, clothing, and cultures into a fantasy setting is lazy, and it tells me the designers do not care. It is a clear sign of the grift that sales and marketing are more important than telling a story through worldbuilding and creating a place other than our own.

Why do I need to build a world and tell a story of another place in time?

I can just plop the real world into a fantasy setting and paint people in Steampunk clothing with magic coming out of their hands. Let's throw costplay face paint, Tiefling horns, or other comic convention props on them for good measure. Look! Fantasy makeup equals worldbuilding!

Harry Potter lies at the root of this "identity gaming" movement, setting up a generation of kids who feel entitled to "live in a mixed world of fantasy and reality." They never give up their childhood, and they live lives in which youth escapes them, leaving them angry and unsatisfied with life.

Harry Potter was a net negative for childhood psychology and adult development. The books and story are fine, but how this was turned into a corporate franchise trapped a generation in eternal childhood forever.

When I enter a fantasy world, I want the world to mean more than the modern day. I want to make mistakes in the world's internal logical consistency, to be called out for not knowing the local culture, and to have that "fish out of water" feeling. I never want to enter a fantasy world, adopt modern attitudes, and have those attitudes affirmed and reinforced by that world's culture and belief system.

I want to escape from this world when I play fantasy.

I want a world that makes me feel like I am "somewhere else."

Not "here and now."