Excellent. Finally, a theology built of MMOGs! I always love open-ended games, expecially RPG's (Role Playing Games). Between this post and your last post, I think you're just trying to suck me into saying something.
I've been thinking about what it looks like to live out my faith on a day to day basis. This doesn't go against the "eternity" discussion like it sounds, though. I'm thinking about an ancient mathematical dilemma. The one where the guy walks halfway to the endpoint. He again walks halfway to the endpoint from that point. Then halfway again. The dilemma being that if he keeps walking, keeps going halfway to the endpoint, he always approaches it, but never gets there. The eventual conclusion is that it doesn't take an infinite ammount of time to travel an infinite distance, or something like that. Math teachers- feel free to correct me.
So, the point is, in role-playing games there are usually very open places in the game and very bottlenecked places. When you hit an open place you can explore, level up your character, enjoy the scenery, play games, figure out secrets, etc. When you decide to walk back into the plotline, you will usually be limited on where you can go, how long you can take, what characters you can use. A MMOG relies on the open places to carry the entire game. They create new skills (building, designing, crafting), create guilds and clubs for conversations, and try to make everything deep and customizeable.
Usually, I find that in life I work for the bottlenecks. I don't delight in the open places. I don't explore the possibilities. That scares me. I love the lyrics of one of Modest Mouse's songs, "you wasted life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?" That's pretty much my concept of eternity. I don't even do anything with my weekend. What makes me think I'd do something with eternity? I have a limited amount of time and and unlimited distance (if I measure it small enough, such as by making use of each day, or each hour or, well, you get the point). So, it comes down to this: I need to do some more marrow-sucking.
And for the record, I have played with both Monopoly and Clue without playing the game, just pretending I exist wandering around in that universe. I think points are pointless. Except for that one. |