From Kester Brewin at his blog The Complex Christ: Insert Coin | Is Church a Game? Interesting article.
La Farge writes:
"The appeal of D&D is superficially not very different from the appeal of reading. You start outside something (Middle Earth, Dickens' London) and you go in, bit by bit. Along the way, you may have occasion to think, to doubt, or even to learn. Then you come back: your work has piled up, it's past your bedtime; people may wonder what you have been doing. D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play the game you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions."
However, in the course of the article La Farge explores the extent to which D&D actually is a game. He quotes Lévi-Strauss:
"Games appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between players or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers."
La Farge notes that there are no real winners or losers in D&D, and there is no real difference established. So, rather than being a game, it is instead, perhaps, closer to ritual. Again quoting Lévi-Strauss:
"Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse: it cojoins, for it brings about a union, or in any case, and organic relation between two initially separate groups."
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