I just discovered the post. Silly me :P
................................................I spent 20 minutes writing and deleting what I was writing...............................................................
Let me finish this fast lol: I have met here a LOT of interesting folks. Folks I would like to meet everyday irl, but irl I generally meet ******. The few friends I have do not balance the situation, no. I split the folks met here in two: hard brains and light heads (not the best formulation, but no one is perfect).
The hard brains will always see MD as a game. They will be aware of this truth. This does not make their role-play bad, it means that behind something like *lies on the ground, next to the unicorns and aramors and fairies* there is a sense of ”i'm imagining things and we pretend that this is real”.
The light heads will be ”drawn”/”sucked” into the game (mostly by the power of image; MD has a great visual impact) and sometimes create symbols where there are none. It is not about creating a landmark or imprinting your footsteps, it is about adding personal experiences to something and coming up with a symbol. This makes their experience in MD much more powerful, but also confusing. Confusing, since it is harder to understand what he/she means, since the symbol exists only in one's mind. Eventually, the light heads turn into hard brains :D in time.
And...I forgot what I wanted to say with this.
yeah, I wanted to say that there should always be the idea in your head that ”this is not real, we pretend this is real and this is where our fun derives from”. I honestly cannot deal with someone who does not agree that this is a game. We play it, it IS a game. Sure, if we go further we might find out this is more than a game and we might inquire about the nature of ”reality”, what is reality and such, what is a/our role and such and we might end up with headaches (I know I have, since I re-visited some concepts I believed in, since playing MD). I'm not sure it is worth it, but we can do it.
The above does not contradict what you said, ironically. It came like that because I was a light head myself. Playing until dawn? Check. Hundreds of games? Check. Visually enchanted? Check (never played games for the math, only for the visuals). In the end, you just realise these games can be wonderful learning experiences, but if you forget, even for a second, that it's a game you play, you end up badly. The things I said about creating symbols and such...been there, done that.
Damn, I wanted to write a short post. :rolleyes: