Hello everyone welcome to...well we are not on the trail per say just merely off the beaten path. This will contain books that do not have a direct interaction with gaming however can easily be tied into them. It may sound confusing right now but when I talk about Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks you will get a better idea.
This book at its core is a chronicle of a midlife crisis and one man's journey to figure out his fantasy desires in the real world. It started with a D&D obsession as a teenager, and then college came and vowed never to play it again...until he turned 40. As with many people at that age people tend to think if they chose the right decision when they were younger and through a series of events find his old D&D books. To figure out where his fantasy urges lay in the real world he sets off for an adventure to discover the fantasy side of people.
This book goes into a modern D&D game session, a reunion of old D&D players, LARPs, Dragon*Con, Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) areas, Wizardrock (i.e Harry and the Potters), and yes even fantasy video games with the focus on WoW. Through this journey he talks about various reasons of escape as a means to cope with reality, and even going as far as trying to find a proper balance between the fantasy world and the real world.
Now if you have been following these reviews you know a title I have done earlier was Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal and the various themes of explaining how escapism is used to deal with real world issues on a person hit home in an unscientific manner. Jane uses the escape to allow us to achieve more then what we believe we can in reality with Fantasy Freaks argues that we escape to make reality simpler to manage and easier to control.
Both people are correct for vastly different reasons, I wonder if Fantasy Freaks went ahead and read Reality is Broken if he would agree with Jane's viewpoint or stick with his own.
As for the video game point of view he does talk about being addicted to video games, even talks to a self help survivor of it. Although the addict argues that video games are evil he simply states at the end that he was really into self help tapes, thus indirectly saying that it might not be video games but the addict within a person that latches on to a particular vice and rolls with it.
In the end he came to a realization where he realizes the true meaning of imagination and dreams, it is not to simply live in a fantasy land instead of reality. We escape or use our imagination in order to create. I believe he hit the nail right on the head with this, as imagination allow us to make world or things that we know do not exist and them into a somewhat tangible reality for people to interact with, some people take it to the extreme and actually try to immerse themselves into their fantasy 24 hours a day but as Jane pointed out in her book doing it for more then 3 hours a day is unhealthy for anyone to do.
All in all a book I can highly recommend if you ever dreamed about Harry Potter, Tolkien or even the fantasy genre itself. It gives a great perspective on how to balance the adult life with your inner child and has valuable advice to anyone who has the same issue the author has in this.
