Gabu
Atlas Star
Posts: 28,386
Political Matrix
E: -4.32, S: -6.52
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« on: February 19, 2006, 02:28:46 AM » |
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While I understand John Ford's point of view, I must respectfully disagree with his evaluation of the "realness" of the fantasy elections held here. It's not the notion that it's not "real" that I disagree with; it's the notion that this fact somehow matters.
I'm sure we all have things that we do as hobbies. Myself, I play video games, draw pictures, and work on a novel that I'm writing purely for my own amusement. None of these things are "real" per se. I'm not actually accomplishing anything in the video games. If I see a bad guy on the TV screen who falls over when I "shoot" him, that's not really what's happened. It's just that an electric signal was fed from the controller in my hand to the machine, and interpreted as a message to make the 3D model of a gun commence going through its "firing" animation while the game outputs a sound of a gunshot, and, once the game has calculated that the path of the bullet intersects the model of the bad guy, the model of the bad guy commences going through its "falling down and dying" animation.
If I draw a picture of a soldier in armor running off to some battle, that's not actually happening. It's just that the material rubbed off onto paper from the pencil's inner cylinder of graphite through motions of my hand and through contact with the paper happened to occur in a series of lines that one's brain interprets, when taken as a whole, to look like something that might occur in reality.
If I write a chapter in which a boy goes through a heavily traumatic experience, that too has not actually happened. It's just that I visualize what might have happened in reality and describe exactly what an unseen viewer might see or take note of while observing this event. I suppose one could even call this lying, as I write it in a very serious matter as if what I write is something that actually happened.
Yet no one would bat an eyelash at the fact that none of these are "real". People go to movies, or examine paintings, or watch TV shows all the time. It's simply natural for humans to need escape from lives that are - let's face it - horribly boring most of the time. Even if your life is centered around something that is exciting, exhilirating, or what have you, you're not doing that 100% of the time, and the interlude between one session and the next is not filled with much of anything at all. Hence, people turn to books, TV shows, movies - anything that can stimulate the mind and create positive feelings, or feelings of accomplishment, or intrigue and suspense, or what have you.
I don't think that the fantasy elections section of this forum is a whole lot different than any of these other ideas. It's supposed to simply be a place where people gather, have fun, stimulate their mind through debate and campaigning, and what have you. Of course it's not "real" - I don't think anyone here disagrees with that - but it still is a way to pass time and engage your mind.
I would even argue that the entire root of all of fantasy elections' problems stem from people trying to make it real, not from the fact that it's not real. Real politics is a very scary place, where people lie or tell half-truths, where characters are slandered and defaced, where cronyism and corruption abounds in the stead of quality representation of the people, where reality is second to people's perception of reality, and where people who either are not total jerks or who do not have a gigantic ego are chewed up, put through a blender, and are lucky to escape with a shred of remaining principles or character.
In summary, I would say that the fact that fantasy politics isn't real is one of the least worrying factors in it - indeed, I might say that it's actually the most redeeming factor of all, one that people should pay very, very close attention to.
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