And check out some highlights from the discussion below. Listen to our complete interview with Joseph Laycock in Episode 185 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). “Not in the sense that people think Anakin Skywalker is a real person, but that these stories give them this sense of psychological fulfillment that in other cultures might have been fulfilled by hearing stories about the lives of the saints.” “There’s a lot of literature suggesting that fantasy role-playing games or Star Wars or things like this can take on some of the work that religion used to do,” he says. He notes that fantasy and science fiction can play a similar role in the lives of secular people that miracle stories do for the religious. “But if every weekend you experience a different world-with a different social order, a different way of organizing the government, different religions, and so forth-then it becomes much easier to question people when they tell you that this is the way the world is, and this is what you ought to believe.” “If the world that you have is the only world you’ll ever know, you can’t really question it,” he says. Laycock argues that fantasy worlds have a similar potential. when the concept of a transcendent realm helped spur social developments around the world. Scholars of religion have coined the term “the Axial Age” to describe a period around 500 B.C. Instead he argues that any wonder narrative, whether true or not, can be deeply inspirational. He’s quick to point out that the parallels between religion and role-playing don’t make religion false. “So I think that by attacking this imaginary game, that was one way of shoving that thought down and not having to think about it anymore.” “The critics themselves began to worry that their religion, which they had invested so much in, could be something like this game,” he says. What really bothered them about this game of gods and demons, he discovered, was not that it was opposed to Christianity, but that it was so similar to it. His research revealed that critics of D&D were not being frank about their motives. The incident kicked off a lifelong interest in the parallels between religion and role-playing, an idea Laycock explores in his new book Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says About Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds.
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