Wednesday 26 January 2022

Pre-Technic History II

"The Saturn Game," III.

The Minamoto extract at the beginning of this section reaches further back in time, then forward again.

Children in pre-electronic North America played house, cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians.

In Minamoto's time, mid-twenty-first century, they play dolphins or astronauts and aliens.

Role play continues in lodges, rituals and maybe society in general.

Mid-twentieth-century entertainment was dominated by television.

Adult psychodrama became a therapeutic technique, a retreat from an unhappy period and a revolt against passive entertainment.

The Chaos ended war and fantasy games.

In the 2050s, databanks and computers generate psychodramatic scenes and sounds that enhance the vivid imaginations of the players.

Psychotherapy has become a branch of applied biochemistry so that psychodrama has ceased to have any medical use. (This part of the Technic History parallels part of  Larry Niven's Known Space History.)

Less familiar than their predecessors with the human unconscious, psychologists expected only benign consequences from psychodrama in the Chronos.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

For whatever reasons, role playing games never appealed to me. So I was never "in to" them. I suppose reading SF and F satisfied satisfied any such hankerings I had that might have led to RPGs.

Ad astra! Sean