While I promise, my next time up I will have another installment of the Snow Queen, I wanted to take the opportunity (since I'm there today) to throw in a shout to fairytales and games.
Video and table top games are an opportunity for creative geekery to blossom within the confines of and blow out the established mythologies. Games like the Fable series, take this head on by inviting the player to take on becoming part of the legend mythos that is built around what happens in the story, while others, like Bioshock and many war games, take "established" history in a new direction. Tabletop games, like D&D and White Wolf, where players and gamemasters alike take an active role in shaping the story that's being told, invite whole new mythologies based on collective imaginations. Some of the familiar stories get retold regardless of the medium and some change -- weeping women by the riverside and bogeymen in the dark, these are a part of the history and mythology and inform much of the classes, races, and storylines you see in RPGs.
But, what is history other than the stories we tell eachother about our collective past.
I have a wild feeling that in some future period, these stories we've created that turn the established roles and stories on their head may become part of what is concidered to be the "normative" fairytales and collective mythos of our time instead of fun tangents.
Of course, that may be what Aristophanes and other Greco-Roman stories are. We just don't know, because so few of them remain. Did they "know" they were fiction or fiction-based-on-true-events or did they fully believe it to be fact (Genn would be the better person to ask on this).
Either way, I'm hoping to send on some of the photos (probably attached to this post) of the new mythologies I see at PAX. And I really hope that I get to interact with a few.
Io smile upon you and beware the Deep Crow.
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