Excellent points, Mumak. Sometimes I wonder why we need fantasy and escapism in general. I have heard that the age group which is the biggest consumer of games (of the Playstation variety, not Ludo) is adults. This is why so many certificate 18 games are released; while the media are up in arms about peddling sex and violence to children they are choosing not to notice that it is grown ups who clamour for this kind of 'escapism'. To me, themes such as car theft aren't such great escapism as I can see that going on in the city around me, but its the essential
difference to our mundane lives which attracts people to games as much as it does to horror, or to fantasy itself. A game can give a person the opportunity to pretend they are a little purple dragon or a criminal mastermind or a skateboarding champion for a few hours. A book can also do this, but we would not (always) deride a book or claim it to be dangerous.
So, I think it is in some respects the escape which fantasy can provide which attracts us.
But there is more to it. Something links the seemingly grisly world of games and the dreamlike fantasy such as Tolkien and that is that both do have some grounding in reality. In games we see a hyper-reality; in Tolkien we see a reflection or a mirror of reality. We see characters we can recognise, dilemmas, and landscapes which though fantastic and awesome in scope, are still real. We have mountains covered in white snow, not in purple snow, and we have fantastic creatures which seem just to be bigger versions of our own creatures. I think that recognition is the key. In both, there is to be found a reflection of what we already know.
The difference is that to play a game we don't have to invest much effort (now anyone who is a keen gamer may disagree and point out how many hours they spent on
Final Fantasy or something
), but the effort I am talking about is in terms of engaging the imagination. In a game (and in film) it is laid out for us and we only have to switch on the machine to engage in that alternate world. With a book we have to dig deeper and create that world for ourselves. This is one thing which
surprises me about fantasy fiction and why Tolkien is so popular;the amount of sheer effort a reader must put into creating this world within themselves is quite awesome. Think about it too much and the almost instinctive act of reading can become a daunting thought.
But this is true of all fiction. If I read
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, then I have to enter the mind of a boy with Asperger's, something which is an alternate reality to me, yet it is in no way a work of fantasy. So perhaps
all acts of reading fiction are escapes in some way. Certainly, any novel which includes situations I am not familiar with is in some ways an escape, no matter how 'realistic' the subject matter.
So, I think that both children
and adults make full use of escapism, whether it be through reading, games or films, and in ways we might not consider to be escapist. An adult who incessantly reads Sharpe novels is escaping just as much as a child who reads Harry Potter.