Exchange of Realities

We deal with the unreal. That’s something we can all agree on, right? That what we treat with does not exist, will not exist… and yet we attempt to get it across. Gaming, writing, it doesn’t matter.

And yet, despite this, so many people forget about the one thing we can do that almost nothing else can. We have the ability to make of what we’re doing an experience. To capture the essence of these worlds that we create and bring them to our audiences. We know, and cannot tell you how we know, what it means to stand in the center of a mass of singing stones as the wind picks up and hums in harmony with itself. What it means to hear the song of the kria while lost in the woods on a misty morning.

The greatest sound we can bring from our audience is a soft intake of breath. The greatest sight is that slow widening of the eyes, and the hand that forgets what it was doing in the middle of its action. The emotion? A sense of wonder. Quiet awe, experiencing; not in battles, nor arguments, nor the cinematic scene that tries to pack all that is Awesome into one point of contact. This is not an emotion for the melodramatic hero, and nor does it need to be. This is a soft emotion, there for a breath and gone again; the only way to measure it is the amount of time that breath appears to last. This is atmosphere, nothing more, but without it, how can we be sure that we have a world and not just a theater set?

Sure, it’s easy to forget. In a story, you’re expecting the audience to want to know what happens next. In a game, there’s always the feeling that everything just needs to keep moving, keep running, where’s the next thing threatening the world?

And we forget. We leave behind the places where the pollen sparkles in the moonlight, or where a single crystal reflects dots of light all over the room. We let the beacons on the faraway mountains fade out, and hold back the meteors before they fall. And the magic—we silence it, we still it, it becomes simple colors, and not swirling dust in the air whose patterns move when we put a finger near them, the scents of the world’s greatest greenhouse, the sounds of music or nature or something beyond description or all three of the above at one.

Nobody sees the price of these losses. They forget about their own times lost in viewing, or smelling, or hearing. That moment in which the little heroes rushing to save the world realize that this is what they’re fighting for—they’ll find something else. It will be less, of course. There will always be something missing, whether they know, whether they remember, or whether it stays outside their reach like a little piece of feather they try to grasp out of the air.

But the world is the less for them… and perhaps they, too, are the less for them.

Bring back the wonder. Unleash the meteors and light the fires. Let your world breathe. You won’t be sorry.