Where’s the mouse?
I remember being a kid and spewing out masses of rudimentary fan-creative kid brain stuff. When I encountered a story, I made other stories based on it, usually transitory ones played out with whatever toys I could get my hands on.
Part of the transition between a blithely unpopular and unaware childhood and a somewhat more socially connected adulthood was the unfortunate realization that not everybody does this. Mind you, to realize that was to go in search of the people who do, so I’ve been surrounded by them all the while, but it always struck me as depressing that creativity was not considered part of the “base set”.
And now that may be changing. See this fascinating bit by Clay Shirky via Patrick Nielsen Hayden, who nicked it from Warren Ellis. Click the link; there’s apparently a video, for those of you who aren’t in China. I read the transcript, and here is one awesome Eureka moment:
(…) In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”
At least they’re doing something.
Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.
And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s [sic] message–I can do that, too–is a big change.