Little Wars

I fell down a rabbit hole. Whether intentional or not I have delved deep into a world of information that actually makes me feel like a neophyte geek. Before I go any further, this isn’t some odd reference to porn (I swear it was spam… I didn’t actually intend to go to that site…).

Actually, I knew my information about the greater Star Wars universe was spotty at best. I’ve read a decent number of the comics and a number of the books that were once considered canon (you know, before the dark times brought on by the Mouse). But here’s the thing, as I have been going through informational videos for gaming stuff, I have run across these analytical videos that dissect aspects of the entire gamut of the Star Wars universe.

It’s geek paradise. Or something…

Of course, there are moments as I am watching stuff like how an Empire invasion of earth would play out, where we are reminded that Star Wars is fictional and all information we have is conjecture. Which brings us to a side step of thought. Have you noticed that people are taking their different fandoms far too seriously in recent years? I mean, it doesn’t feel like it was that long ago that soap actors were attacked in public because of their onscreen personas. It’s like we flipped a dime and the crazies are the ones who actually separate the actors from the parts they play. The normal perception is you are who you portray onscreen. That seems a bit off…

But I digress…

So, I caught an interesting thought this morning. It is a two-part video of the ultimate geek battle. The Enterprise (Star Trek) vs a Star Destroyer (Star Wars). Some say you can’t support both (I disagree). There is tons of nerd rage of which one would win in an epic battle. This conjecture comes from one of the groups that spends a good deal of time ruminating on the tech and military prowess of fictional entities. You know the analysis must be good. Yes, I kid.

This all comes back to our studies of history and such. There are historians that spend their time analyzing battles from the various wars that litter our history. They write doctoral thesis on such things. And the interesting bit that stems out of that is analysis of how the various skirmishes in popular movies reflect and contrast these battles that have shaped history. In a way it is within our fictitious wars that we are seeing our world shape and grow as well.

Ok, so I have written several paragraphs at this point that are relevant in a way to where my thoughts are right now, but they are a bit more complicated than I am willing to delve at this time. I dropped them in order to spare you the minutiae of my warped and strange thoughts. Instead I am trying to figure out a way to tie this next thought to the preceding paragraph without taking us down a wild tangent.

Where I am is games, and how they not only tie in to our fictions but also our histories as well. At one point I spoke of the old war games that once graced the table top. They tended to be reenactments of old wars and the possibility of changing the outcomes. These are moments in time where we are able to get into the mind set of those who might have been generals and leaders. Would our different decisions at those times changed the outcomes of the wars or would we inevitably make the same decisions?

This is something true not only of reenactment games but also of abstract games as well. Consider the game of chess. It is an abstract war game that has been study ad nauseum. And yet we still play it in the hopes of finding new ways to surprise or possibly vex opponents. Mind you I haven’t played chess in quite a few years. I think I might still know how to play. But I was never good at it. Sorry back to the other thoughts.

Stepping back to the thoughts again. So, all of this might lead us to that point where we have those among us who begin to take it all too seriously. Right, I might even sound as crazed as all that at times too. I am still human I think. Waiting to be assimilated by the Borg.

It is so easy to slip down that rabbit hole that brings you all in to the fictions, the analysis, the worlds that exist only in our memories. We can forget that there is still a life outside. Or maybe my addictive personality traits are a curse and I have to take a few minutes every now and then to remind myself that the reality I am seeing in my mind isn’t actually the reality around me. Either way it is always fun to find that there are serious discussions of things not so serious. We are more than just a few aspects of what we see and do.

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