In our youth, we dream of faraway lands where brave knights save gentle maidens, fierce dragons fly through magical skies, and fairy castles grace green, sylvan forests. There in our enchanted courts we dance and play and count passing clouds as days.
But then something happens. The dragons seen from a far turn into 747s, roaring from concrete plains, the knights and maidens lose their glisten armor and gowns for the more practical business suits and pinching shoes. We drift from the simplicity of the storybook for the pragmatism of the Wall Street Journal, while our dancing and playing is transformed into work and survival. Leaving those so carefully crafted worlds, we rightly journey into the much harsher land we call adulthood. But the desire to see again those lush hills and valleys is still there, nagging at us, begging for a moments return.
Roleplaying is a conscious attempt to recreate for a moment in time the magic of that earlier imagination. Far from seeking escapism, the active roleplayer taps into the vast creative reservoir that lies damned up behind the practicalites of our everyday lives. In all instances, in all applications, it is that long-ago child's wonderment and drive to create that allows us to discover those things that a moment before had not yet exsisted. As the roleplayer reencounters the wonderment of play, so can he or she bring that wonderment to all aspects of life and work.
In a non-Absurdist sense, roleplaying, in all its modern forms, is what makes us most human. I believe through roleplaying we become more human.