I have to admit, that escapism is a type of pastime, but reading a book does more. There are educational values, because many novelists like to use words that you would never ever use in regular every day speech. I’ve learned so many words just from reading. It also teaches you to pay attention, because many books have subtle plot twists.
Einstein said
"If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales."He constantly preached needing an imagination, that it was more important than knowledge. Fiction feeds that imagination, it shows us what could be, what might be, if we strive for it. Even the fantasy novels, the ideals are there.
But I fully believe that reading books expands your soul. It allows you to live other lives. To quote one of my favorite authors, George RR Martin, in his book A Dance with Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5)
"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies," said Jojen. "The man who never reads lives only one.”I fully believe that. I’ve gone through emotions while reading books, sometimes I feel as if some book characters are old childhood friends, and I can talk about them as if they actually existed.
And technically they did exist. A Buddhist view, the way I understand it, is that people live many lives, because you exist in a certain way in the minds of everyone you have ever met. Those people do not see you as you are, they see you the way they perceive you, and that in itself is an existence.... I might be wrong about the wording, but that’s the way I understood it the way I learned it.
No matter how you look at it, most games are silly and childish, but every now and then, you can come across an epic story, that you take part in. They can rival, if not best, most novels you can read in scope, simply because you can interact. I read books so I can experience different lives, different stories, to expand my own horizons and expand my own imagination. I just finished the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
trilogy, and I LOVED how they explained their zombies in the final book, it really made me think about the whole genre differently, which kind of made me think about the light of the soul in a great way....Either way, I leave you with a quote that went viral recently. It was posted on many pictures, and it got me thinking about gaming in general. There have been games that had stories that have amazed me and moved me. There have been games, that I took part in, that took my own creativity to another level. El’Mindeeya Do’Katal was born in a game. The quote:
“I am a Gamer
Not because I don’t have a life
But because I chose to have MANY.”
–Dan
