Journal Entry 6: Davis: Ch. 7-8 (Sara Loughran)

        In Chapter 7, Davis explains virtual reality and cyberspace by mentioning computer games, specifically ones that tend to focus on the Middle Ages/medieval times. He points out that they are always exaggerated caricatures of what that period of time was actually like, as a way to fulfill some sort of fantasy or escape to a virtual world where you feel like the hero and live vicariously through that. He then brings up how the West has been fantasizing about medieval times and trying to explore that "world" for several hundred years now, most notably with Gothic Romance literature. Gothic Romance is not what we might immediately assume it is - it isn't always about a romantic relationship. Furthermore, the "romance" part has to do with the Romanticist movement, which was a counter to a lot of Enlightenment ideals. Instead of focusing on logic, reason, and the tangible like the Enlightenment thinkers, Romanticists focused on emotion, nature, individualism, and a glorification of the past, which is where the fascination with medieval times comes from. It glorified a lot of art, music, poetry, literature, and etc., and gave the world some of its most famous authors, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, Edgar Allen Poe, Jane Austen, and many others.

       Romanticism and gothic romance is something that has fascinated me for a while, and like most people my age, I read Frankenstein and Edgar Allen Poe's poetry in high school. But the comparison to fantasy video games, most of the time RPGs, is one I had never considered. To generalize a bit, they also tend to attract men who are somewhat pretentious and believe that their minds and thoughts are superior to all others, and also a lot of times, they hold some misogynistic beliefs. Of course not everyone interested in fantasy RPGs is like that, nor is that how all Romanticist writers are. But the fact that it seemed to attract a lot of similar people to the RPG gamers. There are also a lot of women Romanticist writers, as well as a lot of female RPG gamers, and there is also somewhat of a resemblance in the way they think. There is something to be said for pieces of media, whether it be literature or video games, that portray a fantastical and escapist reality attracting a certain type of people, which again goes back to the tribes that Davis has continued to reference.