In other news…

vael:

The Night Circus seems a bit bothersome to me now, Demi. I’m definitely going to continue playing, but I think one such as myself may require just a little more meat to a game than TNC provides. I wonder if this will be the same for other people, like my sister. Without a clear, defined goal, I feel as though I’m mostly walking through this world mouth-agape but never truly engaging in it.

        I got a bit frustrated when I thought of it as a game, too, but then I realized it didn’t really matter if there were no new widgets for me to collect for another week. Which only serves to illustrate that it has no actual game mechanics beyond that. But, and this is the difference, I also realized that I kind of enjoy “walking through this world, mouth-agape” because the writing is just so beautiful to me. I’ve put a bunch of stuff in my diary “in-game” without sharing it on Facebook simply because of the writing. And in some ways it’s better than reading a well-written novel, because the content comes in bite-sized chunks, and I can instantly set them aside to say “hey I liked this part!”

        It also speaks to how much I really enjoy writing (as in the medium of writing…? is that what it should be called?), but I also think that I like it so much because I understand it more than other things. A chiaroscuro picture or painting would be nice, I guess, but I wouldn’t appreciate it much AND I probably wouldn’t engage with it enough to think “oh, this is chiaroscuro, what a beautiful contrast” and so on. But for them to describe the Night Circus as being chiaroscuro is far more pleasing to me than an actual image would be - it’s a great word, it’s a rarely used word (provided you don’t study art), and it provides an incredibly vivid image. I have no artistic skill, and I’ve never tried to improve; I get frustrated when I simply can’t translate ideas from my head onto paper. Really, I probably can’t imagine things accurately enough, yet the vague sort of ideas I get from reading are still better than even the greatest artistic rendition of the same thing.

        The one exception might be a fantastic performance by an actual person. Tyrion is an absolutely wonderful character in A Song of Ice and Fire, but Peter Dinklage in Game of Thrones is so damn good that it’s way better than any imagined version I could come up with. To the point where I imagined all of Tyrion’s lines in A Dance With Dragons in Peter Dinklage’s voice.

        Yes, it was great.