PARANOIA

In October 2001 British writer M. John Harrison, known in SF/fantasy circles for his Viriconium novels and other fine works, posted on the Fantastic Metropolis site an interesting article called "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium." Having only just stumbled on Harrison's article, I was struck by its parallels with the PARANOIA rulebook:

The great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric. They were books, which means that the one thing they actually weren’t was countries with people in them....

The commercial fantasy that has replaced them is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else’s metaphor, or realise someone else’s rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, “Yes, but what did Sauron look like?”; or, “Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?”; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien’s images. You have brought them under control....

Games are centred on control. “Re-enactment” is essentially revision, which is essentially reassertion of control, or domestication....

“What would it be really like to live in the world of…?” is an inappropriate question, a category error. You understand this immediately you ask it of the inscape of, say, Samuel Beckett or Wyndham Lewis. I didn’t want it asked (and I certainly didn’t want it answered) of Viriconium, so I made that world increasingly shifting and complex. You cannot learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice. That is because—like Middle-earth—it is not a place. It is an attempt to animate the bill of goods on offer.

Viz. the PARANOIA rulebook: "Alpha Complex is not a place; it is a state of mind."