Madness

What is it that draws me to madness, insanity, and mental unbalance again and again? Whether it's Condemned, the works of H. P. Lovecraft (and Dark Corners of the Earth was especially cool), The Suffering, Fight Club (okay, that's stretching it but... anything to mention Fight Club), Perfect Blue, and now Bioshock.

I played the PC demo of Bioshock and, even more than the XBox 360 version, the madness of Rapture was evident in all three glorious dimensions. At any rate I'm just waiting for the full game to arrive from Amazon now (along with a better monitor but I've been waiting for that for more than a week now).

So why do I enjoy the concept of losing one's mind and falling into dementia? The paranoid ramblings of madmen is all well and good but when it occurs in the first person (i.e. Dark Corners of the Earth) and you can never be sure whether what you are seeing is reality or a conjuration of your broken mind... that really gets me going and I'm not sure why. When you are surrounded only by madness (Bioshock, Condemned) or when the protagonist of a story can't tell the truth from the phantoms of their own imagination (Perfect Blue, The Suffering) I find that the underlying story is only ever improved by the mania.

I'm sure I'll be able to find more examples of craziness in books (e.g. most of Stephen King's work), games, and film once I've walked away from today's blogging session but the ones I've given above will have to do for now.

And on perhaps a not-too-dissimilar subject, when is The Dark Knight coming out? July??? Aww.

Footnote: Now the PC is working again I'm starting to write out the D&D adventures I've been doing on scratch paper. I'll have to start with adventure nine because that's for this week's adventure but once I'm on top of planning gaming sessions again I'll start working my way back and write out all the adventures in full.