Role-playing Games
Dungeons & Dragons, the first major role-playing game, has created several detailed and commercially successful fantasy worlds (called "campaign settings"), with established and recognizable characters, locations, histories, and sociologies. The Forgotten Realms is perhaps the most extensively developed of these worlds. These elements of detail can be a large part of what attracts people to RPGs.
Many established fantasy writers have also derided Dungeons and Dragons and the fantasy fiction it has inspired due to its influencing new writers toward reading the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual instead of studying the original literature and mythology from which modern fantasy literature has sprung.
Due to the fuzzy boundary between fantasy and science fiction, it is similarly difficult to make a hard-and-fast distinction between "fantasy worlds" and planets in science fiction. For example, the worlds of Barsoom, Darkover, Gor, and the Witch World combine elements of both genres.
Read more about this topic: Fantasy World
Famous quotes containing the word games:
“In 1600 the specialization of games and pastimes did not extend beyond infancy; after the age of three or four it decreased and disappeared. From then on the child played the same games as the adult, either with other children or with adults. . . . Conversely, adults used to play games which today only children play.”
—Philippe Ariés (20th century)