5 Nov

Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Filed under: Misc. No Responses

It’s been more than two years since I started my original blog at calltoreason.org and for over a year now I’ve been mulling over the thought of splitting up its content. This webspace was originally used to hold a number of essays, mostly related to critiques of religion, that I wrote a while back, but after I turned it into a blog, I added more and more posts about video games which have nothing to do with the site’s original theme.

This was a problem because there is almost no overlap between my readers for the games-related material and the more serious political and religious stuff. Even worse, I get the impression that the presence of the controversial stuff intimidates the gamer crowd while the serious folk thought of the game-related stuff as being frivolous and unworthy of attention. Add to this the fact that a site design that works for one subject obviously doesn’t work for another.

Believe me, the dual nature of the blog confused me too. Which category should I classify the site under when submitting it to catalogs and such? But splitting the content a year back was unfeasible because I couldn’t generate enough games-related content to reliably fill a blog. Simply said, playing PC games takes a lot of time and I’m not going to post news items and press releases that other sites do a much better job at covering.

This has changed now that I’ve added boardgaming as a hobby. I now consistently play boardgames at least a couple of times a week, and so far, everything is new enough that I have something to say about it. Combined with video gaming, which I fully intend to continue, I believe that I have enough material to regularly fill a blog, hence Knights of the Cardboard Castle.

Why this name? The term “Cardboard Castle” of course alludes to boardgames, but the title comes from a book by Elisabeth Beresford that left a deep impression on me as a child. It was first published in 1976, the same year I was born, and is now out of print so I can only vaguely recall the story from memory. Set in one of the decaying inner cities of the UK in the 1970s, it tells the story of a small group of young pre-teens who all come from broken families.

Bereft of parental supervision or attention, they spend their days loitering and playing in the streets where they must band together for protection against the older and stronger delinquent youths who frequently bully them. One day they find their way into an abandoned garbage dump and over the course of many weeks use the waste materials they find there to turn an old building there into a castle, complete with a drawbridge, a throne room and battlements.

Eventually the older youths discover their “castle” and decide to destroy it out of spite and revenge for the many times that the younger kids have foiled their plans. So the self-styled “knights” must unite to defend their fortress in a siege from tougher and more ferocious enemies using such weapons as wooden swords and blotting paper.

Many books tell tales of children coming across true magic, the Chronicles of Narnia for example, but the lesson in the Knights of the Cardboard Castle is that magic can be something we can create in real life with a bit of imagination and need not be any less wondrous for it. That is I think, something that all gamers can agree with.

Written on November 5 2009 and is filed under Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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