I had forgotten I loved my topic this much! I am writing of the aesthetics of games, and to do that I have to write something about the fantasy genre. That's always been a pet project of mine, and now I get to use it for the computer games.

The point is: these games exist not in a social and cultural vacum, but as part of a larger cultural sphere. They can't be described isolated, and they don't grow out of the ancient fairy-tale archetypes. Tolkien might have drawn heavily on that - in this millenium we have an industry to produce fantasy archetypes for us.