So, I'm doing some pre-planning for the introduction, where I pick out all the relevant quotes from the sources that I want to use, and then throw them all together and try to find the threads that tie them all together. So I thought I'd show you what I've got, in case people want to work in similar directions or tie different articles more tightly together.

My points for the intro are:
-- roleplaying as the creation of imaginary experiences/memories, and what reasons we might have for doing so; what this says about us
-- the idea of exile, detachment, and desire in roleplaying
-- I pretty much had Edward Said's articulation of "what is an intellectual?" in mind when I thought about what Push should be about

These tie together great, especially with my own experiences as a "cultural exile" in China, thanks to two guys named Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci, both exiles, both artisans who built imaginary cities in the mind. Here the sources that I'm going to be drawing from:

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     [Polo] said: "Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know."
     "There is still one of which you never speak."
     Marco Polo bowed his head.
     "Venice," the Khan said.
     Marco smiled. "What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?"

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 86.

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In 1596 Matteo Ricci taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace. He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember: the most ambitious construction would consist of several hundred buildings of all shapes and sizes; "the more there are the better it will be," said Ricci, though he added that one did not have to build on a grandiose scale right away...
     The real purpose of these mental constructs was to provide storage spaces for the myriad concepts that make up the store of our human knowledge. To everything we wish to remember, wrote Ricci, we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it by an act of memory.

Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, p. 1-2.

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POLO: Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids, and we have never stopped: you, from raising dust on the field of battle; and I, from bargaining for sacks of pepper in distant bazaars. But each time we half-close our eyes, in the midst of the din and the throng, we are allowed to withdraw here, dressed in silk kimonos, to ponder what we are seeing and living, to draw conclusions, to contemplate from the distance.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 103-104.

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"From now on, I'll describe the cities to you," the Khan had said, "in your journeys you will see if they exist."
     But the cities visited by Marco Polo were always different from those thought of by the emperor.
     "And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced," Kublai said. "It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations."
     "I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all others," Marco answered. "It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probably to be real."

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 69.

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Being deframed, so to speak, from everything familiar, makes for a certain fertile detachment and gives one new ways of observing and seeing. It brings you up against certain questions that otherwise could easily remain unasked and quiescent, and brings to the fore fundamental problems that might otherwise simmer inaudibly in the background. This perhaps is the great advantage, for the writer, of exile, the compensation for the loss and the formal bonus - that it gives you a perspective, a vantage point.

...Exile places one at an oblique angle to one's new world and makes every emigrant, willy-nilly, into an anthropologist and relativist; for to have a deep experience of two cultures is to know that no culture is absolute... When all borders are crossable and all boundaries permeable, it is harder to project conflict outward, to imagine an idyllic realm or a permanent enemy... We are less shocked by the varied assumptions prevailing among different peoples, less prone to absolutist assertions of our own rightness.

Eva Hoffman, "The New Nomads," Letters of Transit, p. 50; 51, 55-56.

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Regard experiences then as if they were about to disappear: what is it about them that anchors or roots them in reality? What would you save of them, what would you give up, what would you recover?

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. ?.

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One task of the intellectual is the effort to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are so limiting to human thought and communication. (xi)

...[T]he intellectual is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. (11)

...[I}ntellectuals are individuals with a vocation for the art of representing... (12-13)

The purpose of the intellectual's activity is to advance human freedom and knowledge. (17)

There is no question in my mind that the intellectual belongs on the same side with the weak and unrepresented. (22)

At bottom, the intellectual, in my sense of the word, is neither a pacifier nor a consensus-builder, but someone whose whole being is staked on a critical sense, a sense of being unwilling to accept easy formulas, or ready-made clichés, or the smooth, ever-so-accommodating confirmations of what the powerful or conventional have to say, and what they do. Not just passively unwilling, but actively willing to say so in public. (23)

[T]he pleasure of being surprised, of never taking anything for granted, of learning to make do in circumstances of shaky instability... would confound or terrify most people. ...An intellectual is like a shipwrecked person who learns how to live in a certain sense with the land, not on it, not like Robinson Crusoe whose goal is to colonize his little island, but more like Marco Polo, whose sense of the marvelous never fails him, and who is always a traveler, a provisional guest, not a freeloader, conqueror, or raider. (59-60)

A second advantage of... the exile standpoint for an intellectual is that you tend to see things not simply as they are, but as they have come to be that way. Look at situations as contingent, not as inevitable, look at them as the result of a series of historical choices made by men and women, as facts of society made by human beings, and not as natural or god-given, therefore unchangeable, permanent, irreversible. (60-61)

Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual.

Hell! That Matteo Ricci thing made me remember that I promised an article about the tie-ins of ars memorativa and rpgs to Chris half a year ago. Sorry, I completely forgot it in all the busyness! I'll make it up whenever I have the time, Chris. Don't get mad.

Anyway, this is good stuff and inspiring. The intellectual as an outsider is easy to grasp for the audience and makes for nicely gothic "cool" imagery. It's the standard trope of modern fantasy and geekdom, so I'd say that you'll get through. Consider spelling it out by comparing the intellectual to Gaiman's Morfeus or something.