Welcome. Since I joined the lore forum, I saw exchange upon exchange of lore minutiae, people from all over the world debating and disagreeing in hard-to-find details of the elements that compose ES. Take the Amaranth hunt, for example. Months of arguments, seeking to find a quite elusive, hidden aspect of ES lore, hinted by MK.

I'm not the sanest mind out there*, but I worried about something: That some of the loregoers were, perhaps, too engrossed into ES, seeing it as something more than a fantasy.

*By any measure or perspective, I assure you. I have the diagnosis to prove it.

Being a tabletop RPG player, I started to worry that some may be the digital equivalent of the RPG players that delve too much into the fantasy, and alienate themselves from reality somewhat, or are simply too obssessed for their own good.

So I wish to hear your opinions, your ideas. basically, I wish to know:

Does ES repays the attention you give to it? Is it worth it?

Personally, I think the lore discussions that I have on this forum allow me to think more creatively, as I don't really have a call to do that in my everyday life, and found that I wasn't as good at it as I thought I was when I went to school (in part) for creative writing. The minutiae you mention allow me to try to wrap my head around important mysteries that nonetheless are not so important as to affect either my real life or my playing style in-game--nothing screws up if I don't figure out the answer, so I have more fun with it than I would if I was trying to answer any question like it in real life. And it makes me look at the real world in a new way, as well. I can't tell you the number of times I look at the moon now and prefer to think about Lorkhan instead of the ball of rock that's really up there.

Well, I'm not exactly juggling a full set of cutlery myself, but I find that reading/studying/debating something as seemingly silly as the history and cosmology of a fictional world is a healthy thing:

Critical thinking skills.

Attention to details.

Creative writing (for those that actually write).

Practice with spelling/grammar.

The games themselves are interactive fictions, in a way they're a very personal sort of theatre. The catharsis that a healthy individual experiences can be shared, the lore (and by extension, the lore forums) are one way we can share it.