Politics and D&D

Ever since my experience at GX I’ve been thinking of where the game and gaming subculture are at. It’s one thing to merely suspect political engineering at work, but another altogether to actually witness its fruits.

The marketing position of hardcore D20 advocates is naturally based on real sentiments: that there needs to be room for straightforward gamist play without too much analysis. I agree; this is the root of the hobby and where you get your foot in the door. What I’ve seen and read, though, goes far beyond that. It reminds me of nothing more than the RPG equivalent of Republican entitlement and false persecution.

You know what I mean: Dungeon crawling was in about as much danger as American Christianity. The rhetorical tactics are the same (and it is a pity to see them employed by ostensibly left-leaning gamers): identify a cohesive group (“liberals”/”storytellers”) opposed to populist values (Christian “moral values”/dungeon crawling) in a way that encourages hostile discourse (“faggot”/”faggot”). And to say something that will probably get me trolled: It’s no accident that the main architect of D20 as ideology is a Republican who characaterized Democrats as folks who believe that people are “evil,” and who is no stranger to dirty tricks and media manipulation, though to be fair, when the industry is so small, this sort of stuff isn’t that hard to do. It’s just harder to undo it when it tells gamers what they want to hear.

I’m using US politics as a model largely because, like the two party system, this tension doesn’t really have a strong ideological character in terms of how one should actually get things done. Everybody plays D&D, after all, and whether playing D&D is a good idea is about as likely to be challenged as the US’ semi-free market economy. The days when it was politically credible to challenge either are long gone (not that doing so wouldn’t be a good idea), and the false arguments being employed to create tension exist to weasel more money. There was never a “storytelling dominant” era in gaming. There was an era when Vampire and Vampire clones were popular and TSR fucked the dog despite D&D’s success.

Gamers are susceptible to this sort of thing. They like to be peer leaders with a strong persecution complex. Witness, for instance, the fact that so many still act as if (the now dead) Pat Pulling was still after them. Since this is a pretty silly position to have, it encourages a culture of denial which I think is becoming a serious problem when it comes to encouraging a fluid, diverse hobby.

Something I’ll call anti-analysis (there’s surely a better preexisting term) is making the rounds with serious strength. Consider the old debate about orcs and racism, which is about as emblematic of this problem as any other. Earthdawn, Harn and other games actually wrestled this problem and ended up richer for it.

The fact is, though, that orcs are basically “safe” versions of colonial racist imagery. Appealing to Tolkien won’t help here, nor will any other characterization of orcs as inherently evil automotons, because this is completely divorced from how they’re used in games. Read The Orcs of Thar for the apotheosis of orcs-as-safe-racism, where orcs are divided into tribes that parody different enthnicities (with “red” and “yellow” humanoids that represent exactly the stereotypes you’d think they did).

In fact, anti-analysis about this isn’t “old school,” at all. The first writing about a distinct D&D orc culture began with AD&D’s orcish pantheon, which was a creation myth about a marginalized race coming to claim their rightful due. (Did Roger E. Moore write that stuff? He was a pretty clever guy.) It’s only recently that gamers have so fought in earnest for the right to ignore culture (though they still fetishize silly monster “ecologies”) — fictional culture, real culture and the intersection between the two. Instead of using these questions to improve traditional dungeon crawling, they’re being rejected because insecure gamers have adopted an ideology of dungeon crawling that has little to do with actually playing the game.

What happens when you boil the little nuance down into a soundbite position? An opportunity to call somebody a faggot for playing an “enemy” of D&D, of course.