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Month: June 2016

Roles, Titles, Names, and Fatherhood

In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse defines some dichotomies other than finite vs. infinite in order to speak more clearly to real life situations, particularly things that fall outside of what we normally call a game (recreational, relatively inconsequential pastimes) but can still be understood with a broad enough definition.  Things like war and romance. I find that thinking of these aspects of life in terms of games is not a purely intellectual exercise. It helps me make sense of real-life things and events, provides a neat way to discuss ideas with others, and I think that how we live life influences the kind of smaller games we play and those in turn loop back and influence how we live.

One of these dichotomies he draws is between the theatrical and the dramatic. Like finite and infinite, one of these is not better or more important than the other. We are both of these things in everyday life. Theatre is analogous to the finite: there is a beginning, a sequence of events, and an outcome. Drama, in this context, is analogous to the infinite: it is not confined to specific points in time or specific outcomes. Theatre is dramatic while you are experiencing it, because the outcome is not yet known. Once the actions have been taken and can be fixed into a narrative or a script it becomes theatre. In order to play theatrically, a person assumes a role. In order to play dramatically, a person does or becomes the role.

For example, last Sunday was Father’s Day in Canada. In order for the designated celebration day to be about more than increasing sales figures for greeting cards, fashion accessories, and hardware store gift certificates it is necessary for us to wonder what a father is and why we should celebrate that. It is abundantly clear that siring offspring does not qualify a man as a father. The men we celebrate are often stepfathers, adoptive fathers, or other father figures. To be celebrated as a “real” or “true” father a man must assume the role of father and all that entails. When a man has, as a matter of record, met the expectations and obligations associated with the role this is theatre. The fathers and stepfathers who do this well are winning in finite play. They receive the title of father, while those who fail to meet the standard are said to be undeserving of the title. A title is only as good as it is recognized and deferred to by other people. Our society ensures this by attaching powers to and celebrating that title. That is what we did on Sunday the 19th. We, as a society, reinforced a theatrical role. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this at all, as long as we are aware of what we are doing. Perhaps it was most appropriate then, that my brother and I celebrated this with our father by attending a movie at a theatre.

Mother and father are titles; mom and dad are names.

In section 25 of Finite and Infinite Games, Carse introduced the infinite and dramatic counterpart to the title: the name. When you address a man as dad that is not a title, it is a name. It is not something that can be won or lost. It does not matter than you may be the only human being in existence who refers to a particular man by that name. It carries no inherent power, as any power that man may have in your life depends entirely on the level at which you recognize his title of father. We don’t celebrate the name of dad on Father’s Day, we celebrate the title of father. That makes sense because the sort of things we do on those designated celebration days are often more theatrical than dramatic. To celebrate someone’s name is not to have a specific day, it is to use that name in everyday life. I celebrate the name of dad simply by calling him that and engaging in the drama (the word drama itself derived from the Greek word for action) of being his son. That can mean different things to different people, but again I think we do well to recognize how we honour our dads in the dramatic as well as the theatrical. The drama and the theatre are linked, but distinct.

So, that’s how I see fatherhood in terms of playing games. It’s not something that is normally thought of as a game, but the celebration of fatherhood becomes more meaningful to me to recognize the limitations of our societal recognition of a title and to see that there is much more to it than that. We can look at many other roles and aspects of life in a similar way, and discover more about what we’re really doing when we use a name or recognize and defer to a title.

Evil, and Why I Blog

A few hours less than a week ago, a man committed the atrocity that defined the news for the past six days. Although I made a deliberate choice for this blog to have a particular focus rather than being an independent news source or a constant stream of random things I have to say about anything that seems interesting at the time, I find myself unable to avoid addressing this. It is simply too big in my world to ignore. I can, however, approach this topic from the perspective of games and philosophy. I am not doing this to be glib, nor do I think of myself as being one-dimensional in my obsession. It’s because lots of smart people have already covered that ground, and I will express my feelings about this in different facets of my life. It’s also a bit too late in the news cycle for it to seem appropriate for me to tear my robe and shave my head in this space. I am now in the stage of figuring out how to live in the world where it happened, and I believe my hobby and creative pursuits can play an important role.

So how does a person go about making sense of the world we live in? We adopt philosophies and religions to help us sort out what is good, what is evil, and how we can be as good as possible and minimize evil. There is a great deal of diversity in how we define good and evil, and what the appropriate responses are. The reason I added philosophy to the mandate of this blog rather than sticking to reviews, rants, and fun tales from my table is that reading Finite and Infinite Games gave me the idea that the gaming hobby and the desire to create content for and about games can, and should, be a part of something bigger than entertainment and passing the time. They can be tools of good, against evil. And that is how I relate blogging about games to the Orlando atrocity: we can talk all day about racism, cultures glorifying violence, and the politics of gun control but all of these are merely trees growing in the soil of evil. There was a body count before Sunday. The count will continue to increase long after this incident in Orlando is just another datum on the great big chart of atrocities. In moving forward from and with our grief, we must take hold of the tools needed to dismantle evil: our ballots, our online outlets, our donations, our voices, our pulpits, and I would argue our games as well.

Grief

In Finite and Infinite Games, Carse defines evil as “the termination of infinite play… in unheard silence.”  In this context, infinite play means life in general rather than any specific person’s life. Evil is therefore not defined by death, but rather by the lack of listeners for the voices grieving the fallen and objecting to the evil that caused the loss. Evil did not win when bullets killed and injured people. It won when others made the decision to ignore it. Or if they did not ignore it with their words, ignoring it with their actions. It’s easy to get outraged when people say outrageous things, but evil’s greatest triumph comes not in incendiary declarations but in the silence of business as usual. In some ways, quietly musing about how to protect the USA (or Canada, or the UK, or the EU) from “Islamic extremism” in the wake of an atrocity that is anything but Islamist terrorism (while erasing the identity of the victims) is much more evil than waving one of Westboro Baptist’s tacky signs. They’re one of the top two whipping posts when it comes to Anglo-North Americans talking about evil without mentioning the Nazis, and they certainly get people talking in absurd disproportion to their numbers. Evil loses when the opposite happens, when the atrocity does not fall into unheard silence. The overwhelming response in the news and social media has shown me that evil is strong but has not yet triumphed.

How, then, do we get to the gaming table? In stories like The Courage of Being Queer, by Alexander Chee, we get a glimpse of how games can be a part of the solution. Where evil thrives on silence, a game gave two young boys a new way to have a voice and be heard. I want to be a part of that. I want my hobbies and creative pursuits to destroy boundaries and break silences. I want to be a part of the larger culture that has been anything but silent in the face of this evil. I might also have specific ways in which I would want to influence government policies or specific cultural narratives, and I will get more political in political spaces and righteously indignant in religious spaces and so on. But in my gaming spaces, I seek to use the finite games we play to support infinite play. That is to challenge toxic notions such as the one that history and the progress of civilization inexorably leads to the inherent righteousness of my nation-state exercising lethal power to obtain and retain dominance over all others, or that mine are the chosen people whose privileges are unquestionable. Finite games can do that in little doses that prevent the silence from taking over when we’re not actively mourning the dead or criticising others. When I engage in creating stories, I will be very intentional in opposing fundamental evil. If there is something I can learn from this event, something I can change, it will be to do this with gusto and no apologies. It’s easy to refrain from the crass display of aligning oneself with evil, but even more important to do it when there might be a cost and/or a risk associated with causing an argument or a social rift. That, I think, is better than making a big show of my grief over one incident and then moving on with business as usual. I will do it in every space I have access to, including this one.

A Tale of Three Castles

It’s hard to discuss Dungeons and Dragons as a game without hearing the name Tolkien. It’s like a special case of Godwin’s Law, except that Tolkien is generally well-regarded by the people making the comparisons. Worlds full of wizards, dragons, dwarves, and elves tend to be given the label Tolkienesque. It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The elven alphabet in the illustrations in your official D&D rule books might look like it comes from Middle Earth, but the game certainly did not start there. It started in two castles: Greyhawk and Blackmoor.

These two castles were the settings for the first fantasy roleplaying games that lead to the development of the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons. David M. Ewalt, whose book Of Dice and Men I mentioned last week, tells us the history of how two wargaming enthusiasts created the first settings for fantasy story-driven roleplaying games. This was a radical departure from the traditional wargaming settings, which tended to focus on American military history from the revolutionary war, to Civil War conflicts between the union and the confederacy, to World War 2 battles between allies and the axis. And there we have it, a reference to the Nazis. Thanks, Godwin.

The third castle I allude to is one that never inspired thousands upon thousands of games. Castle Stirling is the one I cobbled together for the second campaign I ran in 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. As I read the histories of Greyhawk and Blackmoor in Of Dice and Men, I smiled and felt proud of myself. It’s not often I feel like I can compare myself to the legendary fathers of D&D, but in a small way, I can here. These settings, unlike Middle Earth, were not created for the sake of a linear plot. They were designed for play. That is what Stirling has in common with Greyhawk and Blackmoor. I didn’t start with a place and make a game of it; I did some research so that the outline of the castle would make sense, then designed a series of encounters (combat and otherwise), then detailed the castle to accommodate the game.

The process for outlining Castle Stirling was deliberately anachronistic: I got on a bicycle, rode to a public library with a notebook, looked up some books on castles, and drew some rough diagrams by hand. This might not sound novel to people who have been doing this since they were teenagers in the 1980s or 1990s, but I was a twenty-something working in the late 2000s it was already in the age of Wikipedia and vast repositories of professionally designed D&D modules, and I could have driven my own vehicle if I wanted to. But I wanted to see if I could tap into the excitement with which men of my dad’s generation recall their AD&D adventures. That meant I needed a memorable setting in which legends can be forged, itself born of creativity rather than consumption. While I did do a little bit of homebrew in my first campaign, Castle Stirling was part of my first attempt to create a truly engaging setting rather that linking published modules together into a longer campaign.

Tales of adventure may start in taverns, but sooner or later, they lead to castles. 

Once I had a castle in mind, I started thinking about how I could capture the excitement evoked by the phrase “dungeon crawl” without making it a procedural check for traps, kill the monster, get the treasure sort of thing that would bore the roleplayers in my group to tears. None of the rooms in my castle were empty save for cobwebs and a single pressure plate that triggers a hidden blowgun, because that doesn’t leave a lot of room for players to push any limits. Allowing the players to negotiate with sentient Yuan-Ti henchmen is not innovative in the fantasy roleplaying world anymore, but some of the players had never been involved in the sort of game where sarcastically mocking the enemy’s hissing speech could actually have an impact on how the game proceeds. Further into the castle, the players came across a massive iron golem acting as an automated gatekeeper, demanding a blood sacrifice as the price of admission. I knew there were some obvious solutions (refuse and fight the iron golem, give a small amount of one’s own blood to an evil demon god, or go find one of the hapless henchmen outside the door to sacrifice) but fully expected that someone could try and circumvent the whole setup, at which point I would have to improvise and bend the rules to keep the game going. What ended up happening followed one of the standard solutions, which I expected from the black sheep assassin in the party of otherwise pious characters. What I didn’t expect was for a priest of Pelor to help harvest the bodies. Our group still fondly refers to him as the best cleric ever.

So, like the fountain of snakes in Greyhawk, I had a bunch of nifty things that at face value did not seem to add up to something grandiose. A long hall which contained an invisible maze that starts filling up with water (and then sharks) when the players make it halfway through just doesn’t evoke the same majesty as a rich description of Rivendell or a long legend of how the old gods delivered the dwarves to salvation from the fire giants. The reason I focused on the little things is that they were all things that players could interact with in many ways including ones I could not possibly control. In some ways, within the walls of the castle, there were fewer boundaries than being outside in a majestic world where the plot proceeds inexorably to a predetermined end.

Of the various highs and lows in my campaigns, I think the design of Castle Stirling was one of the high points. Of course, having only used it once in a home campaign, about six people at the time of publishing this post have ever heard of Castle Stirling. But the magic of the fantasy tabletop roleplaying game isn’t in the rules or the famous settings or the particular one I made for my friends. There are thousands of other castles, pyramids, palaces, towns, forest groves, ad infinitum imagined by the game runners (dungeon masters, game masters, storytellers, whatever they’re called in your rule set) for their own campaigns. What other type of game offers such a wealth of opportunities to engage players in new and interesting ways? That’s not entirely rhetorical. If a game other than a tabletop RPG offers that kind of potential, I really do want to play it.

Potentials and Pitfalls

Of all the kinds of games I am aware of, there is one type that stands way out front in terms of potential to be used for social good and to understand ourselves. That is the dice-based tabletop RPG. Or, for those who aren’t already well-versed in the lingo, Dungeons and Dragons should ring a bell. I am talking about that, as well as the widely varied alternatives that are directly or indirectly derived from D&D. As recently illustrated by Josh Kramer in the Washington Post, it is now firmly established as a bona fide cultural phenomenon. I don’t need to spend a lot of time explaining this to you, as David M. Ewalt does this quite well in his book Of Dice and Men (I would recommend it especially if you are one of those people who only subscribe to one or two geek fandoms and find yourself curious but unfamiliar with this thing your other friends are raving about).

Instead, I’m going to tell you the story of how I got into it and why I think it has such great potential and also why I think it could also be monumentally disappointing. My first experience with D&D didn’t involve a basement room full of teenage boys with dice and character sheets. Although my social circle certainly qualified as “nerd” or “geek” or whatever label you might apply to a boy in grade 7 who skips school not during classes but during the school dance to go play Starcraft, nobody I knew owned a rulebook or had the idea to put something together. And then in 1998, my parents bought me a game called Baldur’s Gate. Never before did I get to play a game with such an intricate character options. It was loosely based on the third edition of D&D (with a few elements of 3.5 folded into the sequels and expansions), but Baldur’s Gate wasn’t quite the same as D&D. It was good, but then Baldur’s Gate 2 was amazing. It was largely more of the same in terms of game mechanics, but the quality of the writing, the visuals, the dialog, everything was given a huge upgrade. I had sunk 200+ hours into that game by the end of high school. Yet for all of its splendor, it was very limited: there were several distinct plot branches, but there were only so many areas to explore and specific conditions for winning or losing. After playing through every possible path, I briefly visited the modding community. I downloaded and played through a few, and enjoyed them, and toyed with the modding tools in the hope I could create my own adventure. I lacked the skills and commitment at the time that would have been required to create something that works, but it was certain that I wanted more. I wanted to be able to keep going to other places and seek other stories limited only by the imagination of creators (myself or otherwise). I had boundaries, and wished for horizons. During the time I spent on the modding forums, the regulars spoke of “PnP” (pen and paper) as an ideal rather than an alternative. I learned on an intellectual level why a lot of people found the video games to be neat but no substitute for the real thing. Almost two decades after Baldur’s Gate, I eventually came to understand this concept for myself.

Most tales of adventure from the D&D table hinge on the effects of throwing chaos orbs at a flat surface.
Most tales of adventure from the D&D table hinge on the effects of throwing chaos orbs at a flat surface.

By the time I finally got to play true D&D, I had completed an academic degree and wasn’t living with my parents anymore. 4th edition had just come out, so that is what our DM (dungeon master, person who organizes and runs the game) wanted to run. Arguing about editions is a very strange blood sport that only makes sense to a few particular subsets of D&D enthusiasts, so I am not taking a position here. The only reason why I mention it is because I don’t come at this from the perspective of someone who has been playing since the 1980’s or 1990’s. I’m not part of the newest cohort, but I’m newer to it than people might assume. It wasn’t until the late 2000’s that I had, in a game, played a character who could try and break, jump over, or seduce anything that wasn’t intended originally to be interacted with in such a way. No door was sealed shut, no waist-high bush could contain me. I don’t love BG2 any less, but getting to play in a potentially infinite fictional universe was freedom rather than a newer, nicer, bigger cage.

And I loved it. I got to try different things, and run a few campaigns. Games started and ended based entirely on the group’s desire to play, not on any externally defined plots and stages of gameplay. We could go anywhere the DM was able to come up with a narrative space for. Characters had objectives and end goals, but the only thing that ever ended a campaign was a satisfying end to a story arc combined with the desire of the players to do something else with their time or move on to the next campaign. And move on we did, despite several comings and goings, the core group is into its ninth campaign (of which I have been involved in seven). We also played games in World of Darkness and other rule sets geared more towards modern and horror settings rather than swords and sorcery. The appeal of the game wasn’t just in one setting or iteration of the rules, it was in the fact that the game could go anywhere we wanted it to go.

So, when does D&D become a terrible disappointment? Aside from malicious dungeon mastering, it also becomes rather anemic when people try to win the game. There are many ways this can occur, but the thing they all have in common is that they limit the game right down to one individual’s desire to be seen as a winner. Whether it is a DM forcing characters through a story without giving them any agency, a rules lawyer determined to mathematically prove how much better his character is than anyone else’s, or a player character seeking adoration by proxy of a character, everything that imports unnecessary limitations takes away from what makes the tabletop RPG special.

That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

That’s simply not how D&D became the phenomenon it is today. It is because it has more characteristics of a game than sitting around a campfire taking turns doing collaborative storytelling, but is so much more than finite dice games. It is a dice game, but one that runs on its own time and establishes its own boundaries during play. It can, at the discretion of the participants, keep on being played with the rules changing in order to allow the continuation of play. Every boundary is mutable (according to rule zero of every tabletop RPG). That’s why I characterize it as almost infinite. It isn’t quite, but the tabletop RPG is much closer than anything else I know, and that’s why I continue to play and continue to dream up the next campaign.