Naked Went the Gamer is posted
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
Here's my essay published last year in Fight On!: Naked Went the Gamer. It's written as a companion piece to S/Lay w/Me.
All questions and relevant personal information are welcome.
Best, Ron
droog:
That's quite intriguing. We never had the full moral majority backlash phenomenon in this country, but of course 99% of our roleplaying texts were from the US, so I imagine there was some trickle-through effect. There's definitely a larger point regarding the change in public discourse in those decades.
Seems to me my drug of choice RuneQuest actually got filthier over the years (and continued to be relatively popular in the Australian scene at large). But that is likely a conscious counter-culturalism on the part of Stafford et al.
Simon C:
What I find in interesting is that while nudity in rpg art has, as you described, become less acceptable, the acceptability of pornography in mainstream discourse has grown. I think the primary force behind the backlash that you describe, Ron, is not prudery so much as its evil step-father, misogyny.
Which is not to say that the older fantasy and sci-fi works were above a level of exploitative tittliation, but that the hysterical virgin/whore dichotomisation, the dehumanisation of women (especially sexual women), hypermasculine posturing, and the way sexual attractiveness is positioned as a feminine trait while sexual desire is positioned as a masculine trait, has reached a fever pitch since the relative liberation of the sixties and seventies.
Not that the sixties and seventies didn't have their own sexism embedded in even the most "liberated" movements, but it seems like the acceptance of radical thought, the willingness to challenge assumptions and norms, and the possibility of a real gender revolution were closer then than they are today.
Maybe this is too spicy for the internet? I'm having a go at GNS in another thread, which by comparison is bland soup indeed.
greyorm:
Been waiting forever to read this! And now I've appeared to write an essay in response. Sorry.
I came into gaming on the edge of the early 80's cleansing of the material. Because I grew up in the middle of nowhere, we were always around a decade behind other areas of the country in terms of what the big things were and what was available to us, so my old school books were old school, with bare-breasted demonesses and funky 70's style illustrations, even though my first introduction to the hobby was the red box D&D Basic set (I graduated backwards to the old printings of what would become 1st Edition AD&D). This is despite living just a few hours north of the D&D belt, which expanded to the south-east.
Because of the local time-warp effect, we were also somewhat protected from the hysteria up there, though not completely. It had penetrated through the culture far enough that my father was convinced D&D led to suicide, and the only reason I ended up in the hobby was because my mom poo-poo'd that notion and let me buy the red box. A couple years later, some lady passed one of the older boys I'd gotten into the hobby a "Dark Dungeons" tract, which provided our gaming groups hours of incredulous amusement ("Blackleaf, NOOOO!" was a running joke for a good while).
But the real hysteria didn't hit until late high school, so around the early 90's, when we were treated to the full gamut of "D&D leads to Satan worship" nonsense in the form of a couple of lectures at our churches by a couple of visiting youth ministers, including one who claimed to have been a "high-level Dragon Master" (yes, "Dragon") on various fliers distributed around our high school, who promised to reveal the "truth" about D&D.
We went to the presentation ready to argue, armed with logic courtesy of Michael Stackpole and Dragon magazine, but all we got out of it was that this guy and his ministry organization were the ones living in a fantasy world (once I was older and looked back on the event, I recognized he had even "seeded" the crowd -- used plants in the audience back up his assertions "independently" -- which is likely why I ended up studying and writing a few papers in college on the various underhanded tactics these sorts of groups regularly employ as part of their "ministry" and "religious outreach" programs, the cult-behaviors and ties to such, and so forth).
There was also a video showed at a confirmation class, that after my father heard about it and went in to complain to the Church leaders -- small town, good, lifelong church member goes in to tell the church leadership they are being hornswaggled and dragged around by the nose -- was never to my knowledge given another showing. (By that time, obviously, he'd turned his head around on the D&D=crazy issue.) So, the hysteria never hit us super-hard nor as early as elsewhere in the country, and we didn't have to deal with a whole lot of persecution based on it (other than the typical persecution of outsider status suffered by the teenage geek in the days of yore).
Unlike a lot of other guys I knew who grew up in that transition era, I dug backwards into the stuff as I got older, though it was based on some early foundations, like a complete reading of the Lord of the Rings when I was five years old, extensive exposure to Norse and Greek myths, odd little sci-fi and fantasy books from the library (inc. some of the greats that I really didn't know were greats until much later), hit Howard pretty early (grade school sometime IIRC), books about monsters (movie and mythological) often with naked women in Classical style, etc.
So I'd already had a good taste of all this when growing up, and lots of outside exposure to the same kind of material elsewhere (Wagner's Nibelungen opera, the funky original LotR movies, the Clash of the Titans, the old Sinbad movies, etc), and I've been digging more deeply into that history, or into the artifacts of that history, as I've gotten older (frex, I just recently started reading the old Heavy Metal mags).
But it is important to realize I was on the cusp of the 70's-80's transition in a small town with conservative bent in the middle of nowhere. So some of the material discussed in Ron's essay was more like a passing shadow than an integral part of the activity: you knew it was there, but it wasn't really at the center, then it went away completely and you kind of wondered where it had gone (and maybe even what it had been about).
Also, keep in mind we didn't have the internet back then, especially not in my tiny corner of the planet (except, eventually, a couple of us set up a local BBS that really saw no more than maybe half-a-dozen users), and so I didn't have nor could I find a group of like-minded peers to talk about any of this with, or be referred to material equivalent with whatever I happened to be reading. There wasn't a selection at the library, or a decent-sized bookstore carrying it. There was no trail of breadcrumbs to follow, just a lot of random stumbling around and finding the occasional thing.
There were no conversations about any of this fantasy/sci-fi stuff until I was much older, though the interested peers I found then were immersed in the fantasy and sci-fi series of the time (Silverberg, Donaldson, and others), thus we didn't have the eldership thing going on that Ron talks about...heck, I was the father of the original game groups that sprouted up in my area, and I was eight at the time.
We were in virgin, unexplored territory given the surrounding culture of our area and we honestly had no clue what we were doing there or TO do there, other than the fact that we were kids and swords, knights, magic, and monsters were cool. Even the older kids who gamed with us first and then split into their own groups were trying to make this thing work by (in hindsight, poorly) imitating the novels we were all reading at the time. We didn't have the guidance of anyone who had been around for the previous era or knew anything more about it than we did.
Instead, we had all this stuff that hinted at this whole different idea of what fantasy was supposed to be like, such as the early AD&D manuals and stuff from authors who were writing and getting into their careers during that whole turning point, that we had no real way to decode.
Despite getting into it, I was never really satisfied with fantasy as it was presented and understood in the late 80's, and especially in the 90's and on through today. Which may be why I drew lots of naked girls in high school (well, that, and I was a teenager), and then years later came to the conclusion that fantasy fetish porn had no "soul". It was sex, with funny ears or swords and kind of boring and heartless all told, and not fantasy-with-sexuality (or perhaps "humanity" would be the better word?).
Eero Tuovinen:
This is an interesting topic. I was inspired to hunt down a bunch of Ralph Bakshi's movies last fall after Gencon due to that essay, in fact. (Cool World sucks ass, in case you didn't know.)
We don't have the sort of Puritan culture that US has around here, so while sexual liberation happened through the 20th century, the process wasn't the sort of human rights epic that it is in the USA. No backpedaling, either - Finland is probably as liberal as it ever was today. Makes observing the drama in the US seem like another world now and then. For instance, the things people are saying about Playing D&D with Porn Stars in the Internet at the moment seem nigh incomprehensible in how nasty and condescending you apparently are allowed to be towards other people just because they work in adult entertainment.
I don't know if it is connected, but roleplaying never was at particular odds with religion here in Finland, either. Some roleplayers around here like to pretend that they were big rebels around the beginning of the '90s, when a few church-associated loons tried to import the D&D scare, but it didn't exactly go anywhere here. When I started the hobby around that time roleplaying was treated generally like amateur theatre or some such cultural hobby. We children got most of our rpg books from the library, among them a couple of biblical history adventure games written by Finnish hobbyists for the Church to use in youth work. (This was in-land in Upper Savo, an area associated with agrariarism; not a particular hotbed of liberalism or globalism.)
The sum total of that experience of course includes the fact that without controversy roleplaying was never very radical in Finland, either - American source texts came to the country long after the '70s, for instance, which might have a part in explaining why nobody ever took roleplaying seriously as counter-culture. Still, at least in my experience, roleplaying has been pretty definitely a liberal cultural current in Finland, just a relatively polite one. Popular games like Paranoia, Cyberpunk 2020, Stormbringer, Call of Cthulhu (all translated) were and are read with a clearly liberal interpretation, and my usual experience with roleplayer culture here is that it's mostly a hobby for the social left and liberal right, not for staid church-going folk. Even today anything resembling conservative voice is conspicuously absent from Finnish rpg texts and discussions.
A part of the picture is the fact that pre-Tolkien fantasy literature from the English-speaking world came to the Finnish consciousness at the same time with roleplaying, sometimes driven by the same people. So at the same time that we were playing rebellious punks and gothic dope-fiend Elric-lookalikes we were also reading Howard, Moorcock and Vance. Tolkien was huge in Finland, of course, but the wide-spread distribution of these other fantastists was for a short time even more important in the early '90s. The understanding of fantasy was continuously expanded through the '90s by extensive publication of Francophone fantasy comics (ranging from Valérian to Inspector Canardo) and British AD2000 titles, both of which are well-known among my generation in Finland.
In summation: I like Ron's message in that essay, and while I don't have a personal stake in the direction of American fantasy, I wouldn't mind expanding vistas one bit. Especially the idea that roleplayers should be proud of the form's roots in counter-culture strikes a chord with me.
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