Naked Went the Gamer is posted
Finarvyn:
Quote from: Calithena on March 24, 2010, 04:49:20 PM
I still think this is a good essay and I'm still glad we published it in Fight On!
I think so, too, and I'm glad it was published as well. It is a fine essay and I think it has historical value as well as some valuable thoughts to make one ponder. I'd suggest that folks buy a copy of Fight On! as a show of their support. :-)
Quote from: Calithena on March 24, 2010, 04:49:20 PM
Some people got on me about it after the fact because they felt that Ron was not a particularly strong D&D fan, preferring T&T and Runequest as games among the early productions. What Ron does get though is the fantasy culture that the play-cultures of all these early games partly grew out of, and we were glad to get his perspective on it for the magazine.
I think that it's interesting to look at the evolution of the role-playing genre. From its basic roots, miniatures gaming (which evolved into role playing) started off as a hobby for middle-aged men. Sure, some of us got into it while in our early teens, but most of the gamers I knew were a lot older than me and when I see photographs of other gaming groups from the era they all seem to be aged college or later. No one at the time seemed particularly distraught by the mostly-nekked woman being sacrificed on an alter on the color cover of Eldrich Wizardry back in 1975, and I suspect it was because of the age of the participants. Lots of folks had read the old Conan pulp stories and other "non PC" fiction, and it really didn't bother anyone to have this stuff out there.
So then, as the hobby evolved, gamers grew younger and younger. Suddenly there was this outcry against "Satanist" D&D players and other rubbish. I suppose that if gaming is an adult's game you have certain parameters but I suppose these change when kids become interested, in the same way that movies have ratings for viewers to use as a guideline. Gaming never had that, and maybe that makes people nervous, but I've met a lot of strange people through gaming (and some normal ones, too) and no one that I've encountered actually thought that magic was real, that they could summon Satan using their game books, or decided to join a cult so they could kill orcs. Not one.
So anyway, Ron's article was probably ill-recieved because many of the old-school gamers remember bad vibes from those outside the D&D clique and Ron's style of play is certainly outside of the usual D&D style. Although I won't claim to have really mastered Sorcerer or other games of Ron's creation, I certainly value his contributions to the field of gaming and his thoughts and insights. If I didn't, I wouldn't hang out here as much as I do. Someday I hope to really "figure out" Sorcerer because it does go against many of the axioms burned into my brain through D&D, and when I finally get it figured out I expect to see Ron nodding and saying "told you so".
It was a nice article and I'm glad that Fight On! took the risk and printed it.
greyorm:
Marv, I think you may have something there with the gradual age-range change in D&D from the college-set grognards to the flood of younger kids who came in during, I think?, the late 70's/early 80's. I don't think that's all of it, but I think that may be a factor, especially combined with the scare-mongering, and "Won't somebody think of the children!?" political posturing-and-arm-twisting of the same period.
Quote
...no one that I've encountered actually thought that magic was real...
You've never met a pagan or occultist gamer?
There's a very high population of such in our hobby (though, obviously, they don't think pretend game magic is real).
Actually, I only point that bit out because the "I've never met any" and following bit sounds like "I have to defend the hobby to the mainstream as completely safe and unremarkable and not crazy at all!" But we do have lots of "weird" (ie: counterculture) people in our hobby. In fact, our hobby, and its history, is rooted in weird counterculture. And it seems like we often try to un-embrace that important aspect of the hobby for the sake of looking "normal" (whatever that is) for an ill-defined "normal" "Them".**
That is, yeah, there aren't crazy people running around in our hobby, but why is it THAT is the idea we fixate on when talking about our hobby? There aren't crazy people here. So? We're defining our hobby by what we're not and by how really normal we are? Instead of defining it by what makes our hobby interesting and unique and fun? We're still defending it instead of promoting it, and kind of confused about those two things as being the same.
That's damage we picked up from the 80's/90's scare to our subculture, and I think many of us are still carrying that around in our pocket without really taking it out and examining it.
Which, I think, leads to precisely the same sort of censorship, self-and-otherwise, that Ron's essay mentions. And doesn't just apply to the retro-revolution, but modern developments, too -- like the Wizards ban on association with products that mention drug-use, or sex, or anti-establishment or anti-authority views (ie: you can never portray the police or whatever as corrupt, bad, or evil), or whatever, in any context.
** (Tangential: I think this is also one of those things that helped White Wolf garner such a large audience: they took the "we're counter-culture, we're NOT normal, just like you, and proud of it" stance in terms of the whole goth-craze of the 90's. They sold a "we're not 'normal' and we're just fine with it, go suck eggs" attitude to a group of people for whom that was already a rallying cry.)
ejh:
Great to see the article's out in the wide world now!
I don't have any commentary on the Andrea Dworkin subject, but I was amazed to see that when you look for information on her views, one of the things Google quickly throws at you is her being interviewed by, of all people, Michael Moorcock.
I provide the link not to contribute to any argument, but so that the mystical ouroboros of 1970s fantasy/scifi culture may close in upon itself, and the circle may be complete. :-)
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.html
contracycle:
I liked the article, very interesting; only just came across it.
Quite a lot of it jibes with my own experience, albeit I came to it slightly later (1982-ish) and my local context, there was no prior period of liberal thought against which there was a backlash. Instead, things just got more intensely moralistic and repressive. This also means that my exposure to the prior fantasy genre was random and spotty; I knew the Fafhrd/Mouser books existed, but they were not to be had for love nor money. My influences were thus the Clarke/Asimov stuff leavened with a dose of Burroughs. Therefore D&D certainly did act as something of a gateway to fantasy for me, and even more so for the people with whom I played. On the other hand, in the same way Raven describes his locality being behind the curve, this still meant that you could, as Ron describes, strike up a friendship with individuals of all kinds through this shared interest, outside of a recognised subculture. At any rate, this also meant that the sex element never featured strongly in the criticms, perhaps surprisingly - maybe a lot of it was gone already, but while I had to have a few chats with Earnest Parents (tm) to convince them I wasn't inducting their children into a cult, none of these people, good citizens that they were, would ever have looked at the actual contents of the books to see any of that stuff; everything they "knew" was second hand anyway.
I don't have much of an awareness of or interest in the OSR movement as such, but it does seem to me that the backlash as such isn't over yet. "Family values" is still a political buzzword, and although my experience is purely anecdotal and based on encounters on the internet, I'm not sure the hobby has been much of a counter-cultural refuge. Perhaps some of the OSR people are not so much capitulating to the backlash, as voluntarily working within its terms of reference.
Secondly, I just wanted to throw out a though on something else, namely the import of Japanese manga and anime. Quite a lot of this stuff features sexual explicitness pretty much unthinkable in the West for the audience its often aimed at, plus monsters a nd magic etc., and it comes in for some of the same sorts of criticism. But, it seems to me that it has much the same sort of element Ron describes in early fantasy, the monster and the naked both being strong presences, without being organised or standardised. Although not perhaps directly related to RPG topics, I wonder if this form is in some way stepping into the gap created by the sanitisation of fantasy, and appealing to the same sort of audience.
Hans Chung-Otterson:
The article (and ensuing discussion) has gone a long way towards helping me understand the roleplaying subculture as it stands today.
I only entered this subculture a scant few years ago*, but I immediately noticed something that confused me and that I couldn't articulate about the role-player demographic, something that couldn't be explained away as mere geekiness. It was that this roleplaying subculture seemed to have intersections with all kinds of other, way-out-of-the-mainstream subcultures, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why. Now I understand, and I like our subculture all the more for it. It did seem to contain some sort of counter-culture-ness, but again, I couldn't place it until now.
*I was way interested in D&D as a youth, but I wasn't even allowed to watch the Smurfs or read the Goosebumps books. D&D was totally evil (and is still suspect) in the eyes of my mom. I remember reading the Chick tract in a family friend's house. They had a whole box of 'em, and I read them because I loved comics (Calvin n' Hobbes, not Comics comics, b/c those weren't allowed either). I remember, impressionable child that I was, believing every lesson those tracts taught me, and being scared shitless by them.
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