Naked Went the Gamer is posted
Ron Edwards:
Hans, I'm glad the essay touched base with your experience of the hobby. I'm interested in learning more about how your early experiences with D&D and gaming intersected with your experiences from reading all that Jack Chick.
Gareth, all of that is intensely thought-provoking for me. To begin with the last part, I think you are quite right in terms of content, and it adds an interesting twist. As I see it, anime is marked to some extent by an effect I can only call hyper-Victorian: if it feels good, it must be transgressive; to feel good, you must be transgressive because everything "normal" has been rendered meaningless.* I see a weird dance, in anime and manga, between genuinely countercultural (what I praise in my essay) and effectively a politically-empty vehicle for fetish-based tension-release (one of the things I criticize in my essay). I'm not saying the former is absent, though.
How that worked out and continues to work out when the medium is transferred to Europe, I don't know. But I think that political context would be my starting point for trying to dope it out.
If you don't mind, refresh my memory about where you live and grew up: I think I recall it's Wales, is that right?
Best, Ron
* All of this led to a big rant about U.S. client states, militarism, dubious democracy with unwavering center-to-hard right outcomes, and more.
contracycle:
No I grew up in South Africa. In practical terms the social context was probably not that much different from what you know as the US Bible Belt, but it was also a bit more complicated than that. South Africa is a society comprised of micro-groups to a much greater extent I think, because even in the essential unity of the white National Party state there were divisions between English Anglicans and Afrikaans Dutch Reformed Church. The overall morality was very strict however; the nearest thing SA had to a pornographic publication had no actual nudity - breasts were displayed but nipples were covered by stars - and gambling was banned (except for horse-racing, because in true hypocritical style, an early president had argued that "every man has the right to exercise himself and his horse.") So while it's not quite true to say that the 60's counter-culture passed South Africa by, it was firstly only present among tiny, tiny groups of South African whites, and secondly all of its political significance was immediately and totally subsumed into the struggle against Apartheid. On the other hand, the anti-D&D movement was imported wholesale because there are strong links between South African protestant churches and American Evangelical movements, and the whole "Satanic abduction" scare in the 80's was huge. The little RPG society I had set up in my highschool was thus soon banned under parental pressure.
Anyway, thats probably more than was needed, but I think you can see why a "backlash" was something of a moot point, and why the public libraries, or even bookstores, weren't exactly stuffed with fantasy.
Hans Chung-Otterson:
Ron,
Primarily it made me incredibly nervous as I started to buy, and later play, roleplaying games. Once I was in college and away from home I wanted these games so bad I could taste 'em; subsequently I bought the D&D 3.5 core books. It was a war in my own mind--I knew there was nothing wrong with this game, but It'd been beaten into my brain again and again that they were eeeevil, and so I had all these pangs of conscience while reading the D&D books.
I went to my first convention in 2008, and there were moments--only moments, but they were solid and real--walking around the convention floor when I said to myself, "Am I doing something wrong here? Is this hurting me spiritually somehow?" Ridiculous, I know, but it happened.
Mind, I may not have had these struggles had I thrown out the Christianity that made my mother so Bothered about Dungeons & Dragons, but as I've grown up and become a roleplayer I've kept my faith. I suppose my initial struggles with the hobby were less about reconciling my beliefs with my gaming than extricating the pack of bullshit fear-mongering lies that Jack Chick and his ilk sold to my over-protective mother from my faith.
Interestingly enough, before that 2008 convention experience, I ran a series of 3.5 sessions for a bunch of high schoolers I was working with in a Christian youth group. This left me with no pangs of self-conscience or worry that I was doing something wrong. My struggles came in two waves: with my initial purchase of the D&D books, which was my first contact with the hobby, and with my first convention experience, which was my first contact with the subculture.
Joel P. Shempert:
Ron, I really enjoyed the essay. I've been curious about it for some time. I find that yours mine and and Hans' experience dovetail in interesting ways.
I believe I'm right around 10 years younger than you, which means I came into the hobby right smack in the middle of the "dark time" you describe--soft-focus, toothless artwork, reactionary Baptist furor over Satanism and gratuitous violence, and yet, behind all that forbidden mystique, a rather mundane, vanilla reality.
When I was little (circa 1980) we moved to the Dalles, Oregon, a sleepy, dusty little town on the Columbia River. My dad had taken a job as assistant pastor at a baptist church there. There our family had our first contact with D&D.
There was this cool, funny guy who worked in the children's program and youth group, in his 30s, I think. The church caught wind that he was running D&D for the youth, and a delegation went down to game night to confront him. My dad had never heard of the game, but the senior pastor had, and "knew" it was Satanic. They observed the game, and whatever my dad saw there that night convinced him 'till his dying day that it was evil. "Straight out of the pit of hell" was the phrase he used, over and over, for decades. The two elements that dominated his perception were that first, someone was drawing intricate and gory pictures of events in the game, and second, when given the choice between giving up the game and giving up working in the church, the guy chose to quit the church. The former was proof that the game was steeped in violence and wickedness, and the latter that, of course, it was an unhealthy obsession that consumes its players' lives, to the point where they'll EVEN choose it over Sunday School.
Later I came to realize how warped these perceptions were, but at the time I lapped it up. When I was a few years older I read books and pamphlets on the "Satanism" in the game (including of course the Chick tract), and believed every word. Still, though, I had an instinctive sense that even if the Devil had infiltrated this particular game, the IDEA of roleplaying still had merit, and I was drawn to it. So I ended up playing everything BUT D&D--Marvel Super Heroes, MERP, Palladium--which was somehow OK with my folks because it didn't have the name "Dungeons & Dragons" attached to it. My brothers and I were worried we'd get nailed for MSH because it was made by TSR, but the parents never made the connection. And so progressed my adolescent roleplaying career, fun and all, but very sanitized with nary a whiff of the forbidden or dangerous.
To back up a bit: my introduction to the hobby came from a pair of cool older boys in my Christian homeschool co-op, themselves Pastor's kids, funnily enough. Just hearing about the game through the lens of their offhand remarks gave the game a tantalizing allure even though I knew it was Wrong and Evil. I remember being over at their house and seeing the Fiend Folio lying around, and the name and artwork confirmed for me BOTH how Cool AND how Evil D&D was (I also remember being confused, and thinking it was about a Fiend named Folio!). The boys were very aware and respectful of (or fearful of) my parents' boundaries. When the older one took me over after school to play a game, he made it a nice tame Marvel Super Heroes adventure. In retrospect I wish he hadn't been so respectful; I could have dearly used a taste of sweet artistic rebellion!
In college I hooked up with a group of folks who DID play D&D, and there turned out to be nothing much forbidden or dangerous there. By then I was already convinced that the charges of Devil Worship and being initiated into "the real power" were so much nonsense, but I think there was still a vague notion in the back of my head that if not blasphemous, there was still something naughty about the game. But really, not so much. Even so I can identify with Hans' "war in my mind" feeling, of knowing rationally that there was nothing damning about the activity or the product, yet being secretly terrified for my soul anyway. Consciously, I was only aware that I needed to keep it hidden from my parents.
So with regard to the essay, I feel my experience backs up your picture of the hobby's history in that I grew up with a D&D that was both neutered in terms of truly daring content (we had plenty of "edgy" evil alignment play and the ensuing "good roleplaying" debates) and shrouded in a veil of danger and fear. I can see now that the fear worked both ways--both ignorant yahoos afraid of D&D and a roleplaying culture afraid of the yahoos. When I encountered the Dead Alewives' D&D skit I loved it for its attack on the claim that the game was "eeeevill," but didn't catch that it was also attacking the game's culture in its timid squandering of the potential for underground art.
Peace,
-Joel
KevinH:
Hello all,
the Glorantha-phile in me wants to argue against Ron's article, especially as Uleria was mentioned.
Uleria, for those who don't know, is the Gloranthan goddess of love in all it's forms; physical as well as emotional. I wanted to argue that her large presence in an RPG world disproved your thesis.
However, I have to admit that even Glorantha has become de-sexualised (for want of a better word).
No, it's not about sex in RPGs. It's about consensual, pleasurable, enjoyable, fucking-for-fucking's-sake, hot and sweaty, afternoon delight, love making being removed from RPGs.
Uleria has somewhat faded in Gloranthan writings, whereas Thed (goddess of rape) and Gorgorma have become more noticable. Even Babeester Gor, who used to be the fight-all-day-party-all-night good time girl has become dark.
My point is that representation of sexuality as pleasurable has become lost. Or rather, we allowed it to be taken out of our games. Sex is acceptable if it's used to sell (ie book covers), or violent (the erotic elements of Vampire, frex), or degrading, or in some way bad.
Bad sex is good, good sex is bad. WTF? How on earth did this become the norm?
Kevin
p.s. I'd like to mention the hypocrisy in Blockbuster's policy of not stocking porn, despite having shed-loads of true-life rape dramas. Heck, I even saw a movie in a Blockbuster portraying Mike Tyson as the victim in that whole he fucking RAPED someone misunderstanding. It's not something that affects only RPGs, to be honest.
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