Three games about religion
Anders Gabrielsson:
My personal history with religion, with some historical background first. Those who don't care about religion in Sweden can skip the first three paragraphs.
I'm Swedish. Sweden as a country and society and Swedish people in general have (at least superficially) very different opinions and expectations than the US and Americans when it comes to religion. We're very secular and religious belief has no place in politics - not even the Christian Democrat party uses religious arguments for their positions.
On the other hand we had a state church until about 15-20 years ago, into which you were automatically inducted at birth. The Swedish Church is protestant, but very much "old" protestant; not quite Anglican but still rooted firmly in the 19th century traditional protestantism as opposed to more recent evangelical movements. That said, official church doctrine is very progressive, performing marriages between same-sex couples and such (though not without conflict within the church).
Speaking of the evangelicals, they were one of the three big popular movements at the last turn of the century (with the workers' movement and the sobriety movement being the other two). I think pentecostals and various forms of baptists are the biggest branches, but I'm no expert on that part.
I was raised in a traditional, Swedish Church family. Mom was (and still is) active in the church (singing in the choir, sitting on the council and so on) while my stepfather is from a somewhat puritanical family - of interest here may be that they specifically disliked gambling to the point of disallowing any form of chance-based games, i.e. any involving dice or cards. Chess was fine, and him teaching me that when I was five or so was probably my start in gaming. I went to church regularly as a child, sang in the childrens' choir and went through confirmation, though by then (at age 15) I had come to the conclusion that I didn't believe in God and probably never had. Social pressure will do that to you.
My sister (one of my half-sisters, but the only one I grew up with - that's another long and even more boring story) joined one of the more fringey evengelical churches in her teens and she's still part of that side of things though far less vocal about it. We had a couple of arguments on faith vs. reason and since then we've avoided the subject. Not that religion was ever up much for discussion at home otherwise - our parents expected us to go to church and that was about it. When I lost interest I was for the most part allowed to do as I wanted, though Mom would still ask me to come every now and then and I didn't really mind before I started to feel truly hypocritical about it.
When I was around 10-12 there were a couple of runs of moral panic regarding violent comic books and movies on video. (During this time Sweden still had a government-owned television monopoly - not state-run, but not far from it - with all of two, count 'em, two channels. Cinemas were private, though. Anyway, the arrival of the privately owned VCR was huge.)
I've always had an interest in Norse mythology, which has been very popular in Sweden since it was revived during the national romanticism of the 19th century. We all study it a bit in school, and I don't think there's a town in Sweden that doesn't have a street named after Thor or Odin. The area I grew up in is called "Vi" (or "Wii" with an older spelling), which I've been told is Norse for "place of sacrifice". (Having another religious system to refer to, one that was actually used by people who lived where you live, probably changes one's perspective in some ways.) As a sidenote on the sidenote, there are some modernized Norse god adherents in Sweden; my impression is that they're fairly similar to other neo-pagans: harmless, with liberal modern values and a varying degree of spirituality.
My religious views haven't changed much over the years, really, but I have become better at putting words on them. In a strict philosophical sense I'm an agnostic, because I believe it's impossible to know for sure if God exists or not, but in a practical sense I'm a "strong" atheist, in that I believe (in the everyday meaning of the word) that God does not exist.
In the gaming groups I've been part of, faith has rarely been presented as something positive. When religion isn't part of the setting players very rarely play religious characters, and when it is part of the setting it's usually present as fact which makes it more like a weird kind of science than anything else. In my experience, this type of religion (as in D&D and many other fantasy games) can't stand up to any serious examination because it makes the world very, very different from the one we have any experience with, personally or from history. There's a massive difference between being convinced of something and having absolute proof that it's true.
For my currently running D&D 4E game I made an attempt at reconciling the gods as presented in the books, how people actually act with regards to religion and the knowledge people would have with regards to the will of the gods, the afterlife and so on, but partly because one of the PCs is a cleric with some backstory I couldn't be too radical. I'll probably revisit the subject for the next game.
I would like to get more religious themes in my gaming to explore that mindset, but I'm not sure I could get a good group together for it.
Erik Weissengruber:
I've read the three games.
The red game engages players in the gnostic experience of begnining to know a more powerful truth than the (fictional) people around your character.
The ophite game really brings in the social dynamics of adhering to a doctrine outside of the socially sanctioned one, and which looks on the dominant one not only as incorrect or evil, but the very enemy of all that is true and right and good.
"Belief" or evidence don't seem to be the subject matter. The human consequences of living out religious docrines do.
Is that what you were aiming for? Did I grok it?
Related reading:
- The references are good and have grounded the games sufficiently
- (the majority of Biblical studies scholars believe that there was some historical figure whose teachings and actions initiated the Jesus movement but that dispute doesn't really affect the ophite game's fictional cosmology or the validity of your statements about the production of religious texts scattered across the games and associated discussions)
I cam across a discussion of the gnostic trope in popular fictions -- particularly fictions for adolescents -- that might come in handy when discussing/promoting/explaining the game:
http://jseliger.com/2008/06/05/on-science-fiction/
Some of the highlights
Seliger
"I think there is also something in the modern adolescent temperament that science fiction and fantasy appeals to: the idea that you’re being held back and oppressed and that with time you will acquire devices or skills that lend you great power to overcome forces that seem to be evil. Later, unfortunately, you discover that those forces are not so much malicious as incompetent and lazy and that the structure of the world is very hard to change; what those novels often don’t show is how the heroic quest is symbolic in the real world not of battling demons but of study, thought, and work."
Graham:
"But if a kid asks you “Is there a God?” or “What’s a prostitute?” you’ll probably say “Ask your parents.”
Since we all agree [about lies to tell kids and forbidden questions], kids see few cracks in the view of the world presented to them. The biggest disagreements are between parents and schools, but even those are small. Schools are careful what they say about controversial topics, and if they do contradict what parents want their kids to believe, parents either pressure the school into keeping quiet or move their kids to a new school.
The conspiracy is so thorough that most kids who discover it do so only by discovering internal contradictions in what they’re told. It can be traumatic for the ones who wake up during the operation.
I remember that feeling. By 15 I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end. That’s why movies like The Matrix have such resonance. Every kid grows up in a fake world. In a way it would be easier if the forces behind it were as clearly differentiated as a bunch of evil machines, and one could make a clean break just by taking a pill."
The fun thing about the games is that they allow players to play out undergoing, living out the repercussions of, and engaging in the theological/scholoarly pursuit of breaking the simulacrum [http://tinyurl.com/44ahr9n] (and in the skull game's case, facing up to how the institution betrayed its followers).
Ron Edwards:
I'll contribute some thoughts, not necessarily formal responses, to what's been posted so far.
Erik
Call of Cthulhu, or the Mythos as presented through the game, presents a fascinating double view of religion. On the one hand, you have the right-thinking, deeply rational, civilized and effectively retro-Victorians opposed to the gibbering, unwashed, non-white cultists. On the other, you have the yawning and uncontrovertibly insane cosmic void confronting those right-thinking and rational types and turning them into mental patients. So there's a tension between (i) promoting an Anglophilic WWI-American worldview and (ii) challenging it. Not exactly the most enlightened tension considering that the "coloreds" get tagged as grunting hordes either way, but a tension nevertheless. How this gets involved in play strikes me as a major creative and aesthetic concern for the game: is or is not Mythos-inspired insanity insight? And if so, about what? The best Lovecraft stories really nail this, like Pickman's Model, regarding art, and The Thing on the Doorstep, regarding love. The dumb ones, sadly including the game's namesake, do not.
I should have specified that I am in fact examining the Abrahamic religious tradition, as such, not the shamanic and ecstatic approaches that are emphasized in most of the Gloranthan material. Although a look at monastic, prophetic, and other "edge" versions of Abrahamic religions certainly shows a lot of correspondence to those approaches, now that I think about it. Baptist snake-handling, whirling dervishes ...
David
I think you are caught in the exact trap that I tried to help you around: that whenever anyone does anything important with a religious sticker stuck on it, it must be about "belief." I suggest instead not to equate committed, relevant action in a religious context with faith, belief, religiosity, or anything like it. I suggest humans are more complex than that, even if the religion is providing the symbols and vocabulary for the action.
One thing I mentioned in the talk is that when it comes to diversity of observance and the discontinuity between belief and observance, people are quite tolerant and all "of course" when it comes to their own religion, but tend to see any observance to another religion as evidence of profound and committed belief. My carefully-chosen example to a European Christian audience was the head-scarf (hijab) issue - that people in the room may well take it as given that both the attendees and lack of attendees at Catholic Mass that particular week varied all over the map in terms of raw faith, but also may react to a person wearing the hijab as if she were expressing nothing but the fullest and most unquestioning faith. The reaction at the table confirmed my suggestion, or rather, people found it close enough to home for the point to be confirmed.
The decision at the end of a Montsegur story is not strictly about belief, as I see it, or more accurately, it is a framework for investigating belief rather than treating belief as a fixed thing. It is about the social expression of allegiance to a sect at the hardest edge of life vs. death. Whether that includes belief in the sense of personal religiosity is a dial for a given character and a given instance of play. In fact, I suggest that the spinning of that dial, and discovering where it lands for your character when the crunch comes, is what play is about. Does the harlot choose to burn because she believes in the Cathar doctrine, or because she wants to be "married at last" to her lover? Can one even tell the difference? The game leaves all of this up to play itself, most especially the back-story and emotional framing of her pregnancy. It does not dictate that she is simply and only a fanatic who either holds to it or abandons it.
You might be interested to know that the people who conducted human bomb operations for Hezbollah (a profoundly committed Shi'a Muslim organization) in the 1980s came from all of the religions and ideologies available in southern Lebanon, including Sunni Muslim, more than one version of Christian, and secular radical communist, and that Shi'a Muslims were not in the majority. This runs counter to the widely-held notions that Muslims are more prone to using such attacks due to some kind of belief in a martyr's paradise, or that Shi'a are more motivated to do so because of their doctrinal emphasis on martyred historical figures. Those widely-held notions are stuck in the trap.
Callan
Defining religion as "unquestioning faith/belief" is simply counter-factual. It's precisely the trap I'm talking about, a refusal to look at the practices, observances, doctrines, and institutions as human phenomena with features of their own. When you take belief, faith, all that stuff, out of the picture, all those other things remain - and remain consequential.
This is precisely why so-called enlightened, secular northern European culture can refuse to face up to its own ethnic and cultural bigotry and still be smug about it. No one is more classically, medievally Christian than my Nordic friends, especially concerning Jews and Muslims, no matter how modern and "we're all atheists now" they congratulate themselves for.
Take a look at the games (or drafts, or "things," whatever they are), and see what you think.
Anders
My wife presents an excellent example of what you're talking about. When we moved to the neighborhood we now live in, as a Swede living in the States, she joined the local Lutheran church, in which we were married and into which our twins are baptized. Given the local demographics, most of the people who attend that church have names like Lindstrom and Lundberg, most of them third- and fourth-generation Americans. But the difference between her expectations of the church and what she encountered there is fascinating. To them and to the ministry there, personal belief matters greatly, it's at the center of all the observance and all the church activities. For instance, the baptism ritual was about nothing else. But to her, personal belief is kind of a minor and not especially interesting part of her desire to have church and observances be part of her routine. The discontinuity was strong enough to reduce her interest in participating in those observances and activities, quite a bit in fact, compared to her initial enthusiasm when we moved to the area. Our kids no longer attend the Sunday school there, for instance. By contrast, our third child was baptized in the thousand-plus-years-old church in Norrkoping, which includes the graves of my wife's grandparents, great-grandparents, great-great ... you get the idea. And that ceremony, steeped in concrete tradition unimaginable to most Americans, did not involve advocations of belief at all.
Erik again
Quote
"Belief" or evidence don't seem to be the subject matter. The human consequences of living out religious docrines do.
Yes, that is it. Or not living them out. Or more precisely, reconciling religious doctrinal exposure with one's maturing personality and choices in life.
My reading of the "red" game doesn't include the notion of truth. I think instead that it throws that concept hard into the blender of beauty and insanity. My seminal inspiration probably lies in one of the sequences in Valis, in which the protagonist has a very colorful and cosmically-flavored vision of his child's hernia, and takes him to the doctor to discover that it's true. Vision? Prophecy? Insight? A rational decision retroactively colored in by a little too much imagination? Stupid luck? The text wisely does not say. The character's vision was quite arguably both beautiful and insane, and the question is raised whether it was insightful ("true"). And I think a darker, more profound question is really underneath that. Because the text does say, and I think elicits profound grief and horror in doing so, that the child had been suffering for years without anyone noticing. Say the vision was prophetic, true, insightful, cosmic, et cetera ... well fuck! How genuinely good is "truth" that let that go on for so long? The book is so good because that underlying howl of rage underlies every single plot point. I hope to have incorporated that into the game most especially regarding the outcome if you were, for instance, to rely on the Living Life to the Full option throughout, and more generally, in the rule that always decreases one or more scores by 1 after every round.
Regarding Relic, nothing in the game dictates that the church ultimately betrays its followers. That's one outcome that might happen, yes. It depends on where your mind goes as you play.
Best, Ron
Anders Gabrielsson:
I've read the Red game now, and while I find the actual game interesting what struck me most was the appropriation of the character sheet as a physical object. I really like that.
I suspect that the Lutherans of Scandinavian descent in the US, especially in the communities where they dominate, are far more conservative than Swedes in general when it comes to these issues. Religion used to be a very important part of everyone's life, especially their communal life, and if your beliefs were slightly different from those of the people in the next town over that has a conserving effect.
Quote
One thing I mentioned in the talk is that when it comes to diversity of observance and the discontinuity between belief and observance, people are quite tolerant and all "of course" when it comes to their own religion, but tend to see any observance to another religion as evidence of profound and committed belief. My carefully-chosen example to a European Christian audience was the head-scarf (hijab) issue - that people in the room may well take it as given that both the attendees and lack of attendees at Catholic Mass that particular week varied all over the map in terms of raw faith, but also may react to a person wearing the hijab as if she were expressing nothing but the fullest and most unquestioning faith.
This is very true. As I'm sure you know headscarves and similar types of clothing are hotly debated in many European countries currently, but obviously only in relation to Islam. That Christian nuns cover their hair is uncontroversial, and that it would have been scandalous for a grown woman to go with her hair uncovered here a hundred years ago is also ignored.
(As a sidenote, I've been quite amused by a book called "Scandinavian Humor & Other Myths" which is about Scandinavian Americans. It has a full chapter on Lutheranism.)
David Berg:
Hi Ron,
As long as I get to explore whether my Montsegur character's a fanatic or not, I'm happy. Maybe I explore that in the choice of whether to burn, or maybe I explore it in the motivation of why to burn -- either way is cool with me. "No one cares if you're a fanatic or not," would be disappointing, though.
As for your larger points about real-world behavior and perception, they make total sense to me: hijabs can look deceptively devout to non-Muslims, Hezbollah can appeal to various people for various reasons, etc. I hear ya.
That said, if I had Game A about secular Hezbollah members, and Game B about exploring what you really believe in and relating it to your choices and actions, I'd be happy to play both, but the latter would be the one that scratches my "RPGs about religion" itch.
Ps,
-David
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