Three games about religion
Callan S.:
Ron, I don't think I was forcing a definition that doesn't commonly occur. On the other hand I'm looking through Ophite and the more the direct references to the word 'religion' become a peripheral in the text, the more the effect I mentioned becomes peripheral. It seems pretty peripheral so far in the Ophite text, so perhaps me going into the details wont benefit the design process much. So I'll leave it at that.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Callan,
Yeah. Meaning, yes, I'm with you on that definition or at least that phrasing of religion being commonly, frequently used. And I'll agree further in observing that many overtly-religious people (most observant, most sociologically committed) identify their personal faith with the details of their practice, although whether this is regional or religion-specific I can't say.
The construction I presented in my first post and in the video is definitely not the most common view. I didn't intend to correct you in terms of what's said or how it's said, and I don't think I chose my wording toward you personally quite right. Doing that is tough with this topic. All I ask is that my own phrasing be considered, as a contrast to the way your post put it.
Best, Ron
Marshall Burns:
This is highly interesting. Like, seriously. Man.
Ok. I was raised in an evangelical Christian household. Primarily Pentecostal (I grew up seeing people dance in the aisles and "speak in tongues" and thought nothing odd about it), but there were times when a Pentecostal church my parents were OK with wasn't available and we went to a different (but still evangelical) church. Just about everyone on my father's side of the family is religious. My grandfather writes gospel songs, and evangelizes at prisons and in foreign countries. My great grandfather has played guitar in the church band at my hometown's First Assembly of God for decades. I attended church every Sunday unless ill until my teens, when I was allowed the choice and gradually stopped going because I didn't find it fulfilling in any sense.
Frankly, I was sheltered to a great degree, particularly from things that smacked of the occult (something which evangelicals hold a great fear of, in my experience). For instance, I wasn't allowed to watch the Smurfs because what's-his-face, the bad guy, had a pentacle (misidentified by my parents and everyone else I know as a pentagram) on his floor. That's probably the most absurd restriction that was placed on me, but there were plenty of others regarding what I was allowed to watch, do, and read.
I remember once playing pretend as a child and drawing material from a fantasy videogame, involving magic and whatnot, and my parents becoming upset. From that point, such videogames (Final Fantasy, etc.) were no longer played in our house. That restriction later vanished without comment or ceremony. When Magic: the Gathering got big when I was 10 or so, I was forbidden from playing it, and my mom treated me to a story of how my dad used to play D&D and found out it was evil, so he burned all his D&D materials and skulls formed in the smoke (I shit you not, she really told me that).
On the other hand, it was my dad who introduced me to RPGs with a game of Boot Hill (which went nowhere because I was 8 years old; it was beyond me at the time).
I can't pretend that being brought up in that environment had no effect on me. It's had plenty of them, both positive (I took to heart notions like mercy and patience that got bandied about), and negative -- coming to terms with my sexuality (heterosexual but decidedly non-vanilla, and that's enough info about that) was something of an adventure, and I distinctly remember being viscerally wracked with guilt and irrational fear after feeling up my girlfriend for the first time at the age of 15 (an incident which pretty much scuttled our relationship as well). I was in and of a particular subculture, and although I'm not part of it anymore, it's still part of me. It's also very much entangled with my (tangly) relationship with my father, and that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
I got into RPGs in my teens, around the same time I was granted freedom to abstain from attending church. It was also around this time that I became literate (I had been a reader since as long as I could remember, but I didn't start being literate until then). It struck me as odd that my dad showed no interest in any of the RPG stuff (I was designing games even then) despite having introduced me to it in the first place, but I didn't call much attention to it either, and pretty much actively hid evidence of other games I was involved in (which involved religion-related content pervasively -- interestingly, these games were designed by friends of mine who didn't grow up in religious households). But my dad's disinterest wasn't entirely unwelcome either; I lived with a pretty much constant anxiety of being judged negatively by my father, a fact exacerbated by the fact that you cannot debate anything with the man due to an infuriating ability on his part to dismiss any dissenting argument from the floor (and it doesn't matter if he does it fallaciously; you're still not going anywhere with it). But that's getting into the relationship-with-my-dad thing, which isn't the same as the religion & RPGs thing.
It's interesting to me to look at the games I've designed and notice that none of them really deal with religion. My teen designs featured the D&D powerz list kind of non-religions, and that was as close as I got. Even the Rustbelt with its Faith rules doesn't really deal with religion; it deals with faith from a pop-psychological standpoint, and remains systematically unconcerned with actual religion in terms of observance, doctrine, and institutions. They can be there, sure, but the game itself doesn't particularly care if they are or not. It's more about belief and how the character feels about that belief.
contracycle:
Not sure where to start; if you just find bio data valuable, I' guess I'll start there, although it's probably not very useful for your purposes.
My social context as a kid was quite religious, and being religious was generally considered to be coterminus with being a Good Person, but my family was not particularly involved. I couldn't actually tell you whether my mother takes religion seriously, for example, but for all that I was christened and sent to sunday school etc, that was just the normal stuff that people did. But when I wanted to stop going, there was no fuss. I guess I considered myself a believer in a fairly passive and informal way until the age of about 12 or 13, although it was actually after that point that I got involved with an actual religious group, primarily for social reasons. In some respects I was looking for a convincing argument, but in the end it only confirmed my developing atheism. I didn't really experience RPG as rebellious, because there was no pre-existing hostility as such, certainly not one I was aware of anyway, and I only encountered it after I'd been gaming for 4 or 5 years. The result was that I thought the whole saga was absurd and if anything it hardened my stance on what nonsense people were willing to believe simply because a preacher said it. But for some of the people I played with in those days, I think what you suggest is quite true, that it served as a medium of rebellion, although I associate that more strongly with black/death metal and sundry affectations to being a satanist.
At any rate, what I wanted to mention is that I think a potential 5th aspect to consider is simply data. That is, the structure of a social religious practice that carries some kind of authority can carry within it data of practical utility, even if it doesn't have sufficient information with which to logically justify the position it takes. For example, your classic Hollywood natives trying to appease and "angry mountain"; storing the information that the mountain can enter an "angry" state may be factually wrong, but if it carries from generation to generation the information that the mountain can be dangerous then it can gave social utility anyway. I suppose this might be folded into Culture, but it's not culture of the general establishment of right and proper behaviour sort; it is embedding an intuitively understood insight into the practical world without fully understanding it and relying on the continuity of practice to keep that data alive. Religiously mandated forms of ritual purity can be seen in the same light, in that although many of them are wrong, many of them are not and did probably contribute to hygiene and cleanliness.
I certainly agree that a huge amount of discussion about right and proper social structure, personal behaviour and morality etc, is conducted in a religious context. On the other hand I'm not really so convinced that the Abrahamic texts are much use in this regard, because they are all infused with a programamatic doctrine to establish monotheism specifically, and thus much of their content is aimed at a quite different purpose. But that quibble aside, I certainly see the value in exploring nominally religious texts for the information they contain on cosmology as understood by those people, for example. That element, the cultural one I guess, is that one that draws most of my interest, and where my frustration with RPG's to date arises. My problem with them is that they basically treat the characters as psychologically modern. Religion is thus not a perception of cosmology or right living, but specifically magical practices and anachronistic personal belief. The very distinctions between "magicians" and "clerics" is basically flawed, as is the idea people generally engage with a specific deity rather the pantheon as a whole (note: I know this isn't strictly true. People did attach themselves to particular cults; but the idea that someone was a worshipper of this god or that god in isolation seems pretty weird to me).
I guess a good example of the kind of things I would like from an greater exploration is exemplified in the scene from the Robin Hood Prince of Thieves movie in which Morgan Freeman's Moorish character has a brief rant about how he can't determine where east is in England so as to pray to Mecca. The sort of thing where religious practice is personally important to characters, where it prompts demonstrative and expressive play, rather than gods as patron or power sources.
As a note, another text you might find useful is the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours. Although obviously intended as a work of history, Gregory was himself a bishop who also wrote several tracts on the lives of the saints. The text is thus full of matters of primarily religious interest, such as the doings of church figures, signs and wonders observed, his doctrinal arguments with Visigothic Arians, etc. As such, while not a primary source for the matters of human reflection you mention, it is an interesting window on the practical life and views of an active agent of the church in a period significantly different to ours (the 500's). Like the instance he recounts where a particularly pious monk prays for a miracle which is granted by god, and all his fellow monks immediately beat the shit out of him so that he doesn't becomes puffed up with sinful pride at this achievement.
I also wanted to mention something about the Call of Cthulhu things said above. The trope of "defending civilisation against the barbarians" is a powerful and seductive one, and although often, indeed usually, infused with racist overtones, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. The Romans weren't particularly racist, and it would be difficult to see the effort to preserve the empire against hordes of human-sacrificing barbarians as other than heroic. I know it's dodgy and often exploited territory, but it is so because because it is so evocative.
Ron Edwards:
I'm liking this thread very much. I had no real idea of where to go with it except to see where it goes, and my current notion is that everyone's various posted details - analytical, scholarly, personal - are accumulating into a mine for each new reader. Who knows which piece will be inspirational in terms of later design and play, and along what vector? It's the richness of the mine itself which seems to be the thread's main asset.
More thoughts on the three texts themselves would be helpful too. I know most of my presentation so far has been a little standoffish about that, because they really aren't in either the textual or design shape which would benefit from ordinary critique. But I am interested in what they make people think about, if anything, as a couple of posts have done. Or who knows, any thoughts on the source material or the combinations I've chosen. It is my first set of RPG work that invokes the Grateful Dead throughout, for instance, and band-specific music of any kind has never been a major inspiration for me before.
Best, Ron
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