Safe Words

"The Miracle of the Andes", that's what they called it. Many people come up to me and say, that had they been there they surely would have died. But that makes no sense. Because until you're in a situation like that, you ... you have no idea how you'd behave. To be affronted by solitude without decadence, or a single material thing to prostitute, it elevates you to a spiritual plane, where I felt the presence of God. Now, there's the God they taught me about at school, and there is the God that's hidden by what surrounds us in this civilisation. That's the God that I met on the mountain."

— opening narration to the film, Alive (1993)

For those who don't know, in 1972 a plane bearing a Uruguayan Rugby team and their friends and family suffered an airplane crash into the remote Andes Mountains; 29 out of 45 died.  They were stranded for 72 days against the worst odds imaginable, in a sea of ice and rock, deprived of oxygen due to altitude in below freezing weather.  I won't say more, in case the reader would like to find the book or see the film.

Listening to the opening monologue a few minutes ago, having decided to watch the film again, I was struck by the dualism of the two gods spoken above.  Unquestionably, the first god is also the D&D model.  People tend to imagine gods — including the Christian god — much along the Greek model: as persons with agendas, sometimes good or bad, but always ambitious in some manner, whether it's to obtain sex with a herder girl or convince the locals that, "Yes, no kidding, I'm real and I'm you're god."  It's no great observation, since it's been written about constantly for thousands of years, but we see gods in our own image, with our own foibles and our own needs.  Even the Christian god needs a motivation we can understand: "he loves us" — though he has a helluva way of showing it, not to mention he's pretty damn picky about who constitutes "us."

Much better, however, than the narrator's other "God": the unbelievable force of concentrated, indescriminate death and indifference that lies outside those parts of the world we've managed to tame.  The God that lives in literal space, surrounding the earth itself in every direction, who waits patiently for silly fools to prance forth in thin metal and fabric suits mere millimeters from the worst environment imaginable ... no environment at all.  We don't represent that god in D&D, except possibly with the dice; and it's at precisely that point that the game gets "too real" for comfort and we have to back away and impose nerfing traditions to mitigate the raw, cold, brutal seriousness of the "god on the mountain."

What a bunch of pansies we are.

I had choices to pick from for this image.  Ones where, unlike the one above, the climber wasn't tethered.  This stuff is porn for climbers.  The more dangerous, the more absurd to commonsense, the better.  Pitons slip.  Rope breaks.  People die every year.  Actual death, mind you ... no fudging.

We gamers can't even comfortably imagine death, much less face it.  We have no desire at all to be elevated to a spiritual plane, even metaphorically.  There are no gods of nature in D&D.  Even the very bad ones, the gods of chaos, have an agenda ... and though its unknown, an arrival time as well, like a train that's perpetually late.  But nature is right here, right now.  It's ready to kill you today.  And it doesn't care.  Not a tiny bit.  We matter as much to nature as the particle of dust landing on the tip of your nose, just now.  The particle that could kill you — if it's the right particle.

Doesn't sound much like a game.  Doesn't sound "fun."  Sounds dismal.

Yet what is that girl doing up there, courting death?  What the fuck is that all about?

Well, now, you see ... our bodies are built in this weird, designed format, tailored by a constant interaction we had with this horrific natural god for literally millions of years.  That includes a lot of years before we were "surrounded" in this civilisation.  There was no civilisation.  There was only this solitary indifferent god — in a very non-metaphorical way you understand, because we hadn't invented metaphors yet.  All we had was our biology ... and to keep us alive, to permit the birthing of children that would keep the species alive, our biology developed a strategy that enabled us to cope with constant, terrifying spiritualism on the order of that plane crash turned up to eleven.  All. the. time.

Part of that strategy included flooding our body with intensely pleasurable drugs during moments of extreme danger.  Just think about how fucked up that is.  Your body chemistry is actually designed to reward you for courting life-threatening situations.  And judging from those who push the envelope in this regard constantly, the effect of this "drug" makes you feel god-like.

Take a moment and think about that combination of words.

Why in particular do we associate feelings of fear mixed with invulnerability with the word "god"?  Hm?  Any guesses?

I'll give you a hint.  The feeling occurred millions of years before the word did.

That's right.  We invented a word that captured the feeling, and now we use that word when we have that feeling; and we ascribe that word to other imaginary entities that we associate with being invulnerable and laughing in the face of danger.  True adventurers, if you will.

But you don't have to climb upside down to tap into those feelings, or drugs if you wish; like nature, which you're a part of, those drugs are right here, right now, locked into tiny vessels inside you just aching to be flushed into your arteries and veins.  Want to learn how?  Want to learn when and why D&D enables your imagination to jack you full of god-like chemicals?

Get rid of your safe words.  Ditch the screen, roll the die in the open.  Ditch the fortune points and any namby-pamby harnesses.  Let yourself feel scared.  Get a hitch in your throat.  Experience some trembling in your fingers as you reach for a die.  If you fall, you fall.

At least you'll live like a god.