Sunday, May 14, 2023

Playing Pretend

 The greatest weakness of Dungeons and Dragons, and of all role-playing games, is that they're seen as "playing pretend."  This disparages the game in the eyes of every individual whose heard of the game and never played it, and in the eyes of thousands who have played it and come away with a feeling that they'd rather do something more "grown up."

It is fun to play pretend, even for adults.  It's fun to dress up and act all heroic, waving a pretend sword around or even a plastic copy, while crying out in a pretend voice that we're storming a pretend fortress.  Yet given the simplicity of such pretensions — their lack of mature themes, the presense of fairy tale races and monsters, the wavering voices of those who speak glowingly of "returning to their childhood" or "holding onto their youth" — D&D and other like properties appear infantile and silly.

Some voices push by with arguments that redefine the activity with key phrases like "problem solving" and "resource management."  Some extremely foolish people have even connected D&D with "artistic expression" and other such tripe.  And while admittedly these aspects bear some importance to the game, they hardly raise the legitimacy of the activity.  It's still make-believe when the problems are pretend problems and the resources are pretend resources.  Artistic it may be, but so is children's theatre.  Child-based programs must embrace "education" to give themselves legitimacy.  We may think, for a moment, that D&D could have a piece of that pie, but there are very few out there who want to put D&D play into our schools.

Does it matter if this validity exists?  By far, most in the hobby — an appellation I disdain — do not care.  They wear their silliness and pretense on their sleeves, stiffening their lips sullenly should anyone suggest childish pursuits are something of which an adult should be ashamed ... which, on the grounds that adults are free to do as they like, is well enough.  Nonetheless, the puerile chip on the collective shoulders on the hobbyists cripples the game in two important ways.  First, it's come to mean that no outsider takes the game seriously, or should.  And second, the attitude arrests any forward movement in the activity's evolution.  Institutional infantilism denies the possibility of the game ever growing up.

What is it that makes the game, for some of us, really thrum?  I think we get past the races and the monsters, and past the heroism, and past the pretense that we're accomplishing something great when we foil an imaginative enemy.  These things remain relevant as trappings go, but are they really what digs down into the soul and revs our engines?  I don't think so.  The trappings of any activity, at their core, are pertinent only as conduits to a more satisfying return on our investment of time and thought.

As ever, I turn to baseball because it's universal and it remains something that people do respect as an activity.  What is this "core" I speak of?  Is it hitting a ball with the bat?  Is it catching a ball?  Is it throwing a strike?  No, of course not.  These are the trappings.  It's the arrangement of these trappings; the dramatic process of the ball being thrown, hit, recovered, thrown, with the challenge at the base or plate.  It's the uncertainly of multiple humans performing skilled activities according to their limitations that lifts the simple trappings into something higher.  It's not that I hit a ball, it's that I do it against another trying to stop me from hitting that ball.  Hitting the ball is incidental ... it's hitting a ball that you throw against me that matters.  Beating you.  And then having to beat the fielder who recovers the ball and throws it to first base, where another person waits to beat me.  It's a rapid series of contests, happening seconds apart, that excites the emotions ... not only of the players, but even of the spectators, who can identify with the raw passion taking place.

Where is that passion in D&D?

In the last post of this DMing series, I noted that in my game, when the players are truly uncertain about what to do next, the debate doesn't arise between factions, picking one side or the other, but within the players themselves.  Our fictional player Mick wants to go to the dungeon, but then again he's hesitant to go.  Thus he wrestles with his own conscience — not because he feels anxiety, but because he senses a need within himself to have courage ... which he is surprised to find he doesn't have automatically.

This is very different from the D&D player who pretentiously declares in a heroic voice, "We'll return your father to you, good sire!  For we are stalwart and true, and unafraid of death!"

That's not a brave player.  That's a player who has nothing to lose ... because the character, the game, the dungeon, the result and everything else they're playing is just make-believe.  Whatever happens doesn't mean a good gawd-damn because to that person, the game has no real consequence.  Like a child on a school yard, pretending to be Darth Vader dying at the thrust of Luke's sword, death doesn't mean anything.  He or she can just roll up another character.

From any self-conscious point of view, this is awful.  It's a mockery.  And any participant in D&D that embraces this style of play shouldn't be respected — not by people in or outside the game.  From their perspective, of course the rules are meaningless.  Of course they have no reason to concern themselves with feeling anything, except the sham of pretending they're brave when in fact they're so cowardly that the tiniest constraint on their make-believe spirals them into a temper-tantrum.  They don't take the game seriously because they can't; they haven't the wherewithal, the maturity, the emotional capacity, to take anything "seriously."  That's why they've drifted into the game as a fantasy in the first place.

They need the game to be a fantasy like they need air.

Mick, above, doesn't want to lose another character.  He's lost four already, vis-à-vis the last post, and he's concious of how it will look if he tanks again.  Already the other players around the table are ribbing him, like they would if he were a left fielder who'd dropped four fly-balls.  He knows the others are beginning to doubt his ability to play.  He's conscious that he has to do better, especially as he realises the DM is getting tired of his lack of skill and commitment.  The combination of these factors adds up.  It puts pressure on Mick to change his behaviour, if he wants to continue participating in this activity, with these people.

Mick's problem is self-respect.  He has some.  He wants to measure up to what he thinks he should be capable of doing: in this case, playing well enough that his character survives.

In the alternate example above, our hero-fanatic has retreated into nihilism.  Survival doesn't matter; and if the argument is made that it should matter, or that our hero's commitment might be judged at all — by, say, holding him or her accountable for actions taken — then we can expect pouting, huffiness, outbursts and an inevitable hissy-fit, complete with arguments like, "I'm allowed to do whatever I want!" ... the argument a child makes.

There's no point in trying to manage or educate, or appeal to persons of this sort.  They've already started down a path that they're not going to come back from any time soon, so it's best to quietly inform them that they need to do what they want somewhere else.

The intrinsic value of D&D and RPGs is that, as games, they allow us to explore emotions we wouldn't normally contend with: fear, loss, self-doubt, social responsibility, competence, self-sacrifice and so on.  These are respectable emotions.  These are ideals that children ought to experience and come to grips with.  Not only do they provide young people with the opportunity to deal with adult themes and ideals, they allow adults to immerse themselves into those things that are so easily lost in the day-to-day compromises that we must do if we want to pay the bills and keep our families together.  Nothing in this world is so "adult" as compromise ... the ability to place everything we deal with on a scale of importance, with games and childish behaviour at the bottom and competence and self-respect at the top.  Everything else has to be flexible, if we're to survive and do well.

So if a game comes to take up a lot of our time, it better have elements of those things we view as important in it — or else we're wasting our time.  Mick's conundrum of trying to find the courage to go back to the dungeon is a thinking process that serves him in real world situations ... because it's the same.  The courage to head back to the dungeon is the same sort he needs to step up to his manager and ask for a raise; or step up to the neighbour and ask to have that tree's branches pruned back.  It's facing the business at hand ... and it's ALSO facing the consequences.

D&D is not "playing pretend."  It's weakness is that it's seen that way, because so many people flock to the game as an escape, and not for what the game has the potential to offer.  As a DM, we have to decide which kind of game we're playing.  Yes, the players can have another character when theirs dies.  But we need to ask ourselves: does that automatically come without strings?  Are we, the other players around the table, expected to wipe our memories of the old character, and how it died, also?  And are you, the player, absolved from learning anything about what you've done wrong, or absolved from having to accept responsibility for your previous actions, just because you're getting a new character?

No.  No you're not.

10 comments:

  1. Very, very salient post, Alexis.

    It was by witnessing at game stores this very dynamic of tables entirely made up of "whoever we can get to sit down", limp-wristed theatrics, mock-heroics and not a few detached smartasses treating runnings as personal stage time that made me mock and deride RPGs relentlessly for years as an utter waste of time.

    I did eventually get hooked by the concept of what RPGs could be, but those shoddily run tables, they're still there. I witnessed one such just this last weekend.

    There's something to be said for your sports analogy, for I too respect sports, though I have to upend your claim of universality by replacing baseball -of which I know little- for the beautiful game of football. But bearing past this minor quibble, there shines through the fact that sports are all about, through mediation by a commonly-agreed set of rules, overcoming true opposition in a context of true unpredictability.

    Poorly played RPGs are all about minimizing (if not outright suppressing) either the former or the later. Or both. Tables of such a bent are generally populated with what one may well call nerds, people who're typically prone to the delights of fantasy and averse to the grounded values of sport.

    It's a crass generalization, true, but one that I've found to explain much of my disconnect toward the average RPG table as found in the wild. And my appreciation for writings such as yours.

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  2. It's true about football. Some 95% of my readers are Americans, however, think "football" is this bizarre game played with your hands, so I kowtow somewhat to that pool.

    Football culture is patently cruel where it comes to failure of any kind: fail
    a tackle, fail a pass, fail a kick, and expect to be ringed by your own players screaming at your stupidity. The perpetration of shame in sports is ten times that of American sports - as the investment on a national scale is that much higher.

    I am a nerd ... which is not to counter what you say about these people you speak of. The term "nerd" has dramatically shifted. It used to mean high skill-set capable people with surface appearance defects, and social incompetence, investing themselves passionately in subject material that normies did not understand and did not want to. The term has progressively shed all relationship with capability, so as to make these people not only incompetent but societally irrelevant as well.

    My childhood friends were able, brilliant people who eventually grew out of their nerdiness into Andersonian swans, finding roles as highly functional members of society ... whereas present-day nerds exist in a state of progressive de-evolution into cultural morlocks, driven into anti-empathic attitudes of revenge-seeking, hate and self-aggrandisement. I hate that the term that I once wore with pride can now be applied to the sort of losers who shoot children in schools.

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  3. Coincidence or algorithmic mind-reading, I read your post just after watching this : The Slow Poison of Endless Fantasy. Not as topical as the excellent point you're making above, but still something I'd like all the boys in my daughters' classes to watch and reflect upon.

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  4. Watched it all. It's too anvilicious to change anyone's mind. This is the problem with modern metaphors of this time. The point was made much clearer in the first Harry Potter, in which the mirror has no moral position but remains as something that people have wasted away in front of.

    Most people in the real world are NEVER going to amount to anything; partly because they've been told so from the beginning of their lives and partly because their early attempts to succeed in daycare or kindergarten have already convinced them that they're going to always be in third place behind better finger-painters and playdough sculptors. Their sense of self-importance has already been long-crippled by the time they can understand the message in the video.

    What's more, there's nothing wrong with "fantasy" ... imagination and fantasy do not in themselves prevent people from leading productive lives. Film makers, novelists, designers and so on ALL live in a state of one sort of fantasy or another. It's quite possible to translate one's desire for porn into a money-making empire. The crippling element isn't the fantasy itself, it's the willingness to be a constant SPECTATOR, and not an innovator.

    As such, the moral is fundamentally wrong. There is no devil. There are not deadly forces come to raze the town. There are addictive personalities ... and they'll become addicted to anything convenient that presents itself.

    I despise the phenomenon of the last three decades in which pathetic attempts are made to criticise the internet as the source for society's ills ... the constant pandering that we should all return to parks, and get off our cellphones, and beware the dangers of too much information or communication. It's all bullshit, peddled by people of my generation who think they've lost something they never, in fact, appreciated when they were young. I did hang out in parks when I was young, because I had no money and my personality is, shall we say, disagreeable.

    https://youtu.be/-IzesQaEqJo

    And guess what? The parks were empty. In the 1970s and 80s, years and years before the internet, the parks and the baseball diamonds were available for anyone who wanted to play there, except for a few nights of the week when suburbanites would run their leagues. The criticism of the internet is bullshit. The internet did not invent addiction, any more the television or radio did.

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  5. I don't mean to brag, but it has struck me that you have the best damn readers.

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  6. It's only that my best readers are the ones willing to put themselves out there.

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  7. "the constant pandering that we should all return to parks, and get off our cellphones, and beware the dangers of too much information or communication. It's all bullshit [...]. The internet did not invent addiction, any more the television or radio did."
    I mostly agree, but can't help thinking you are leaving an important aspect out of the equation. The human brain is a powerful yet fragile wonder of evolution, which requires regular recalibration achieved by frequent contacts with the group. Lone geniuses, prom queens, football players and manga artists, they all *need* to be reminded, through interpersonal exchanges, how other people think and feel. Of course 30 years ago you could already obsess about the supposed accomplishments of others by reading magazines, and fantasize about sex all day with nothing more than a few dirty novels and an lingerie catalogue. But when came time to interact with other people, and actually use the neuronal circuits they had designed all by yourself, the vast majority of people where forced to deal with a disparate bunch of random people, whose aggregate amounted to what I'll reluctantly call 'normality'. Hate it or love it, we all had to define ourselves in relation with the actual social reality of our time and place. Now the internet+cellphone combo allows immature minds to seek and *instantly obtain* validation of any self-harming thought, obsession, addiction or destructive fantasy.
    I don't idealize my childhood, half of it was fuckin' awful. You are right about the empty parks, too ; at 14 I spent all my weekends in front of the TV even though I literally had a river and forest at the end of my backyard. D&D was by far the healthiest thing I did. And yet I'm terrified to think how much worse it could have been if I had then in my pocket a device designed to encourage every dark impulse that crossed my adolescent mind.

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  8. I'm sad, ViP, as this is a discussion I really want to get into, and which I think you're able to wage ... but in this venue, I don't know. I expect we'll start and then just back out.

    Without disagreeing, let me just be clear on your salient points.

    Humans need group dynamics.

    Once upon a time, people had to deal with disparate opinions; they were not able to live in a bubble. The "social reality" of time and place.

    The widespread validation of thought, obsession, what have you, is self-harming and - going out on a limb - harmful to others ... and the internet empowers this.

    The physical instrument of the internet, and the device that connects to it, encourages dark impulses.

    I'll leave it there for now, to be sure we're on the same page. And then, if you're willing to commit to this discussion, I'll start taking the above apart with pliers and a blowtorch.

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  9. Well I may once again have bitten a little more than I can chew, English not being my first language and all ; and by the way you rephrased arguments 3 and 4, I ancipate which joints the boning knife will cut first. Anyway when the wine is drawn it must be drunk. I will commit.

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  10. Thank you, ViP. Sincerely. I want an excuse to get into this. I hope I do a good job of it. I'm going to post it on the main blog, as I need room to stretch out, make easy links and so on.

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