|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Feature
|
|
If There's No Saving Throw, I Don't Want To Be In Your Revolution |
Current rating: 3 |
by Bob Mason
Email: masonr (nospam) cox.net |
17 Jun 2004
|
|
Argues that D&D and other role-playing games can and should be a vital part of progressive political socialization (and socializing). |
The personal is the political. It’s a slogan that’s become a mantra that’s nearly become hyperbole. You can hear it in the pronouncements of various social movements, especially feminists and environmentalists, whose work most often leads them to look beyond “mere” socio-politics for the roots of injustice. We need more than social and economic changes, they say. We need a revolution of everyday life, a fundamental change in how we define ourselves and relate to each other.
But the question is, how?
Socialization, they often answer. We need to change the way we teach our kids... and our adults.
If we’re ever to conquer the tendencies to apathy, disengagement and uncritical acceptance of “official” truths, we need to instill in future generations a set of values more consonant with participatory democracy. We need a “paradigm shift,” to quote good ole Thomas Kuhn – where a society’s whole way of looking at the world suddenly snaps out of it (whatever “it” may happen to be) and opens itself to new potentials previously undreamed of, and previously undreamable.
But, again, how? Practical suggestions often seem pedantic and tedious to those already harried by full-time jobs and kids to rear. Swamped by exhaustion and stress, we seek escape. In a way, it’s what humans have always done, why we invented games and literature. So after a long day at the office, we look forward to a night of television, or a good book, or a nice game of poker.
And we forget (if we ever really consciously knew) that games and literature are themselves time-honored tools of socialization, and not mere “entertainment.” We learn lessons from the games we play and the stories we’re told, and we pass those lessons on to children by teaching them the same games and stories (or variations thereon).
The personal and the political intersect right there, in that space we devote to “personal time” or “social hour,” where we use games and stories to pass on and reinforce the rules of life.
Realizing this, we could engage in some sort of rigorous semiotic analysis and deconstruction of personal life (yawn), almost certainly guaranteed to give us and our friends and families crushing postmodern headaches.
Or, we could just play Dungeons and Dragons.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Go ahead and laugh. I don’t blame you for snickering. I know Dungeons and Dragons is stamped with the aura of pure nerdiness, and may strike you as an irrelevant distraction from the important work of activism and social transformation. Perhaps you think I’m kidding. And you’re half-right. I am having fun here, trying to raise some eyebrows, perhaps draw a few smiles.
But on the other hand, I do mean it.
As a perennial nerd, Dungeons and Dragons has been a big part of my social life for more than a decade now -- at least as important as identification with the various “progressive” political causes in which I’ve been involved during the same period of time. I never really noticed a cognitive link between the two until, during a bout of reflection inspired by my recent viewing of The Lord of the Rings, I realized that playing D&D is all part of the Revolution.
Or rather, that it should be.
The way I figure it, if we’re going to successfully bring about an equitable society, where people relate to one another on the basis of something other than cut-throat competition within an unbalanced and unfair system of social hierarchies, then we’re going to have to change a lot more than just the political and economic systems.
We’ll also have to change the interpersonal relation structures – the fundamental ways that people relate to each other on a daily basis. And that includes finding new ways of fulfilling the basic human need for play and gamesmanship, for social interaction and creative exercise.
Which is where Dungeons and Dragons, and other role-playing games, comes in.
Because role-playing games (or RPGs, for short) are fundamentally different from other, more traditional, sorts of games.
Other games -- Risk or Monopoly, for instance -- are rooted in the social paradigm of hierarchy and authority. Such games are about power, and one-upping the other guy. All of them, even seemingly benign ones like Scrabble, are built around the idea that there have to be winners and losers in everything, that someone has to end up on top, and someone else on the bottom.
And in some ways, that mindset is useful. A certain amount of competitive spirit is necessary for both social and physical survival. But when the games we play – and teach our children to play – are centered almost exclusively on winning at all costs, it tends imbalance our moral reasoning without us even noticing.
Traditional games teach us that everyone’s looking out for Number One and only Number One, and therefore, so should we. Children taught such games learn that self-centeredness and ruthlessness are morally redeeming virtues, and they grow up to act accordingly. And adults who play such games reinforce that training, in themselves and in their kids.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that traditional gaming styles are rooted in the ideology of domination, whether they’re consciously meant to be or not.
But RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons are different from that, in very fundamental ways. RPGs are not about competition. The players involved in a game of D&D are not playing against each other for the vaunted title of “winner.”
Role-playing games are about co-operation, about social interaction, about uniting disparate individuals with widely divergent talents and beliefs to overcome a common threat, or achieve a common goal. There are no “winners” or “losers” in a role-playing game. Everyone has an important part to play, and those who work against the other players are not likely to benefit in the long run.
For those who don’t know: a role-playing game, loosely defined, is a sophisticated form of Make Believe. The participants each take on the role of a fictional character, and play the part of that character within the context of an imaginary world or situation. Everyone works together to tell a story, similar to improv theater or the campfire tales of yore.
Any time the characters are faced with a situation whose outcome is uncertain, dice are rolled to determine the resolution, taking into account each character’s unique skills and abilities. Each player determines her course of action based upon her character’s personality and desires.
And the primary reward in Dungeons and Dragons is not power, but character growth, commonly defined through a concept called “experience points.” The more successfully a player portrays her character and the more true she is to advancing the group’s shared story, the more experience points she wins.
Encompassed in all of this is a collection of moral and ethical assumptions that are very rarely enunciated by RPG fans or designers. But the values are there nonetheless, and many of them are quite “progressive.”
Among the fundamental ethical values encouraged by Dungeons and Dragons are:
*Co-operation. As already mentioned, the focus in an RPG is on co-operative resolution of shared problems. No one is trying to “win,” only to have fun.
*Imagination. Players are encouraged to exercise their creative potential, to create three-dimensional fictional personalities, and to actively imagine themselves as part of another world. This is directly tied to another of Dungeons and Dragons’ fundamental moral virtues:
*Empathy. An RPG participant is encouraged to put themselves in another person’s shoes for a little while, to learn how to see the world through another person’s eyes. When playing a character of a race, gender or orientation different from their own (which is generally encouraged in RPGs), players can potentially learn something of what it’s like to be one of “those people.”
*Creative Empowerment. RPGs are a form of interactive storytelling, and as such, teach us not to be dependent upon the mega-conglomerate entertainment industry to supply us with meaningful fiction. In an RPG, we work together to create our own stories, unique to ourselves and our specific values. Role-playing is the creation of personal and interpersonal myths, from which we can gain a sense of empowerment and meaning that’s not derived from the cookie-cutter, formulaic “entertainment” peddled by media corporations.
*Scholarship and consensus-building. Like all games, RPGs have rules, meant to ensure fair play. One of the players takes the role of referee, interpreter of the “rules,” which are generally considered to be only helpful suggestions, not carved-in-stone commandments. However, all players are encouraged to study the rules and understand them, so that all involved can swiftly reach an agreeable interpretation. This focus on study and mutual consensus is a vital skill in the creation of participatory democracy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m hardly claiming that all role-players are the embodiment of the above values, or that RPGs don’t serve many people as cheap, exploitative escapism. Finding and exercising the aforementioned values in a game of D&D takes a certain level of maturity and self-discipline.
But since we’re so often told that “the personal is the political,” I do maintain that Dungeons and Dragons and similar RPGs are far more resonant with the basic moral values of democracy than Risk or Monopoly or even Scrabble.
And as a social progressive, I advocate that Dungeons and Dragons be part of the education of our children and young adults. Such games can be powerful and engaging teaching tools, capable of making common people adept at the fundamentals of negotiation, empathy and consensus-building upon which our very future as a species may depend.
And aside from all that, it’s a heck of a lot of fun.
So, as part of the great project of engineering a just society, you are hereby invited to try out Dungeons and Dragons.
If you do, play it as if the future of the world depends on it – because it just might. |
This work is in the public domain. |
Comments
|
Re: If There's No Saving Throw, I Don't Want To Be In Your Revolution |
by larenegade
compassiontothecore (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
19 Jun 2004
|
|
I don't know much about RPGs and I don't have much interest in playing myself, but, from the way you discribe them and the values they impact, I can see how they'd be an important element of cooperative, participatory socialization and socializing. |
|
