Against the Stream

Right Wing Role Playing

One of my favorite lines about Dungeons & Dragons came from an episode of The X-Files. In the episode, an author is interviewing a young man about a case Mulder and Scully were investigating. After he relates his story, the author asks him if he's frightened to come forward. The man responds by saying "Well hey, I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons without learning a little something about courage."

 

I thought of that scene when I read Russell Moore's article in Christianity Today, "Fantasy Role-Playing is Hurting America." In a clever bit of reversal, he suggests that maybe the evangelical pastors who cautioned him against playing D&D when he was a kid had a point: "maybe there’s another form of fantasy role-playing that might be occultic and pagan in the truest sense of those words."

Paganism, after all, demands the sort of significance that is heroic, in which one’s virtues of strength and power are celebrated in story and song. Joseph Campbell famously popularized Jung’s idea of the “hero’s journey” a half century ago, but the quest for an imagined heroism is even stronger now—and often much, much darker.

Moore's real target, however, isn't really Dungeons & Dragons or other actual fantasy role-playing games. Rather, it's the form of right-wing self-mythologization that has metastasized on the American right and within the Republican Party since the advent of Donald Trump as a credible political figure, aided and abetted by not-really-all-that-crypto-fascists like Steve Bannon. Moore jumps off from a recent Atlantic article by Jennifer Senior, in which she describes the January 6th insurrectionists as "angry, howling hordes" who "arrived as real-life avatars, cosplaying the role of rebels in face paint and fur. They stormed the Capitol while an enemy army tried to beat them away."

Senior ties this into Steve Bannon's background in video game design, and the idea that, for gamers, one's identity as "Dave from accounts payable" is less a reflection of that person's real identity than Dave's online gaming persona, Ajax. He contrasts the occasion of Dave's death with that of Ajax:

Some preacher from a church or some guy from a funeral home who’s never met him does a 10-minute eulogy, says a few prayers. And that’s Dave,” Bannon says. He contrasts this boring, real-life Dave from accounts payable with Dave’s online gaming persona: Ajax. Ajax is tough and warlike. When he dies in the fantasy, there’s a funeral pyre and thousands of people come to mourn Ajax the Warrior.

Bannon concludes that "some people—particularly disaffected men—actively prefer and better identify with the online versions of themselves.”

Whether this provides an adequate account of the motives of the January 6th rioters, I can't say. I suspect not. Disaffection? Sure. But it would be a mistake to assume, as Senior puts it, that they were "cosplaying" as revolutionaries any more than the Jacobins were cosplaying in 1789. They weren't pretending to foment a revolution. They were fomenting it. And their motives, at least as far as I can discern them, were not based on some kind of video game reflection of themselves as heroic avatars. They were whipped into a violent frenzy by a genuine, if delusional belief that their actual democracy was being stolen from them. They weren't role-playing as a violent right-wing mob. They were an actual, bone fide right wing mob!

Which brings me back to that quote from The X-Files and Moore's clever, though ultimately misplaced critique of role-playing. There is, in my experience, always a level of ironic self-parody among role-players. We know better than to take ourselves too seriously, or to believe that we are really learning lessons about courage from rolling dice and pretending to be elves and wizards. We are engaged in a sort of escapism that enables us to recharge our batteries for the challenges of our real lives -- kids, jobs, bills, traffic -- the unheroic and inglorious aspects of our merely human lives. What distinguishes role-players from adherents of Q-Anon or from the Proud Boys is that we're not delusional.

That said, there is something true about Moore's invocation of a certain kind of pagan ideology in his critique, though again, laying at the feet of role-playing games is misplaced. Rather, it is the paganism of nationalism, the paganism of place, and ethnicity and culture that is at the heart of every right wing movement. It is what H. Richard Niebuhr saw as the danger of the worship of merely tribal gods rather than the kind of radical monotheism to which Christians are called.

One can critique that form of paganism without trivializing it as a form of fantasy role-playing. It's not. And while someone like the Q-Anon shaman may seem, at first blush, to be a deeply ironic and unserious figure, make no mistake. He wasn't role-playing or cos-playing. The assault that he and his compatriots launched on American democracy was very real. It was not a game.

On the LARPing Republican Congressional Candidate

Did you hear the one about the Republican Congressional candidate who liked to pretend to be a vampire in his free time? No, that's not the set-up for a joke; that's an actual news story from this past week:

Rush, a 35-year-old attorney who just launched a campaign in Florida’s 3rd Congressional District, knows a thing or two about role-playing. ...

On Rush’s campaign website is a well-produced, professional video, portraying the candidate as the ultimate “conservative straight shooter,” ready to fight for “we the people.”

The video certainly hits all the right marks by featuring a series of heartwarming and inspiring images: Rush placing his hand on a Bible, as a father of a newborn, even initiating a group of enthusiastic schoolchildren on the values of the U.S. Constitution.

What the slick video does not mention is that Rush – as “Chazz Darling,” “Staas van der Winst” and ahost of other roles – was a long-time member of the Mind’s Eye Society, otherwise known as “Camarilla.”

Mind’s Eye, or MES, is a nationwide community of gothic-punk role-players who come together to take on personas of vampires and other supernatural beings (known as Kindred), dealing with night-to-night struggles “against their own bestial natures, hunters, and each other.”

MES has a number of different sects, with names such as Vampire: The Requiem; Vampire: The Masquerade; Changeling: The Lost; Geist the Sin Eaters; New World of Darkness and Werewolf the Forsaken, among others.

Using various “domains” — through both table games and “live action”— Rush participated as dozens of “characters,” with names like Darling, van de Winst, Johan Gambrys, Zane Daily, The Kriesler, Archbishop Kettering and more.

Apparently this led to a bit of controversey, particularly, as David Weigel noted at Slate: "messages about a Rush character sporting a 'rape face' or fantasizing about snorting a line off a machete while receiving fellatio pose obvious problems for a conservative candidate."

There are a few things I find remarkable about this story: First, it shows just how far the nerd community has come when someone hardcore enough to do Vampire LARPing feels comfortable enough in his identity to run for public office without feeling the need to abandon or reject his hobby.

Second, it shows just how much the whole role-playing community remains misunderstood. Role-playing has always been a strange mixture of gaming, improv, community theater, and experimenting in alternative identities. It could be very fruitfully analyzed via any number of lenses, from psychological and sociological to philosophical and political, and there are people, like Ethan Gilsdorf and others, who have given it serious attention. But, to the wider, non-geek community, it sounds strange at first blush, and the idea that someone would enjoy sporting a "rape face" (I have no idea what that is) or pretending to snort coke off of a machette can be off-putting. But this is precisely because they don't really understand what role-playing is. It's right there in the name: You take on a role, a persona, that is often very different from your own. The answer to the question of why a person might choose to play one particular type of character rather than another is personal and ideosyncratic, but it shouldn't be construed as a reflection of that person's real-life ideology or persona. In fact, many LARPers and other role players revel precisely in the challenge posed by playing someone or something radically different from their real life persona.

Alyssa Rosenberg does yoman's work defending Rush:

Nerd-bashing and spotting political hypocrisy are both well-established traditions that magnify each other in this story. I understand how irresistible it is to try to pick at seeming contradictions in the life of a guy who posts pictures of himself with his newborn on his campaign Web site while popping in black contacts and writing laughably incoherent threats to fellow role-players in his off hours. But in the interest of geeky solidarity, let me mount a brief defense of Jake Rush and his hobbies.

As my colleague Alexandra Petri has pointed out, political consultant Peter Schorsch,who went digging for details on the Mind’s Eye Society, is stretching as far as he possibly can to suggest that Rush is palling around with dog-menacers and book burners. Never mind that no evidence exists that Rush’s activities were anything other than fantasy. And as fantasy, there is not actually much contradiction between Rush’s stated policy positions and the games he’s playing.

Dave Weigel suggested that there is tension between Rush’s work in drug enforcement during his tenure in the sheriff’s department, which he touts as proof of his law-and-order credentials, and his fantasies of snorting cocaine. But if Rush is role-playing parts that are deliberately transgressive, it makes perfect sense that he would gravitate towards the very things he finds off-limits in his professional capacity.

In that vein, so what if the”Mind’s Eye, or MES, is a nationwide community of gothic-punk role-players who come together to take on personas of vampires and other supernatural beings (known as Kindred), dealing with night-to-night struggles ‘against their own bestial natures, hunters, and each other,’ ” as Schorsch reports? Sure, supernatural metaphors might be less familiar than the typical fare on offer at a Sunday church service. But pushing back “against their own bestial natures” sounds like a project that a lot of Rush’s potential constituents might engage in on a regular basis. One person’s dorky is another person’s space for moral exploration.

Apart from that of course, someone has to be the bad guy in a role-playing game, and the effectiveness of the campaign depends on how effectively antagonists can portray their characters. It's much the same as professional wrestling: The people who play the "bad guy" aren't in most cases really bad in real life, but they take the persona on in order to enhance the drama of the match.

Ask yourself this question: If Rush's hobby had been amateur Shakespearean acting instead of live-action roleplaying, would we judge him for his effective portrayal of Iago or Richard III? I suspect not. The disconnect comes precisely in the fact that we recognize acting as a legitimate expression of one's interests and a valid expense of one's time, but we have not yet arrived at this point culturally when it comes to role-playing in general, and LARPing in particular.

All that said, as an attack, this seems to have fizzled, and Rush seems to be well positioned to become the next Congressperson from Florida's 3rd District. Like Alyssa, I would probably not vote for Rush in a million years, but in principle, the idea that nerds deserve better representation in Congress is a platform plank that I can get behind!

Winning the Dungeons & Dragons Wars

For those of us who came up as geeks in the early 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons was a phenomenon. I played it for years as a young adolescent, and then picked it up again as an adult. I remain an avid player.

But in the '80s, one theme that continually came up when D&D was under discussion was the idea that it was in some way a dangerous game, one that put us as children at risk of Satanic influence, or at a bare minimum, insanity and suicide. This was nowhere more explicitly stated than in the infamous Jack Chick tract "Dark Dungeons," which illustrated the Satanic power of Dungeons & Dragons in a way that was intended to be frightening, but was actually just hilarious to anyone with any actual familiarity with the game.

And then there was the early Tom Hank vehicle Mazes and Monsters which was losely based on a bunch of D&D-based urban legends (including the Dallas Eggbert "steam tunnel" story).

 

 

Michael Stackpole has written an excellent summary of everything that was wrong with this kind of D&D fear-mongering, but when I was a teenager, it was rampant. A lot of my friends weren't allowed to play D&D, and I was fortunate to have cool parents who were happy to let us play in the living room, on the theory that it was better that then we were off running the streets doing God-knows-what (Ironically, my mother eventually banned the boardgame Dune from our house, but not because of any satanic influence, just because we fought over it constantly).

Annalee Newitz reflects on all of this over at the science fiction blog io9, noting that "We Won the Dungeons & Dragons Wars."

When anti-gamer advocates claimed these tragic suicides as casualties of D&D, many other kids were punished for dreaming about triumphing over adversity, and for daring to imagine that they could be something more magical and powerful than what they were. It was a national craze, and it's not as if this forgotten war on the imagination was unique. Similar battles are being fought today over videogames and social media.

At the end of the day though, the geeks did inherit the earth, or at least popular culture:

And yet the half-elf thieves and evil clerics and dorky kids with dice won at least one melee in this particular culture war. That's abundantly obvious when you consider that the media is dominated by D&D-influenced stories. Meanwhile, the anti-D&D campaigns today have been reduced to items like this shabby little pamphlet, digitized by a gamer who wanted to memorialize a hard time in geek history. It's a clear example of history being written by the winners.

When D&D types win a war like this, however, they don't try to erase the perspective of the enemies who once threatened them. They have too much respect for the source material. In the 1980s, angry mobs of parents burned their kids' D&D books. Those kids, now grown up, digitize and annotate the pamphlets that once condemned them.

It's a weird kind of progress, but progress nonetheless.

Video Games and Morality Redux

Some months ago, I appeared on a web show called "Different Drummers" that's filmed here in Chicago. At the time, they also asked me to do a commentary based on my Christian Century article "Virtual Good and Evil." From time to time I had wondered what had happened to that commentary. Turns out, it's online!

So if you're interested, here it is. Be kind. I had never used a teleprompter before.

 

Misogyny, Gaming, and Nerd Culture

It's been a bad couple of weeks for geeks on the misogyny front. As Alyssa Rosenberg has been reporting at ThinkProgress, an obnoxiously vocal subset of the gamer nerd subculture has decided to put their hatred of women on full display.

Exhibit A: The misogynist ranting at Anita Sarkeesian over her Kickstarter project on "Gaming Tropes vs. Women." Click the link if you want some samples of what was said on her site and in response to her Youtube promotional video. In addition to the sexism, you get bonus anti-Semitism and malicious pranksterism, as apparently seeking to shame her into silence wasn't enough, her detractors also decided to flag her videos as terrorism. As the Escapist article says:

On top of those beauties, there's the usual threats of violence and rape, as well as organized efforts to have Sarkeesian's YouTube videos flagged as terrorism and her Kickstarter project defunded. YouTube comments are, by and large, where the lowest common denominator goes to slum it for a while, so people posting awful things is hardly unusual. What is unusual, is the sheer depth of hatred on display. If the aim of the outrage was to prove that the gaming community doesn't have a lingering problem with women, well ... good job, guys.

Exhibit B: The Lara Croft rape mechanic. Apparently the newest iteration of the venerable Tomb Raider series will depict a scene in which Lara Croft is at risk of being raped, and what happens depends on how the player handles the encounter. As Alyssa describes in detail, there are just so many layers of wrong to this: From the failure of imagination it represents as a narrative devices, to the failure to empathy it displays, to the way in which it plays into stereotypical male fantasies of being the "rescuer" of the helpless woman.

Add to this the reaction to Alyssa's initial report, in which some of her comnentators cheered the possibility of actually allowing Croft to be raped in game and the whole spectacle is simply too odious for words. As Alyssa notes in her open letter to these commentators:

Is it entertaining to you to see this powerful woman reduced in some way, made vulnerable to something whether you’re the person enforcing her powerlessness or not? Because if that’s the case, really, what are you so frightened of? Lara Croft is not some sort of proof that men have been replaced as adventurers, or that men are unnecessary. To paraphrase Orson Scott Card’s Piggies talking about their desire to participate in the full life of the universe alongside humanity, feminism is not about being there first, about rendering men irrelevant. It’s about being there, too. I’d think that needing to see Lara Croft, or any other strong woman, made vulnerable isn’t pushback against misandry, the unicorn of oppressions. It’s evidence of fear, proof of John Scalzi’s theory that relying on patriarchy is really playing the game of life on the easiest setting rather than being willing to collaborate, and in some cases compete. If that’s what you really want, to be spared the presence of women in your lives because you find us threatening and upsetting, you may be able to find a way to do that, for a little while longer. But I don’t think it’s going to last. You can’t put all of us in whatever it is you perceive to be our places. There are too many of us. And whether you want to acknowledge it or not, there are a lot of men who will tell you that having women is a value add to their lives, not a painful surrendering of territory. You can fight for whatever barren rock you want to make your last stand on. But why not check out what men and women are building together? If you like what you see, then welcome.

Exhibit C: The degradation of female gamers. Again, via Alyssa, whose reporting on this has been stellar, Aisha Tylor's account of her treatment as a woman who loves to game, and the men who don't believe she's a gamer.

What all of this adds up to is a serious round of shame for the gaming community in particular, and male geek culture in general. Because this really extends far beyond video gaming. This extends to tabletop gaming as well, it extends to ComicCon, and the whole convention culture of booth babes and the casual denigration of women.

This is a problem of long standing in the predominantly male world of geekdom. There have always been girl geeks, and there have always been men around willing to marginalize them and objectify them for reasons that I've never been able to fully comprehend. Maybe it's simply that, marginalized as guy geeks often are, they look for someone that they feel powerful enough to marginalize in turn (woe betide the guy geek who tries to do that to any of the female gamers I know, though; they'll definitely get more than they bargained for), maybe its insecurity and social awkwardness, which are not unheard of among the nerd clan. But whatever the root causes, it's damaging to the individuals who perpetrate it as well as their targets, and its damaging to geek culture at large.

For my entire life, I've wondered why there aren't more women involved in the hobbies I enjoy: Gaming, science fiction, comic books, etc. The truth is, I've been fortunate to have met some wonderful female friends over the years in those pursuits, but the norm and expectation always seems to be that they're rarities in a male subculture. Examples such as those I've cited above offer some reasons why that persists.

A dear friend of mine recently revealed to me that she was a gamer of long standing, something that I had never known because I had never bothered to ask. Why hadn't I asked, she wanted to know. I told her quite honestly because it was rare to come across a woman who liked to game, and so I defaulted to the assumption that she didn't. Of course, coming out as a gamer of a certain kind always feels like a bit of a risk anyway, but if I had asked her if she'd like to play, it would have led to some very enjoyable conversations, and maybe even a game or two.

When we begin to get out of the gendered rut that geek culture has surrendered to, there are some new possibilties for the deepening of the entire subculture and widening its appeal. The last decade has seen some genuine progress on that front, but much more remains to be done. But the examples of the last few weeks can damage years of careful bridge building and door opening. 

And of course, there are examples of strong, self-reliant, powerful women within the geek community, who deserve to be lifted up as alternatives to pop cultural garbage, as illustrated here (apologies for the amount of skin, but it serves to make a point):

Badass woman-warriors are easily better role-models than much of what pass for cultural icons today.

Just because geek culture has a reputation for appealing to adolescent boys doesn't mean that we're required to act like adolescents.

Video Games and Morality: My "Different Drummers" Interview

Greater Chicago Broadcast Ministry has a show called "Different Drummers" that they post on their Youtube Channel. A few weeks ago they invited me in for an interview. Here it is:

 

It was a fun and interesting experience, though I admit it was a bit disconcerting to talk about these issues while the young man being interviewed with me was blowing away bad guys on the screen right behind me!

Felicia Day Is Cool

Taking a break from theo-blogging to dip into nerd blogging. Hope you don't mind.

The Hunger Games and the Rejection of Violence

At CNN's BeliefBlog, Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio suggests that the central message of The Hunger Games is "Don't watch this": 

As I watched Katniss Everdeen fight to the death, I became aware that I could just as well have been a citizen of Panem, watching the Hunger Games on a giant screen, rooting for favorites, desensitized from the film’s artfully-orchestrated-so-as-to-maintain-a-PG-13-rating-but-still-incredibly-disturbing violence.

She goes on to connect the themes of the novel, and to a lesser extent the movie, to some of the overarching themes of Christianity:

As in Christianity, violence in "The Hunger Games" also serves a purpose: It is not gratuitous. It is not voyeuristic. But there’s a difference as well: We the viewers are not witnessing a past event. We feel like we are seeing the Games in real time, that we are part of Panem and, by virtue of sitting in the audience, part of its dysfunction.

That powerful revelation encourages us to contemplate the ways that we are complicit in violence in our own world and the ways in which we do not object.

So perhaps the great irony revealed by the film is that we are not meant to see it. We’re not intended to watch its violence, because this story, as Gale says, is meant to be protested. Which means that, ironically, "The Hunger Games’ " greatest triumph would be an empty theater and streets full of people demanding the kinds of changes needed in Katniss’ world and in our own.

I'm still working my way through the first novel, and I'm unlikely to get to the movie any time soon, but this does cause me to reflect a bit on my own media violence consumption: From The Walking Dead to Game of Thrones to Mass Effect, I consume and (via video and role-playing games) participate in a lot of simulated violence. It's never really bothered me on a moral level because I do recognize a distinction between real and simulated violence. And I always go back to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis when all else fails.

But underneath all of that is the very real question: Not "is simulated violence anesthetizing me to real violence," for which the answer is clearly no. But "is reveling in fantastic worlds and narratives anesthetizing me to the real needs and problems of the world I'm living in. And all too often I fear the answer to that is yes.

Moral Combat

My cover article is in the current issue of the Christian century. Here is a link to the site for those of you who are interested in checking it out.

Grand Theft Auto IV

I like playing video games, but I'm by no means hard core, and I've never had a desire to play one of the Grand Theft Auto games. However, I was interested in this observation from Salon.com:

As much as it is a driving and shooting game, then, "GTA" is also a puzzle game. The puzzle concerns social relationships: You're working with and for several characters at once, and what you do for some of them affects how you get along with others. In a game known mainly for carjacking, it's surprising how much time you're asked to spend building and maintaining friendships and romantic liaisons -- going on dates to bowling alleys and comedy clubs, hanging out with your pals at bars and pool halls, keeping up with a surfeit of text messages and e-mail (even deleting Nigerian spam).

It may be too much to say that "GTA" has a message, but it certainly has a vision: It's the dystopian near-future, something like the world of "The Children of Men" (there are no kids here, either).

The vision is pushed by the media your character encounters -- the radio stations, the TV networks, the astonishingly deep in-game Web (with parodies of Craigslist, Fox News, Match.com and other sites, which you access at Internet cafes called TW@).

As you pass through the city, you learn about the end of reading as a pastime, or the new market in selling babies over the Internet, or the extremely elevated terrorist threat -- "Liberty City is now officially on Charcoal 8 Alert, more serious than the Red High 7 Risk Alert, but not as serious as the recently created Black Severe 9 Alert," the game's Fox News analogue, Weasel News, warns.

I can't imagine enjoying a game like GTAIV, but I might enjoy reading a book or seeing a movie set in its world? The difference? I suppose it's one of moral agency. I can watch characters on a movie screen do dispicable things without identifying with their depravity. I can read about them in books without becoming responsible for their actions. But you take agency over video game characters, and their actions are, vicariously, your actions, and the limits (or lack of limits) of your moral universe define the characters' morality as well. Thus, by playing this story in a video game, I would come to see myself as complicit in that which my character did, in ways that I would not want to be complicit.

By analogy, I've played several Star Wars themed video games, and one consistent theme is the ability of your character to choose the light side or the dark side of the Force through the choices you make in-game. I've never been comfortable playing dark side characters. When I played Neverwinter Nights 2, which allows alignment shift based on your behavior, by the end of the game my character was strongly "Lawful Good" (and here I had always thought of myself in real life as Neutral Good, oh well).

So, GTA, though I'm sure a very intriguing game for any number of reasons, would leave me morally troubled in a way that watching "No Country for Old Men" did not. So, I'll be happy to read the reviews, and consider the distopian vision of the game, but I can't imagine I'd ever be intrigued enough to actually play it.