You Weren't There, Man - On Exclusion in the Early Days of the OSR and the 'Defensive Posture'

I hesitate to publish this post, given the high likelihood it will give rise to outrage, but it is my earnest belief that this current, overweening predilection for dividing ourselves into competing camps and seizing each other by the throat is only going to be overcome if sensible people continue to attempt to engage in rational, good faith discussion in the centre ground. I will provide the (sadly, necessary) caveat that nothing contained in this post is designed to excuse or justify - only to explain, in order to suggest ways forward. So, here goes: 

I was not there at the very beginning of OSR blogging, but almost: the first post I wrote was in May 2008, and I was involved on rpg.net and in commenting on OSR blogs for some months before that. So, while not perhaps there at the big bang, I was present to observe the sun and inner planets forming.

So it was with some interest that I read Zedeck Siew's reminiscences about the phenomenon:

That community was ugly. Many alt-right-leaning white dudes. It sheltered abusers, like Zak S – a person who, to my shame, I’d been a fan of. 

That community was good. Many key figures were queer / trans. More so (to my impression) than any other RPG community (even other indie groups). Non-white folks, like me. 

The popular TTRPG eye remembers the OSR for its ugliness, not its inclusivity. Probably because the assholes were loud. And because the non-white / cis / het-ness of folks was rarely advertised as a community selling-point: “Look at how diverse we are!”

First, I do have to get one thing out of the way. I understand the point Zedeck is trying to make here in good faith - inclusiveness is good, which I agree with, and which is what this post is all about.

And it is also probably unfair to single him out for criticism in respect of these comments, because there are worse offenders. But I do feel at the outset that it is necessary to say that implying that a person's moral worth is contingent on immutable characteristics is something we should all just agree is wrong. I get that part of the extreme woke shell game is the absurd notion that for white people to complain about bigotry against them is to display 'fragility'. But it would never be acceptable to say that a community was 'ugly' for its association with any particular group of people other than 'white dudes', and this means that it shouldn't be acceptable to say that with regard to them either. If you object to a surfeit of 'alt-right-leaning' people, that's fine, but let's just leave it at 'people' without attaching particular race and sex to it. That kind of thing is a pollutant of the American culture war that all the rest of us could do without.

For what it's worth, I agree entirely that there was an undesirable surplus of alt-right blowhards (an American phrase which I love) on G+, but there was, frankly, a surplus of blowhards of all political stripes there and their absence from my life after the demise of that network is a great blessing. 

Second, though, this thing about the OSR being exclusionary, especially in its early days, comes up a lot, and I think deserves more careful thought than it is usually given. Because I do agree that there were exclusionary currents within it, and also that those currents tended to have discriminatory effects that were, needless to say, bad. But I also think we need to properly explain where those exclusionary currents mostly came from, in order to move beyond them. Condemning people as racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever probably doesn't help matters unless it is truly warranted, because when people know they personally do not bear any animus to people of other races, sexes, etc., the accusation just serves to annoy them and entrench hostility. 

So, let's try to actually do that: what were the roots of exclusion in the early days of the OSR? 

Well, first, of course, it should be said that there is a much-too-large mass of people who make racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., comments on the internet. Some of them probably have personality disorders; almost all are probably deeply unhappy and isolated; a lot just think it's funny to offend others. Sadly, I don't think that there is a huge amount that the rest of us can personally do about that other than block their comments where we can, and call them out where we can't. I used to be bad at doing those things; I am trying to get better at it. (Regular readers will hopefully have noticed that there is now a more or less complete absence of the Candyman - you know who I mean - from my blog comments.) 

I do not deny that these people exist; I do not deny their presence is unhelpful; I do not excuse or justify anything they do except to make the Christian plea to remember that whenever you encounter an obnoxious adult it is almost always the case that they were once a very miserable child.

However, I don't think that they were or are the biggest exclusionary force out there, nor the biggest source of discriminatory effect (as distinct from the biggest source of discriminatory intent).

By far the biggest source of exclusion, and by far the most influential, was what I will call The Defensive Posture.

Those who, like me, were around in those very early days will remember that there were an awful lot of grognards, ten a penny in 2008, who had profound objections to Johnny-come-latelys getting interested in 'their' OD&D. These grognards were a formidable group of gatekeepers in their own way, and many of them truly resented anybody playing 2nd edition AD&D or BECMI, let alone Labyrinth Lord or, heaven forfend, LotFP. For them, the one true way was to have been born in the late 50s or early 60s, to have been there in the mid-70s when D&D had first come out, and to have been playing it ever since. If you were not within that anointed clerisy, then you were at best to be pitied, but generally to be despised. It didn't matter what sex or race you were (in fact, tears of joy would have come to the eyes of many of these fatbeards at the prospect of actually being able to game with a woman). It was about whether you had been with Napoleon against the Austrians at Austerlitz, or rather with the true faithful against Zeb Cook, and that was that.

These grognards adopted the Defensive Posture because they felt, irrationally but perhaps understandably, a sense of possessiveness about 'their' game, deriving from the fact that they had lived through decades of shame while keeping alive the flame of the hobby. It is perhaps difficult for anyone born after, say, 1995 to understand quite how mainstream society behaved towards 'geeks' or 'nerds' in the 70s-90s. But it was a constant source of bullying and violence; there was no sense in which being interested in nerdish pursuits was in any way defensible to one's peers in those days. I knew a boy in school who was beaten up with bricks on school premises and had to be taught separately to the rest of the pupils for his entire school years for his own safety because he had committed the sin of being interested in chemistry; this didn't strike any of the rest of us as being at all unusual, if a trifle unfair. His mistake had been in failing to adequately 'pass' as a non-nerd. That's just how things were in those days, before Harry Potter, the LotR films, the Big Bang Theory, and so on had begun to make 'geek' a thing. (I don't mean to suggest, by the way, that being bullied for being a geek was in the same paradigm as the homophobic bullying which was sadly also rife in those days.) 

Wrongly, but I don't think motivated in any way by malice, the Defensive Posture therefore manifested itself in a certain hostility and resentment towards newcomers to the hobby who were perceived not to have been through the crucible of being into RPGs during that earlier, darker, time. The old schoolers simply felt that these newcomers necessarily lacked a certain gravitas, or commitment, by virtue of not having 'been there'. It is not a justification of that approach to say that it is to a certain extent understandable that human beings sometimes react in that kind of a way, and to say that we are all of us flawed and, at times, motivated by jealousy and childish impulses. 

The real problem with the Defensive Posture, of course, is that it did undoubtedly have a discriminatory effect towards women, trans people, people of colour, and so on, albeit one which was, to use modern parlance, indirect or 'structural'. Most of the grognards would have bristled at the suggestion that they would have had any problem playing D&D with somebody who wasn't a straight white male. And that wouldn't have been pretence: it was all true. But given that most people who were into D&D in the old days happened to be white men, and given that a lot of the newcomers were not, the result was discriminatory all the same. The grognards weren't for the large part excluding people out of discriminatory intention. But the exclusion had discriminatory effects. 

At the start of this post I said it was important to try to understand the reasons for social phenomena, because it is only then that we can get past them. And the good news is that we can, and to a certain extent have, get to a point where the Defensive Posture is no longer a potent force in the hobby. It probably does still exist on certain forums. But I see it less and less. For those of us who have been around now for a long time and have become long in the tooth, the lesson is to try consciously to avoid adopting the Posture in our own humble ways - to remember that just because somebody didn't happen to experience life as it was 25 years ago doesn't make their commitment to, or enjoyment of, the hobby any less valid. The lesson for everyone else is that old leopards can actually change their spots in the end. Which is not to excuse past indiscretions, but to end at least on an optimistic note.