Randomly clicking on other people's blogroll links led me to two interestingly orthogonal posts - Chris McDowall on a 'Universal Hex Profile' and Zedeck Siew on D&D and taxonomy. The former could almost be a (unintentional) critique of the latter. On the one hand, we have a neat proposal to classify hexes on a hex map by using a system of four-letter codes; on the other, we have a bundle of accusations levelled against the 'phallic desire' of nerds and their obsession with taxonomy, and against fantasy worldbuilding in general and its reification of 'colonial epistemology' (which I think just means having clear and accurate bird's eye view maps).
Of course (and, to be fair to Mr Siew, it's important to be clear that he's only reporting the views of others), the idea that the mere act of categorising and classifying things (or imposing 'concrete ontologies' on the world, if you prefer) represents 'phallic desire' or 'colonial epistemology' is complete bunkum: those activities are simply necessary elements of any project of organising pretty much anything, in whatever context. That colonial administrators found it necessary to categorise things and attempt to impose order in the territories they administered through clear maps is simply because they were human beings trying to get things done, regardless of what we might think of the motivations or consequences - and such exercises have of course been a feature of human political organisation since ancient Sumer or before (just as they are also a feature of plumbing, school teaching, medicine, football, staging plays, or any other activity of any complexity in which human beings might engage).
As Siew himself makes plain, it is necessary for D&D to have fixed categories and taxonomies because the alternative - 'you just gotta deal with things being a messy soup, people are not lines of code, you gotta pay attention to everything in its own context' - poses too many logistical problems for anybody attempting to actually run a game. A DM needs to be able to rely on the fact that there is such a category of monster as [goblin] and it has [x characteristics], that there are such hexes as [mountainous] and they have [y characteristics], and so on, because the alternative would require too much time and mental bandwidth. This isn't 'phallic desire'; it's an ineluctable feature of trying to run a campaign of a role playing game. Denying that really just smacks of dilettantism.
At the same time, it would be evident to anybody who had ever spent time with human beings that when they really enjoy a particular pastime and spend a lot of time thinking about it, they come to be able to identity wafer-thin distinctions within it through excessive familiarity. This is not a feature of nerds who like D&D; it's a feature of people who like things. Any hobby has this aspect; just listen to football fans discussing the difference between a 'false 9' and a 'trequartista' or jazz fans quibbling over the difference between hard-bop and post-bop. The idea that role playing games would or should be any different is plainly misguided.
But, of course, that is only half the story. Anyone would agree that there is something deeply banalifying about the nerdish tendencies to insist on conformity with specified characteristics and split hairs between taxons of every this, that and other thing. Having every goblin be just another goblin makes life easy, but is also deeply boring; reducing the dragon to a series of mere stats and numerical abilities is to deprive it of its mythic, symbolic power; having the thoul be the result of cross-breeding between monsters is way less interesting than attributing its existence to magic; and so on. A little bit of 'messiness' is necessary to prevent staleness and to imbue the game with something grander and more meaningful than an exercise in high fantasy pastiche.
I wrote a post on that subject almost 15 years ago, and have returned to it on numerous occasions (see for example here, here and here); I think ultimately I have reached the conclusion that there is a tension between the so-called 'phallic desire' of the nerd and the 'messy soup' of reality, but that it is, in the end, a productive one. The creative D&D DM needs the latter so as to keep things fresh, but also needs the former to keep him grounded and prevent his engagement in fruitless flights of fancy - he needs to be inventive, but never so inventive that he loses sight of the fact that D&D is a game and not novel-writing, speculative anthropology or historical research.
Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, rather than stultifying creativity, the imperatives of 'phallic desire' spur it on, because the need for things to be able to make sense at the table - to be, let's use that word, gameable - acts as a kind of crucible or sieve for all of our frivolous imaginative antics, sifting out the good ideas and forcing the abandonment of bad ones. This in turn creates an iterative, almost Darwinian feedback process whereby the ideas are refined and shaped through reflection and repetition. What we end up with is the best of both worlds - the right combination of what works logistically, leavened by fresh flavours.
I'd go even farther to say that "doing things" and "knowing stuff" smacks of white supremacy and dangerous extremism!
ReplyDeleteYou say that ironically, for comedic purpose (because being a shit stirring troll is your gimmick) but that has actually been a growing sentiment and not from the direction you expect.
DeleteI'd like to know more!
DeleteThis is a great take on this issue. D&D absolutely thrives on this tension between the reductive, obsessive, literal-minded, analytical, taxonomical imperative of the "nerd" or "fan" (in its worst form: "What is the name of the walrus-face guy from the Mos Eisley Cantina in Star Wars, and why hasn't a movie been made about his backstory yet?") and the mystifying, vague, impressionistic, pretentious woo-woo of the "dilettante" (in its worst form: story gamers).
ReplyDelete(That's a joke, I love story games -- and actually, there's an argument that story games and the OSR both share aspects of the dilettante approach relative to the obsessive taxonomy of the 90s-era splatbook explosion).
There's a book to be written about the rapid expansion of the meanings of various pejoratives in the internet age, in particular "nerd" and "bro". A "nerd", as of 1980 or so (Revenge of the Nerds was released in 1984), referred to an obsessive young man whose object of obsession, importantly, was associated with low status. By 2020, after 25 years of comic book superheroes and dragons and wizards dominating pop cultural entertainment, I had heard people describe themselves as "baseball nerds", "finance nerds", and (I kid you not) "fashion nerds". In other words, once it became fashionable to "be a nerd", the low-status qualifier was removed, and anyone who liked [thing] became a "[thing] nerd".
The transformation of "bro" has been treated by Freddie de Boer, among others, but in short: it used to mean "misogynistic, homophobic, reactionary meathead fratboy jock", and it now means "man I don't like". More specifically, it has almost taken over the old meaning of "nerd" ironically enough: it is most often used these days in association with an object of obsession that is deemed to be low status, or at least something associated with the wrong political ideology: hence "tech bros" (engineers), "lit bros" (anyone who reads a book I don't like), "Bernie bros" (socialists), and so on.
Interesting - I'm kind of out of the loop with internet slang but that makes sense to me. When I was a kid growing up in England we didn't use the word "nerd"... I think what we would have said was "swot".
DeleteI get what you mean about story games. A lot of the dilettantism comes from that wing of the hobby, because many of those games are actually possible to play (generally for just a session or two) in a very "vague, impressionistic, pretentious woo woo" way. The problem is you can't run a campaign of D&D that way.
A bit tangential to this is what the Grognardia blog called "Gygaxian Naturalism" or generally the tendency in D&D (most notably in the old "Ecology of X" articles) to turn folkloric creatures into strange animals.
ReplyDeleteThis sort of thing goes way back in D&D to its strong Sword & Planet influences so that a lot of D&D monsters would work fine as Sword & Planet aliens, but I think there's something lost when in a lot of games orcs are more grumpy neanderthals than corrupted beings of darkness, a pegasus is just a very special horse instead of a magical being that sprang from the severed neck of a gorgon, etc. etc. etc.
That's one reason I'm interested in your Northumbria project as it appears like one of its focuses is dragging D&D more to the folkloric side of the equation.
Yes, I did think about mentioning Gygaxian Naturalism but didn't get round to it.
DeleteDefinitely the Northumberland project has that aim in mind! I think it has achieved it, at leats as far as I can do so....
There is something to the fact that cataloging and quantifying robs the mythic of some of its power (paging M. John Harrison). I tend to play pretty loose because of this (and general lack of time and interest to read through said catalogs) but I agree on the metric of "does it work at the table" as being the the best way to approach any game design or worldbuilding. Followed by what is entertaining for the GM to work on of course..
ReplyDeleteYes, and it's important to remember that novels and games are different things. What works for M John Harrison in a fantasy novel is not what will work for D&D, and vice versa.
DeleteTo me there's no better illustration of this principle than the tragicomic unicorn hunt carried out by the sons of Morgause in T.H. White's The Once and Future King. By the time the "fans" are done with a work of fantasy, it's usually been turned from a magical and elusive thing of beauty into a dismembered, tattered, bloody nub of bone and gristle.
DeleteGood shout. It's been ages since I've read that - must re-read.
DeleteI don't know, I feel that a lot of RPGs and Nerd culture in general is enamored with shallow, simplified versions of logical positivism and viewing things as God as the watchmaker. It doesn't just come to games and fantasy worlds, but also the cultures grown around the "How to write ___" writing theories (theories that come from modern traditions of storytelling that don't realizes older or non-western forms of storytelling). The biggest annoyances I have with this tendency is the narrowed mindedness and inability to acknowledge and see that there are other ways of looking at and doing things and the other annoyance is shoehorning this logical positivist viewpoint in eras that would have never thought in logical positivism terms. If D&D is about pseudo-medieval European peoples interacting with fantastical things, why is the situation presented in a Secular sciencism (scienitfic-like, not actually scientific) way?
ReplyDeleteOf course, in some ways, any and all worldviews have done this, in Beowulf one can argue that Grendel turns from a Jötunn (Native Norse belief) to a descendant of Cain (Christian worldview) in the text.
I hope my thoughts were expressed clearly enough, I am writing this very late.
Very clear, and I basically agree with your annoyance - but I also think it is inescapable in the sphere of game playing (let's be pretentious and call it 'the ludic domain'), because of the need to have a functional game. It's not so much imposing a framework of logical positivism - it's just needing to have a fairly clear structure of rules and assumptions which can be predictably applied to figure out what happens in any given moment.
DeleteWhat you are saying is true.
DeleteThough I do think that Nerd culture tends to go to the extreme end in a very modern Western worldview (which is not a bad worldview, nor is logical positivism, which I felt like I was bashing, I wasn't, I was bashing the simplified parody of it in Nerds, but the inability for Nerds to see outside of the modern Western worldview is a problem for them).
To me, stats blocks don't inherently kill the magic and mystery of a monster. It is the way some monster manuals go about detailing monsters. Most D&D games, if you don't say the name of the creature, even a pretty numerous creature such as a goblin, the creature can maintain its mythic power by how the players perceive it.
Monsters are also kind of like mountain lions, we have all this information about mountain lions, you can read books about their behavior, their biology, but that doesn't take way the feeling you would feel if you glimpsed one camping.
I do agree with your assessment of a functional game, that the tension between messy soup and phallic love is a productive one. It is almost exactly the parable of Michael Moorcock's mythos, you both need Order and Chaos. If a game is all Order, then it is rather boring. If a game is all Chaos, then you don't have a game at all.
Yes, and indeed I would argue it's a bit like the dynamic between the political right and left. Human societies actually need both: people who are very into conscientiousness, responsibility and orderliness and people who are creative, empathetic and compassionate.
DeleteI think there is something additional going on, and that is what I will steal from JamesM and twist to call Fantasy Naturalism. I don't know if it qualifies as a sub-genre of fantasy literature, but it's a style that is deliberately used to entertain. It's seeped into so much fantasy entertainment over the decades that I wouldn't be surprised to find that a student or scholar of literature could identify it by some scholarly name.
DeleteMaybe Gygax started the trend, or maybe some works from his Appendix N (or science fiction in general) influenced him and other influential people. But either way, I think this way of writing fantasy overtook D&D a long time ago, and is a much broader thing than D&D taxonomies.
I'm not so sure that it's inescapable in game-playing. But I do think that it's become the default way to experience fantasy, currently. I know enough people that "this is fantasy" for them. Forget inventing rules for it, just trying to narrate some non-naturalist fantasy storytelling to certain players would break their brains.
I do agree there is tension between the creative vs analytical approaches. That's why I think DMing is an art that utilizes techniques which can't just be written in a book. For example, knowing when to be explicit (maybe describing the shape and size of a room) and when and how to be vague and leave things to the imagination (inventing and describing a new monster).
I've probably gone in too many directions, but I guess what I want to say is that I don't think there will be anything satisfying accomplished around this topic until a someone writes some popular fantasy fiction without depending on Fantasy Naturalism. I thought for a moment that maybe someone could just write a game for a Middle Earth RPG that really brings out Tolkien's fantasy, but I think most people know LotR by the movies, not the novels. It would just be alien to them. And anyway, those images are burned into all of our brains now, perhaps killing much of the creativity we might have been able to bring to bear in imagining and presenting that world to others.
Possibly an aside, but this reminds me of the "Flyweight" design pattern in software engineering. Put down a shared skeleton (A Goblin has these basic stats and features), specific examples can have things added on top (This Goblin has extra HD and spells, this goblin is Fat and eats gold, etc.)
ReplyDeleteAnother thought; having a clear understanding of what you're referencing and presenting at the table is important, but there's no need for a monster or a group of monsters in one area to be anything like a similarly named monster or group of monsters in another area. If they're both "goblins" but one is a kind of bizarre fungus creature and the other is an ugly faerie hominid species, they can be internally referenced as goblins (fungal) and goblins (faerie), or even Gobilns (west coast) and Goblins (east coast).
Thought-provoking article and insightful comments, as always. I think you're exactly right, that the "ludic" imperative stimulates creativity as it restricts, much as the sonnet form or the practical restrictions of staging a play directs and stimulates creativity. There are story games and "unperformable" plays that deliberately play with the boundary, and then there's dross that lacks understanding of the rules being broken.
ReplyDeleteI think you can (usually) tell the difference between story games that have been created by experienced gamers vs. dilettantes.
Provided that the creator, DM and players all understand that the competing forces war in service of a higher gods, "fun" and "challenge", it's all good.
I've now read three and a half blog posts about it, and I have yet to understand what this "phallic desire" has to do with anything phallic. It seems to me just a buzzword coined by some post-Freudian weirdo with a pathological obsession for sex and sexism.
ReplyDeleteBut please, don't educate me, Marcia's articles left me nauseated enough already.
Rant over. Great post, this, by the way.
As a feminist, I think it's pretty laughable.
DeleteMarcia's political pronouncements tend to be extremely cringe, even though I share probably 95% of her sentiments. Her dedication to unpacking the technical implications of old-school D&D, however, is mind-blowing (if a little boring sometimes)
DeleteDoes unpacking the technical implications of old school D&D qualify as 'phallic desire'? This is a genuine question - not trying to be facetious. (Well, not entirely.)
DeleteHa, that is a very good point (and I totally get you - made in entirely the sort of "joking not joking" manner that I like to frame questions about potential arseholes.
DeleteNot even bothered to read the post (yet), just came here to say that things started to go downhill around here once we decided that Things exist.
ReplyDelete(I've been stuck between vol. 1 and vol. 2 of the Iain McGilchrist for about 6 months now, and as a result everything EVERYthing [but obvs not every Thing] is appearing through its lens)
I find Marcia's posts to be intriguing, but largely intellectual clickbait. I don't mean that as an insult, but they fall into that familiar Marxist trap of presupposing that the author is in fact representative of a "left intelligentsia" and not just a regular person commenting on the meta of D&D on a blog somewhere.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of the usual label soup, and there are good points there. But I feel that Marcia got lost in her labels and approached it from a strange freudian perspective. I have found short twitter threads say largely what she is saying and with more depth, with much more approachable language and without any weird freudian stuff.
There is definitely a colonialist mindset present in D&D, and intriguing arguments that D&D really follows the values of a Western better than classic Fantasy. A lot of the gameplay is "go kill these savages and take their land and wealth for the forces of order" after all. WOTC has been trying to purge it with a lot of controversy but they don't seem entirely willing or sure how to do it. A lot of fundamentals would be brought into question on the way, though, and I'm not sure the fanbase is willing to see it go yet. Bioessentialist morality comes to mind.
I concur with D&D following the values of a Western better than classic fantasy at least on the "old school" model. But it's important to remember that mainstream D&D has since the 1980s been much more about "saving the world from big bad evil guys". So I don't know what war against colonialism the Marcias of this world are fighting, even if you grant them the slightly bizarre premise that killing orcs and taking their stuff in an imaginary realm somehow has anything to do with the real world.
DeleteD&D is both a product and a game some friends play at a table. As a game that friends play at a table, it's reasonable that they can have a social contract to design a fantasy world where defeating evil entities "shall not be the story of colonialism". But this leans both ways. They could also agree that such a fantasy world is inherently colonialist. It's up to them.
DeleteBut D&D as a product is subject to the perceptions people have about it, which inform the resulting social contracts that take place at tables. If there are enough people out there who perceive the included setting to be colonialist, then that's their take. It doesn't matter if you or I disagree, or call it slightly bizarre, because they're paying customers, too. So this is something that WotC has to deal with, even if you or I don't.
That's another interesting thing about indie products, I guess. The advantage of having a smaller, dedicated line of customers means that you can more easily give them the product they want.