Pen and Paper Role Playing Games as Revolutionary Praxis

As I sit in the kitchen of a rented cottage somewhere in rural England, listening to tawny owls calling to one another through the twilight, I reflect - as one does - on what it means to be human. 

One doesn't have to be a Marxist to agree with Karl Marx that what separates us from, say, tawny owls, is that we are capable of praxis - a posh word for acting so as to change oneself or society. Tawny owls just do what tawny owls have always done. They are very good at it by now, I'll grant you. But we humans are qualitatively different. We are capable of acting, and later reflecting on why we did it; we are capable of giving our actions purposes beyond the short-term satisfactions of wants; and we are capable of acting so as to give effect to theory. We do not merely act. We act in order to change things - indeed, we act in order to change how we act. We are the only things in the universe to our knowledge that do this.

It should be obvious that this makes us very special, but the advent of so-called 'Artificial Intelligence' has given our self-confidence a bit of a beating. Are we really so unique, or are we each just a souped up natural language model that respond to inputs by spitting out outputs and kids itself that it has free will? Are we just very complicated algorithms?

No. We just have to get our mojo back. And one way we can do this is precisely through praxis itself - and this, you will be glad to hear, involves playing more D&D (though ideally not online). 

What is it that makes playing a P&P RPG a revolutionary form of praxis in 2023? It's because it undercuts three huge tectonic social forces which daily push us inexorably in roughly the same direction. The first of these is the abandonment of reading print, a shift to a post-literary culture in which the great majority of people never really develop the capacity to engage with a long piece of fiction and use it to imagine scenery, people, events and emotions that they have never, and will never, directly see or experience.

The second is virtualisation, by which many aspects of our lives become abstracted from the physical realm, such that almost everything except eating, drinking, sleeping and defecating - the barest aspects of biological life - can, if one chooses, be performed online through technological media (and, concurrently, by which the barriers between what we can imagine and what we can experience give the appearance of gradually being dissolved).

And the third is passivity, by which we become acculturated to constantly being entertained at almost every moment of every day by very cleverly designed devices, kitted out with very cleverly designed software, that keep us always doomscrolling and checking and watching and listening such that our creative gears never really have to engage and we almost never need stand up from the mental sofa to use our imaginations for very much at all. 

Some readers get very bothered about me saying this kind of thing and never fail to let me know about it in the comments on entries like this, but I'll say it again anyway: the place that these forces are pushing us towards (if we haven't arrived there already) is really going to be a bit shit, and we won't at all enjoy it or find it remotely fulfilling. I have faith that this realisation is going to dawn on people ('gradually, and then suddenly', as Hemingway might have said), but we can help that realisation along through our actions. 

In a post-literary, virtualised, passive world, the hobby of playing pen and paper role playing games becomes radically subversive. It requires reading and engaging with lengthy, often very dense, and creatively rich texts. Despite the fact that it requires extensive use of the imagination, it needs proper social interaction with others, preferably all together in a physical space and deploying physical accoutrements like dice, pencils and paper, and beer. And it is active - it needs a DM getting himself off his metaphorical arse to both plan things and imagine, and needs players turning up and engaging positively with each other and the content in order for everybody to have a good time. 

The more people choose to involve themselves in hobbies and communal activities - and especially if they purposefully do so in order to improve themselves and their societies - the less of a grip the antisocial (and, let's face it, antihuman) forces I mentioned earlier will have over us, and the more we will recover our sense of what makes humanity good and special. This may not be revolutionary in the sense Marx understood it, but it will do for our current predicament. 

Pretending to be an elf with some smelly neckbeards and a few d20s can, in other words, actually change matters, if enough people do it - and, even if you find that assertion facile, at they very worst it can change you for the better by making you more well-read, more confident, more grounded, and more socialised. And that in itself is transformative of society when done at scale. What on earth, then, are you waiting for?