Ludology & Liberation: Tabletop RPGs as Dreampunk praxis
lu·dic/ˈl(y)o͞odik/
showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness.
"Anyone who thinks there is a difference between education and entertainment doesn't know the first thing about either."
- Marshall McLuhan, Communications Theorist
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Before I say anything, this essay “Decolonizing the Dungeon” written by a young BIPOC teen critiquing D&D and gaming culture for its (quite ironic) shortsightedness and narrow-mindedness when it comes to race & equity is the most brilliant thing I’ve read on the subject yet. Their clincher question is this: why is it so hard to get their DM to agree to let them play a Black elf if the whole point of tabletop role playing games is to create fantastic worlds with your imagination? The author’s critique isn’t directed at the DM per se, it is aimed at the culture of canonical sword-and-sorcery fantasy that acted as our model for what this genre is. Ironically, speculative fiction is only as speculative as the authors can manage to be, with the limitations of their own social programming. I hesitate to even call sci fi and fantasy truly speculative until the ethno-centric (namely, white supremacist) worldviews at the core of many classics are further along in being dismantled.
It might seem like this young fellow just got unlucky with their DM, but unfortunately this story echoes many I’ve heard from bipoc and queer friends, especially those trying to get into the game. This isn’t to say there aren’t amazing, inclusive, gamers and parties out there. This is the multiverse, remember? Pretty much everything exists there! But in terms of the mainstream framing/storying of the game during much of my own generation as a millennial, (not deep, subterranean fan-culture that is more opaque to newcomers) there is a lot left out. Also, have you guys been in high school lately? There is some rough shit going on. When I was in high school in the early 2000’s, our country wasn’t contending with the rise of neo-Nazi youth… I think we should listen to this author.
You might think, so what, this is a game. It's a fictional character. But the importance of this actual exact point should not be underestimated, and should definitely not be used as a hook for gaslighting. And moreover, calling this stuff “just a game,” and categorizing games and speculative fiction in general as “escapist” is part of the problem. Whose escapism are you talking about? If you are spiritual or religious (thus, investing imagination and belief in often-unseen worlds), I don’t think you would take lightly to your beliefs being called escapist. For those of you that venerate the work of hermit philosophers and eco-romantics like Thoreau or, for the more radical, rewilders and green anarchists like Daniel Quinn, you probably would take it hard if people constantly referred to those people’s pastimes as escapist. What about those of you who are invested in cryptocurrency, or even more mundanely, those who trade stocks? Are those games escapist? I don't use the word "game" in a pejorative way, even when the game I'm talking about is totally not my thing—when you understand ludology, and the psychology at work there, I don’t think it's possible to sneer at the ludic, and if there are games that uphold systems we don’t agree with, well, we best take them seriously. Imaginative play (whether through formal games or not) is the boiler room beneath the production of the fiction and literature you love, cherish, or venerate as world-altering. So why the crap do we keep using the word “escapist?” You know what is escapist? Global capitalism. You know what is escapist? Thinking that infinite economic growth is possible. You know what is escapist? The super-wealthy literally wanting to flee earth to another planet; white tech CEOs who should know better tweeting about how they believe the Egyptian pyramids were built by aliens, not actual North African people; thinking that non-human animals aren't people with like, souls and feeling and stuff. We could go on, couldn’t we?
I sincerely believe that decolonizing imagination; bringing into being narrative that represents and mythologizes us, all of us—especially marginal, targeted, fugitive, emergent communities—is the butterfly effect-style leverage point that will alter futures, clean rivers, bring back species from brinks of extinction. Human imagination has underestimated ecological power.
What about Octavia Butler or Ursula K LeGuin's work? See, when you start to talk about the Imaginative worlds created by folks pushed to the margins of society (or simply of their chosen field), the escapist charge starts to break down because these people literally have helped create imaginative space for untold numbers of people. What if escaping from white supremacy and patriarchy is actually desirable? lol, what if…
Again, whose escapism are we talking about? My hunch is that as speculative genres and TTRPGs become more and more overtly diverse & anti-colonial in their origin and use (which they actually are, but not in a way that breaches the awareness of many white folks), the word “escapist” will gradually get disassociated with these games and become passé, OR it will be reclaimed/re-inscribed in some way. Pundits, journalists, scholars, and others—ya know, the people who unfortunately create framing for how many people story this society—call things escapist because of the archetype of the young white male gamers ‘wasting time’ in their basements or whatever. Because from the view of dominant culture, these subjects are considered not optimized, or unrealized potential, or something. I’m not trying to defend that particular demographic per se although I think they certainly don't deserve those projections. Rather, I’m trying to get at how the toxic, unsustainable projections (interpersonal and intergenerational) masquerading as "hopes and dreams" endemic to white supremacy that ultimately serves to dismiss Imaginative play, which affects most people in this society, and definitely youth. Calling games, especially collaborative fucking storytelling that doesn’t involve screens, escapist, is connected to the sad and paternalistic pressure put on young white men to grow up and become wealthy and powerful and good little participants within empire and good little upholders of American exceptionalism. My point here is, if it's white conformists calling whom they see as white rebels or disaffected youth escapist, that's just speaking to trauma cycles & dynamics within euro-centric/white culture, and unnecessarily centering that baggage, positioning it as What Gaming Is.
When I see my BIPOC and trans/queer gamer friends playing and co-imagining together, escapism is not anywhere near the first word that comes to mind. (Unless we're talking about escapism as a totally differently valenced concept, which I alluded to above, which would be basically survivance and regeneration, but let's be honest, that's not how most people mean it when they say that word.) They are getting to the heart of something through the performance of gaming. They are myth hacking. They are innovating. They are regenerating and creating resilience through neurological processes that haven’t been studied yet by dudes in lab coats.
I get that there is legitimate fear in the escapism-as-negative-charge. And it is simple: that such activities can create political complacency. However, that's to think that games aren't political spaces. Which they are. Come on, It’s 2020. They are.
I love diving into other people’s imaginative worlds. Sci fi, fantasy, and post-apocalyptic movies and books have had a big impact on me. However, a lot of these fictional works that I hold dear are written by people who aren’t in my immediate communities, people I’ll never meet. The magic of the mythic world should not end with our consumption of a product. It could continue, like a fractal, into our relations—it already does in unconscious ways, but what if we imagined it as more of a practice? Even, a ritual for strengthening and tempering Soul? I would much rather hear my mother imagining what it would be like if she were a naiad (water nymph in Greek mythology) than read the Odyssey one more time (and yes, this has actually happened when we were in a storytelling ceremony of sorts, together, and I almost died of joy). We should do things with(in) the awesome worlds that our ancestors and our favorite authors have created for us. These worlds are ecologies, relational.
As someone trained as an historian, my ears perks up at anything that is both very widespread and beloved by its advocates or users, yet also somehow universally dismissed, mocked, or devalued.
It’s these sorts of cultural trends, representations, and practices that historians of the future will very likely study to understand us. Anything contested is deeply informative, and things that are both widespread and downplayed or devalued are contested.
A great example of this is gaming. In particular, video games and virtual games (especially violent ones, that is, ones that gamify our survival instinct), though what I want to talk about more specifically are tabletop role-playing games, which have at times been swept into a similar place of moral concern and frustration. Dungeon and Dragons, the most famous example of the genre, is a sword-and-sorcery role-playing game that caused a moral panic in the 80’s because social conservatives and religious leaders insisted it was turning young people to Satanism and the occult. Obviously, it was doing no such thing, at least in the moral sense of making people ‘evil.’ However, as I would like to discuss below, I do feel like there’s a relationship between role-playing games and (re)enchantment. As Jason A Josephson Storm has shown in his masterpiece book “The Myth of Disenchantment,” there was never really a decline in magic post-Enlightenment. If anything, engagement with magic went ‘underground’ and became cryptic—disguised or ventriloquized into academic interests or as modes of entertainment or play. In many ways, imaginative investment (if not outright belief) in the supernatural and/or magic is stronger than ever in the contemporary West, and in America. It’s not a coincidence that the most popular role-playing games, tabletop or virtual, occur in enchanted worlds rife with magic and animism.
I don’t really need to cite any sources to tell you that there are stigmas around gaming in American culture even though there are actually professional gamers now and live-streaming DnD games has become a thing. Still, a lot of people see role-playing games as a vice, or a coping mechanism at best. It’s something you grow out of, right? Really, you shouldn’t enjoy it so much. It’s just make-believe.
For me to “have fun with my friends” and co-create imaginary worlds, experience teamwork, solve problems, and literally, co-dream, is political, practical, and yes, also really fun. It is medicine, too, for it treats the maladies of mythic malnourishment and lack of rite of passage that afflict our society. Tabletop (or, as it were, Zoom-mediated) roleplaying, which is basically collaborative storytelling with dice—those ancient tools of mathematical divination, can be an act of resistance in apokalyptic times. This is particularly juicy when you consider that tabletop RPGs evolved (partially) from wargaming. To me, roleplaying can easily fall somewhere between pleasure activism, radical kinmaking in Strange times, and one example of reclaiming of storytelling as part of community building, relationships, and survival.
And what I find excellent about tabletop role-playing, as opposed to RPG video games, is that in the latter, you do get to explore, but Mystery is finite. As fun as Metal Gear Solid, Tomb Raider, or Metroid were for me as a kid, they were computer programs, pre written. I shouldn’t understate their narrative power—but they are more similar for me to reading a book, where the words have been typed beforehand. The cool thing about the former, a tabletop roleplaying game played collaboratively with a group of people, is that Mystery is infinite. Even if the setting or world the game is set in is pregenerated, the actions of the characters and their group dynamic have as many possibilities as players can have ideas. If you can think it in your mind, your player character can do it in your DnD game. As someone who struggles with attention, it’s hard for me to get into books, or even video games that I’m told are popular. But tabletop roleplaying totally sucks me in because I’m forced to generate the world with my imagination, since it’s not visualized for me. Because of that, I am invested in it from the moment the story begins. There is no confusion about my separation from the story—I am part of it, and it is part of me.
There is something ancient, even bardic about tabletop gaming because you are creating stories in the moment. Even if settings are prewritten, any game will be unique, in the same way that to a Homeric Bard, every retelling of the Odyssey was unique, details tailored to the moment, and to the audience.
It’s easy to see Story as something we consume — in the form of pre-generated media — and not something we are part of, not something co-created. This is another reason why I see ‘old school’ tabletop roleplaying as an extremely powerful ritual praxis in these times. It makes sense to critique the Hero narrative and de-center ourselves. But if we decenter ourselves too much, there is no story at all. This is redolent of the common binary/splitting action in Eurocentric culture of either “anthropocentrism” or “biocentrism.” Though, as ecologist Dennis Martinez has counseled us, there is a third way—”kincentrism”—where relations are what we center in our values and thinking, instead of either centering humans or centering everything-that’s-not-humans.
In some corners of post-modern thought & criticism, personal truth and meaning has become suspect, and so Story can be risky—we worry about whether our stories and our dreams are worth sharing and telling. The intentions behind deconstruction are good, especially when they are oriented toward exposing imbalanced and entrenched power. However, interrogating our cultural programming and our locations of power & privilege doesn’t mean our stories or our storytelling abilities die. We may need to have a funeral for them, but they are destined to be reborn. Collaborative storytelling among circles of friends, whether they be COVID pods or virtual gatherings of people whom you want to ‘think-and-feel with’ and take refuge with in these times, can be a practice of fugitivity from both the casually kyriarchical, combat-oriented roots of fantasy role-playing, and also from the discourses alive today that erode trust and wage misinformation and mind control with the sword of dogmatic thinking and the sorcery of false binaries.
Since I’m a “nature-based” educator and teach survival skills, I think people expect me to be anti-technology, or some sort of dyed in the wool empiricist. Sure, there are forest schools out there that don’t allow their students to talk about or simulate video games. There are also forest schools out there that style their survival-skills curriculums on Minecraft game mechanics. I would say the latter is more my style. It reminds me of one of my favorite Buckminster Fuller quotes: “Don’t fight forces; use them.” (Obviously, when possible).
Truly, the seemingly disparate worlds of high-tech roleplaying videogames and crunchy forest schools teaching kids how to make fires are two sides of the same coin for me. Survival skills and RPGs are both ludic, sensual, even erotic in Audre Lorde’s expansive sense of the word. They are about navigating complex adaptive landscapes that respond to our engagement. They are about decision points, risk assessment, and direct feedback from your surroundings. They are about consequences that impact our physical or emotional & imaginative bodies. (Birds provide us instant feedback about our stealth ‘game.’ Having a tool like a knife can ‘unlock’ the potential for processing and using materials around you so that it won’t take you days to make a fire.) They are about problem-solving and resource management. Wildlife tracking—which I guess is a symbolic lodestone for me—especially in the context of trailing (following a creature’s trail), is a sort of ‘mother game’ because our brains are discerning and manipulating patterns that help us solve high relevant puzzles—who made these tracks, why, and where are they now? The fact that people love to find patterns in things, and why Tetris is so wildly popular with such a wide variety of people, is exactly why tracking is so entrancing. In fact, from an evolutionary perspective, tracking is probably WHY we love Tetris.
Yes, one of the cultural foundations of tabletop roleplaying games is wargaming using miniatures—itself part of military strategy. This is yet another reason that many people write off D&D or similar games as somehow having imperialism inextricably in their DNA—and it is true that these games were originally conceived with combat as key driver of the game. This may lead folks to think that these games valorize war—even though, interestingly, the characters often created in DnD are often, in one way or another, fugitive, libertarian, or somehow anti-authoritarian—they are outlanders, rogues, retired mercenaries, Robin Hoods & Peter Pans—with problems of their own, yes, but not with the ability to drop a nuclear bomb on anyone or command an army. These games, oddly enough, thrive off of a play with marginal/fugitive identity, and a deep, tacit investment and acknowledgement in the power of identity, personal Story/mythos, as well as the impact of social power—interesting, as there is a huge contingent of white, male gamers who scoff at ‘identity politics’ outside of game space and seem to hate transgender people with our real-life shapeshifting abilities, and then within games experiment with those things. (um, okaaay).
As we work to root out racism from RPGaming, reimagine relations within gamespace, and decenter DnD itself with its Euro-centric, Tolkein-esque flavor as the ‘flagship’ RPG, we also consider that creating a relationship with combat—in particular, an imaginative one that might consist of magic does not necessarily translate to supporting the projects of state-sponsored warfare. Often, the appeal of ‘combat’ in these games is actually in the achievements of problem solving and navigating the unanticipated as a group—things that many people, especially those of us who work at a computer or an office, don’t get the opportunity to do outside of the game.
‘Tabletop’ role playing gaming is being utilized as technology of mythic resistance by many folks who are contending with systemic oppression and political terror. Traditions and institutions created from imperial, capitalistic, or other hegemonic subjectivities/perspectives get repurposed, in particular, by marginal subjects—this is part of QPOC theorist Jose Esteban Munóz’s definition of ‘disidentification'‘ (1999). The abstract for his book reads:
An important new perspective on the ways outsiders negotiate mainstream culture. There is more to identity than identifying with one’s culture or standing solidly against it. José Esteban Muñoz looks at how those outside the racial and sexual mainstream negotiate majority culture—not by aligning themselves with or against exclusionary works but rather by transforming these works for their own cultural purposes. Muñoz calls this process “disidentification,” and through a study of its workings, he develops a new perspective on minority performance, survival, and activism.
Disidentification, of sorts, is and will remake the landscape of tabletop gaming and related ludic/bardic cultures. And beyond disidentification is regeneration, the emergence of the next worlds, the post-apocalyptic, symbiotic ecologies where the only thing wasted is, not the land, but hate and oppression. These worlds are already being born in the multiverse, a dream or an eyeblink away…
