 I recently made the mistake of watching an evangelical program on late-night TV. The show dealt with the degeneration of youth culture, and, true to form, spent some time lambasting tabletop role-playing games.
“God,” I asked, “why is my favourite pastime your servants' favourite whipping-boy?” Since God wasn't forthcoming, I'm going to try to answer the question myself.
A role-playing game, or RPG, is a form of interactive storytelling. One player assumes the role of storyteller, and is responsible for designing the imaginary environment in which the game will be played. The kinds of environments storytellers create follow the categories of pulp fiction: fantasy, science-fiction, horror, and so on. The other players create characters suitable for the environment chosen. During the game, the storyteller describes the events in the environment and the actions of supporting characters, and provides plot threads to help guide the game's narrative. The players, in turn, describe their characters' actions and speak with their characters' voices. Games typically use dice rolls to simulate the effects of probability in determining the outcomes of actions undertaken in the imaginary environment. The games are non-competitive and can last for years, with each session picking up the narrative where the last session left off. People tend to gravitate to RPGs in their teens, but many continue playing them throughout their adult lives.
This undoubtedly sounds quite benign. Why, then, do fundamentalists come down so hard on RPGs? Groups like the 700 Club say it's because of the games' occult themes, and because playing them often leads to crime, violence, and suicide. These claims, however, don't hold up. Very few RPGs have occult themes, and the available studies suggest that gamers are less likely to commit crimes, hurt other people, or kill themselves than their non-role-playing peers. The real reason for the fundamentalists' disdain must lie elsewhere. After much thought, I suspect it lies in their attitude towards non-Christian organizing fantasies.
An organizing fantasy is a mental schema composed of metaphors, parables, and emotionally-charged images. People make use of these raw materials to allegorically explore and systematize the many philosophical questions the human condition confronts us with. Permeating many levels of human consciousness, organizing fantasies structure our inner lives. They're like conceptual mandalas, assigning each perception, thought, and memory a meaningful place within concentric mental spheres. The truth or falsity of these fantasies is often less important than their usefulness in helping us fulfil our ethical, intellectual, and psychological potentials. Everyone has organizing fantasies; without them, we'd be unable to either maintain coherent personal identities or make sense of the world we live in.
An important function of any religion is to supply organizing fantasies, as the popularity of the phrase “What would Jesus do?” demonstrates, but religion isn't the only way cultures meet this need. Works of art—novels, drama, poetry, and so on—offer their own metaphors, parables, and imagery. Think, for instance, of the guidance people have found in Leonard Cohen's songs, or of the role Superman plays in the lives of men like Jerry Seinfeld.
The basic difference between religious and artistic organizing fantasies is in their degree of centralization. Religions are highly centralized: the well-ordered details of their intricate and vast organizing fantasies are dictated from specific seats of cultural authority. The arts, in contrast, are decentralized. The organizing fantasies they offer are chaotic and open to individual interpretation and revision. While religious and artistic organizing fantasies may often complement one another, an underlying rivalry always exists between them.
Their rivalry is most intense when radically centralized fundamentalist fantasies compete for teenage minds with radically decentralized, street-level artistic fantasies. Adolescence is, after all, the time when we're most receptive to organizing fantasies. Adult minds, in contrast, are extremely closed. In order to flourish, fundamentalist fantasies have to capture the teenage market. These (which?) fantasies spread most quickly among the most marginalized teens—the children who are ostracized, or have learning disorders, or whose families are in turmoil: the children who have to struggle hardest to cope.
And here we unlock the reason for the fundamentalist hatred of RPGs. RPGs are remarkably useful vehicles for the personal development of artistic organizing fantasies, and marginalized teenagers find them very accessible and extremely rewarding.
Take the time to ask teenage storytellers about their games, focusing not on the rules but rather on the nuances of the settings, the characters, and the plot threads. You'll probably be surprised by the depth, complexity, and resonance of what you hear. Storytellers spend countless hours between games designing and fine-tuning their worlds. They'll generate dozens of ideas, weigh them for aesthetic, ethical, and dramatic appeal, and select those that intuitively seem to fit best with their games' overarching “feel”. Most of their work will never reach the gaming table, but that doesn't matter, as they're pursuing more than simple entertainment. They're systematizing their fantasy lives, and thereby structuring their subjective worlds.
Thus, fundamentalists have a legitimate reason to revile RPGs, though it's not one they publicly admit. After experiencing the joy that comes from creating one's own organizing fantasies, highly centralized organizing fantasies seem less appealing. As a result, the mind of a teenage gamer often proves to be barren soil for the fundamentalist seed. Having developed personal competence in the field of fantasy, players are understandably reluctant to passively submit to fantasies delivered from on-high.
This autonomy-in-fantasy may be what fundamentalists really mean when they use the word “occult”. If so, then their assault on RPGs is just part of a larger war on spiritual self-sufficiency, a war that has many fronts. The analysis I've offered here is relevant to the fundamentalist assault on humanist psychology, the goth subculture, the arts community, and the New Age movement, to name only a few of the usual targets. Regardless of how clumsily the members of these various movements go about it, the goal they're striving towards is an imaginative maturity completely at odds with the eternal childhood of fundamentalism. Gamers are doing the same thing, only less consciously and less conspicuously.
As ever, it's our pastimes' deepest virtues that incite the most venomous evangelical slander. Remember this when next you see socially awkward kids throwing dice and speaking “in character.” They may look foolish, but what they're doing merits our consideration and respect.
**** |
