Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. ix)

A KIERKEGAARDIAN DIGRESSION

            As so often happens to me, I find I can’t help bumping up against Kierkegaard as I write this essay.  In this case, it is the question of what makes a life meaningful.  In Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works, this problem appears in Either/Or, which is a debate between an egoist (or “esthete” in Kierkegaard’s terminology) versus a moralist (or “ethicist”).  The first volume of Either/Or is presented as the collected writings of an esthete, a person who lives for his own amusement and the pleasure of life.  He seeks to avoid entanglements of any kind, whether they be romantic, career or moral.  He treats everything as trivial except as it suits himself at the moment, in order to be free to pursue pleasure wherever and whenever it might appear.  As the book unfolds, the reader sees the result of this life, and its ultimate self-refutation.  The esthete says, “Boredom is the root of all evil,” but cannot escape boredom.  Instead, his (or her) entire life disintegrates into a series of ultimately disconnected and meaningless episodes, each increasingly resembling what went before.  In pursuing spontaneity and novelty above all else, the esthete ultimately falls into a life where true spontaneity and true newness disappear.

The second volume of Either/Or is presented as a series of letters from a judge, addressed to the young man who wrote the first volume, urging him to adopt an ethical life.  The judge argues that the boredom which plagues the esthete is itself a symptom of a deeper psychological malaise, which he labels “despair.”  To the judge, despair is the recognition that one’s life is meaningless.  All merely esthetic lives are meaningless, so despair is the universal condition of the esthete.  Instead, the judge argues that an ethical life actually preserves the beauty and joy of life better than the esthetic alone is able to.  The ethical life is the life lived for the sake of higher, “eternal” values, such as good over evil.  It is the attempt, the judge says, to take up the universal moral duties and make them actual in one’s own life.  This gives one’s life a continuous structure, by making one’s life a task to be consciously reflected on, willed and carried through instead of simply a drifting from one pleasure to another.  It puts one in relation with others, and in doing so puts one in relation to the past and the future.

Insofar as role-playing games are simulations of life (that is what “role-playing” suggests), the challenge for the players is to create characters that are fun.  This is an esthetic criterion, of course, and a subjective one.  However, in the long run, a character whose life consists of meaningless events, just fighting and getting stuff over and over, is more likely to get tedious than a character who has long-term goals that are important in the context of the game.  Killing 3,872 orcs is fine, but killing 3,872 orcs in order to save the village or clear the valley for one’s castle, from which one will establish one’s kingdom and change the world is much more satisfying, even if in fact all of this is just a game.  For this reason, most role-playing games have opportunities for just such a narrative structure, with a past history, present challenges and the hope that by striving the players can make a better future for themselves and for others.  While playing the game may be an esthetic occupation, it has more esthetic value when the fictional characters have ethical goals.

Another aspect that perhaps makes Kierkegaard particularly applicable to understanding role-playing games is the fact that Kierkegaard wrote most of his philosophical works while himself role-playing.  In writing Either/Or, for example, he did not merely describe the esthetic and the ethical lives; rather, he took on the role of an esthete and wrote as such a character would write, then took on the role of an ethicist and wrote accordingly.  To varying degrees, Kierkegaard’s most famous philosophical works are all written in character.  These characters are not mere pseudonyms; for the most part, they are different from their author, and some have fairly significant backstories and other personal details which are as important as their written arguments.

To be continued…..

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. vii)

            In all of this, I have been assuming relatively well-functioning players, those who know the difference between the Primary and Secondary Worlds and know that the Secondary can only be a vacation destination, not a permanent address.  I have also tacitly assumed that the players tended towards “good.”  Increasingly, that is not always the case.  It is impossible to directly compare the moral alignments of player characters of the earliest days of gaming to today’s heroes; however, it is possible to draw a rough but useful equivalent.  In the earliest versions of Dungeons and Dragons, some magic items had moral alignments.  These alignments were randomly determined according to percentages assigned in the rulebooks.  In effect, this established the moral balance of the world in any campaign using the Dungeons and Dragons books (barring Dungeonmaster interference with the dice).  Intelligent magic swords were 55% likely to be some sort of Good, and only 15% likely to be Evil.  Robes of the Arch Mage were 45% likely to be Good, and 25% likely to be evil.[1]  Any player would quickly get the message that the world (or at least the treasure tables) favored Good players.  In the case of the most popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft, we don’t have to speculate as much or rely simply on moral biases in the rules to suggest the likelihood of evil characters; we have a census.[2]  According to the 2010 World of Warcraft census of player-characters level 10 or above, 51% are Alliance and 49% are Horde out of 6,014,846  total.[3]  To be fair, though, the official descriptions of the various Horde races seem to transform them from the ruthless killers of the original Warcraft games to a collection of races at least as much victims of brutality as they are its authors. 

            In Dungeons and Dragons the Evil party was usually a variation on the norm.  Truly evil characters cannot trust each other, and in a face-to-face roleplaying group you can rarely have players who cannot trust each other.  Even if they were pirates (a viable option in the early days of Traveler, for instance), they had to at least have honor among thieves.  Insofar as the characters are evil, there seems to be some unique dynamics in play.  First, sometimes the characters are evil in the eyes of some but not to the players.  My limited experience with Vampire:  The Masquerade suggested that the players were more Goth superheroes, trying to control their monstrous sides to enable them to fight the truly evil beasties of the universe who really did want to destroy the world.  The current WoW web site describes the Horde races in similar terms; the true evil, the Burning Legion, is enemy to Human and Orc alike.  In fact, the history of the Horde races is a collection of stories of good peoples corrupted by evils and temptations of various sorts, now trying to redeem themselves.

            More generally, it seems that playing evil characters has a cathartic function, much as Aristotle describes in his Poetics.  Players find an outlet for their desire to rebel against society, their lot in life and so on, in a Secondary World where the social consequences are not so great; once they have blown off steam they are able to go back out into the Primary World.  From the perspective of these theories, however, the choice to play truly evil, destructive characters would seem far more problematic.  Philosophy may have difficulty defining “evil” or “good,” but generally Fantasy has little trouble:  “evil” wishes to destroy the world or at least to enslave and torture other sentient beings, while “good” seeks to help and support life in general, and sentient life in particular.  To be truly evil is to side with what is harmful to the world in general, and other persons in particular; it is to be sadistic, nihilistic, treacherous and anti-life.  From the perspective of Campbell’s theory, this seems impossible; the monomyth is an expression of hope and oneness with the universe, with overcoming the destruction.  In the mythologies of the world, there are gods and goddesses that seem “evil,” but generally they have some sort of benevolent purpose.  The perfect example of this is Kali.  To the British, Kali was the goddess of the Thuggee, a ruthless cult of brigands and stranglers.  This is how Kali has been depicted by Hollywood as well.  There seems no sane reason for anyone to worship a fanged demon wielding a sword and wearing human skulls.  However, in Hindu mythology, Kali is a more complicated figure:  the mother who destroys her young, but also protects and saves.[4]  She may appear terrifying and evil, but the deeper understanding is that the cosmos itself gives and takes, gives birth and takes back in death again.  To embrace the truth and the paradox of Kali, as Hindu mystics such as Ramakrishna have, is to embrace the whole of reality, light and dark alike, knowing that both are necessary parts of existence. 

To be continued….

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[1] Stuart Marshall, final author and editor in chief, OSRIC:  Old School Reference and Index Compliation; 2008 (http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/osric).  As a former 16^th Level Mage, I’ll pass on speculating why the writers thought Fighters were 10% more likely to be Good than were us spell-casters. 

[2] WoW Census, 10 June 2010 (http://www.wowwiki.com/WoW_Census) accessed February 18, 2013

[3]

[4] Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 114-16

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. vi)

            What light does all of this shed on gaming?  Clearly, Fantasy is the primary element in any role-playing game, by definition.  From Bunnies and Burrows to The Sims, the players are playing a role.  They are engaged in a fantasy.  They are engaged in an act of sub-creation, and must give their Secondary Belief if the game is to have any significance—-otherwise it’s just as boring and pointless as pinball.  In some ways, role-playing games may be a purer expression of the imageo dei than any other art form, by their very nature.  First, the Dungeon Master or Storyteller (or whatever the referee is called) really is trying first to create a world.  Second, in most games there is an element of randomness in the world, which generally is used to simulate everything from genuinely random events (from a bar-fight to the weather) to the “free actions” of non-player characters.  In a book or movie, the author knows whether or not the princess will kiss the hero when he lifts his visor; but in an RPG the GM may choose not to control that event, but instead set probabilities and let the dice fall where they may.  A good GM can keep the plot moving in the desired direction no matter what random chance and the choices of players may be, without directly controlling those other events and never, ever overruling the free choices of the other players.  Is that not a good model for God’s Providence in the Primary World?  If the players actions are to be meaningful, the referee must step back, and let the players make free choices.  Some elements of the secondary world have to remain uncreated, undetermined until the players encounter them.  Some elements are delegated to the players themselves, so they become sub-creators within the sub-creation.  In a real role-playing game, the GM sets the parameters and the main features of the world within which other agents may act; given those boundaries, the players then seek to role-play lives they will find meaningful.

            Recovery seems more occasional.  I am not sure any player or gamemaster regularly experiences a re-visioning of the Primary World.  I have, at times, witnessed a player experience a Recovery of himself, where the player began to question his choices as a player and, from there, question his choices as a person.  But Escape is something that any good role-playing experience will offer.  This seems to be the main attraction of the RPG and the main reason these are distrusted by non-gamers.  For a time, the players enter into a world where people can fly, animals can talk, and hard work and talent really do lead to riches.

            But if RPGs can offer Escape, what about Consolation?  How far can they be evangelium, gospel, for the players?  Insofar as the plot of the scenario presents a eucatastrophe, it offers a foretaste of the Gospel, according to Tolkien’s essay.  Generally, this is not a sure thing.  For the players’ actions to have real significance, there has to be real risk.  (Again, this offers a real model for theodicy in the Primary World.)  Sometimes the balrog wins, and everyone has to roll up new characters.  But to keep players coming back, there has to be the belief that ultimately, the players can win.  The eucatastrophe must always be possible.  The arc of the Secondary World must bend towards justice, at least justice for the player characters, such that their virtues as players will eventually be rewarded.

To be continued….

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. v)

Recovery is another element that is well illustrated by The Time Machine.[1]  It is the moment when you see the overly-familiar Primary World in a new light, as if it were new and alien.  Tolkien uses the image of seeing familiar England as if it were some distant future seen only with a time machine.  In that future, the class divisions that were so common in Victorian England that one scarcely noticed them became a strange story of two separate races of humanoid:  one condemned to a joyless life cut off from both Nature and Culture, both enslaved to the technology it serves and enslaving through it; and the other living a life of beauty and joy, supported by the subterranean race but itself helpless and useless except as food.[2]  Dwelling on that image, one can begin to reflect on the nature of class relations, what rich and poor owe to one another, and what constitutes a “Producer” versus a “Moocher.”

Recovery opens the door to Escape.[3]  Fantasy, whether it be RPG or soap opera, is often condemned as “escapist;” but Tolkien asks,

 

 

“Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home?  Of if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?…  Why should we not escape from or condemn… the Morlockian horror of factories?”[4]

 

 

Escape is envisioning a world that is better than the Primary World one finds oneself in.  Having Recovered the ability to see the world afresh, one can decline to, as we so presciently say, blindly accept it.  One can reject, one can condemn, one can imagine a Secondary World where things are better, one can Escape for a time.  But Escape is not merely a modern need; humans have always longed to escape from the limits of physicality, from everything from illness to gravity to the separation between the Human and Natural worlds.  The Fairy-Story allows this, at least for awhile, by inviting us into a Secondary World where we are free.  One denied Escape is truly a Morlock, condemned for all eternity to live in the moral and physical darkness.

There is little specifically religious about either Recovery or Escape.  Escape, however, leads to consideration of “the Great Escape:  the Escape from Death,” and with it, Consolation.[5]  This was ultimately where Campbell sees the monomyth aiming as well.  However, for Tolkien, the highest Consolation is not merely another aspect of Escape.  He writes:

 

 

Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending.  Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it.  At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story.  Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—-I will call it Eucatastrophe.  The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.[6]

 

 

 

The eucatastrophe is the sudden, joyous turn, the unexpected rescue, the happy ending when no happy ending seemed possible.[7]  It is an escape from the tragedy and pain that is all too common in life.  It admits that these are the usual way of the world; the sudden happy ending is always presented as unexpected, unique, and not to be counted on.  But “it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of this world, poignant as grief.”[8]  The fairy-story is, in effect, a kind of Gospel, “good news.”  It is a Subcreation; it is true, but only in the Secondary World of the storymaker, and capable of commanding only Secondary Belief.  By contrast, what God does is Creation, true in the Primary World.  Tolkien writes:

 

 

But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation.  The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history.  The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation.  This story begins and ends in joy.[9]

 

 

The fairy-story expresses the hope and wish of human nature; the Gospel fulfills it.  The fairy-story is the desire for the Gospel, sometimes even older than the knowledge of the Gospel itself.  As Augustine said, “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.”  The fairy-tale expresses that restlessness.

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[1] “Fairy-Stories,” pp. 75-78

[2] I wonder how many of the Occupy Wall Street protesters with their signs saying ”Eat the Rich” knew they were echoing 19^th century science fiction.

[3] “Fairy-Stories,” pp. 79-85

[4] “Fairy-Stories,” pp. 79, 82

[5] “Fairy-Stories,” p. 85

[6] “Fairy-Stories,” p. 85

[7] “Fairy-Stories,” pp.  85-90

[8] “Fairy-Stories,” p.  86

[9] “Fairy-Stories,” pp.  88-89

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. iv)

In many ways, Tolkien’s theories of myth and fantasy move in the opposite direction from Campbell’s.  Tolkien specifically rejects theories that see the significance of the tale in what it borrows from or shares with similar stories.[1]  Rather, Tolkien says we should focus our attention on what is unique to the particular story as presented by the particular storymaker.  While the author or poet or storyteller may use themes and symbols that are common property, Tolkien urges us to look at how the storymaker changes them.  Is the Orphic myth of Dionysus the same as the story of the Crucifixion of Christ, because both tell the story of a god who dies and is resurrected?  Should we focus more attention on the common elements, or on the differences, such as the fact that Christ is said to deliberately offer himself in place of humanity, or that the events take place in history rather than prehistory?  Tolkien would say that in any story, we should look at the intent of the storymaker and the message that is invented through his or her creative activity.  Both may be stories of divine heroes who conquer death, but while one explains human sin as a natural result of human origins (part Titan and part god) the other sees it as unnatural, the result of human rebellion, which is now to be undone by God.

Campbell and Tolkien disagree on the origin of “fairy stories” or “myths,” and likewise disagree on the essential elements.  Campbell’s list was more structural, Tolkien’s reads more like a list of ingredients:

 

 

First of all:  if written with art, the prime value of fairy-stories will simply be that value which, as literature, they share with other literary forms.  But fairy-stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things:  Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.[2]

 

 

These are the distinguishing characteristics of the fairy-story, according to Tolkien.  For the most part, they are not necessarily present in any particular order, except that Consolation refers to the “happy ending.”  There are two general reasons for this.  First, it reflects Tolkien’s emphasis on the uniqueness of each story; while Campbell is arguing that all myths are basically the same story with different fonts, Tolkien wants to emphasize the variations introduced by the author and thus is more inclined to an examination that enlarges the space for authorial originality.  Second, Tolkien is attempting to distinguish the fairy-story as a specific genre, different from similar tales such as the dream story or beast fable.[3]  For this reason, he wants to present the distinctive characteristics of the fairy-story.  But while his emphasis is often on the unique and distinguishing, he also has much to say about what all such stories have in common; and like Campbell, he traces this to human nature itself, and particularly to the spiritual in human nature.

Of Tolkien’s four qualities of the true fairy-story, Fantasy is the most fundamental and the one he discusses most extensively.[4] Tolkien affirms that “Fantasy is a natural human activity,” an expression of human creativity and imagination.[5]  As such, it is fully consistent and even dependent on human reason and logic.[6]  It may be distorted into destructive and self-destructive idolatries and Morbid Delusion, but it cannot and must not be suppressed.  But Tolkien does not see the capacity for Fantasy merely as an expression of a human psychological or intellectual need; he sees it as expressing a theological truth:  “Fantasy,” he writes, “remains a human right:  we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made:  and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”  Human creative activity is the expression of the Imageo Dei.  Humans are given the capacity for “sub-creation.”   The finest Fantasist can create a whole Secondary World, where fantastic images such as a green sun have “the inner consistency of reality” and command Secondary Belief.  Only God can create the Primary World, of course, and only the Primary World can deserve Primary Belief; but a Secondary World can invite or even “command” (in Tolkien’s words) a temporary belief, a feeling that such things are possible and perhaps a wish that they were true.  It can even suggest possibilities that could be true.  One of Tolkien’s repeated images is H.G. Wells’ story of the Morlocks, those descendents of 19^th Century factory workers who evolved into technologically superior troglodytes, farming the surface-dwelling, beautiful but idiot descendents of the aristocracy.  This is hardly a happy “fairy-story;”  The Time Machine is a cautionary tale rather than a true fairy-story in Tolkien’s sense.  But it is an admirable expression of Fantasy, despite an appalling lack of elves or magic.  It takes the elements of this world, reworks them as a potter takes and reworks the clay, and creates an internally consistent Secondary World.

To be continued…..

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[1] J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Tree and Leaf; reprinted in The Tolkien Reader, by J. R. R. Tolkien, (New York:  The Random House Publishing Group, 1966) pp.  45-8

[2] “Fairy-Stories,” p. 67

[3] “Fairy-Stories,” pp. 34-44

[4] “Fairy-Stories,” pp. 68-75

[5] “Fairy-Stories,” p. 74

[6] “Fairy-Stories,” p. 75

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. iii)

Perhaps so many RPG scenarios resemble Campbell’s monomyth because of his ubiquitous influence on the fantasy industry; or perhaps it is because it really is as universal as he says.  Either way, this general pattern is embedded in most of the RPG sessions I’ve played in and in the games themselves, to some degree.  To some extent, of course, any adventure has to begin with “a hero ventures forth…”  The hero must encounter hostile forces and win a decisive victory.  Many games do not include the “fabulous” in the narrow sense.  Sword-and-sorcery games are fabulous, of course, and space opera really is even if the fabulous elements are described as super-science rather than magic.  But what about Western campaigns, or spies, or noir/pulp detective games?  What about The Sims, where players simply pretended to be different 21st  Century people?  The answer would be that not all role-playing is a monomyth because not all is necessarily a quest.   But where there is a task to be performed, a goal to be attained, and there is a sense of character development and progressive empowerment through the striving towards and achievement of the goal, the monomyth pattern appears.  In the original RPG, Dungeons and Dragons, the monomyth was embedded in the game itself.  Characters joined together to seek treasure and kill monsters.  As they did so, they improved in their abilities by quantifiable steps or “levels.”  They might have a purpose, a great evil to thwart or village to save, but they just as often simply went into “the dungeon” to fight monsters and gain levels.  However, as they got stronger, the monsters got tougher too; even if it was not their intention, they wound up bestowing boons on their fellow men (or dwarves or elves or whatever) simply by removing so much evil from the world.

However, it turned out that simply killing beasties and getting rich makes a boring game.[1]  Therefore, a narrative structure was introduced, and with that the monomyth emerges full-blown.  It was consummated with the final “level.”  Eventually, the character was such a high level that there was little sense in playing; but by then you had a fighter who could kill Asmodeus in single combat or a wizard who could level a mountain with a word.  In short, the character was godlike, and there was no more fitting retirement than to settle down as either a god-king ruling over other mortals (and maybe immortals) in the material world, or to transcend the material completely and retire to Valhalla or Olympus to hobnob with one’s fellow deities.

From the Campbellian or Jungian point of view, it matters little whether or not anyone in the game realizes that what they are doing has spiritual significance.  What matters is that they are focusing intently and creatively on potent symbols from humanity’s collective unconscious.  Together the players are taking on tasks and quests, entering into a shared dream where they symbolically confront and (hopefully) overcome a variety of existential and psychological threats, to eventually overcome the limits of morality itself, becoming one with whatever divine power exists in that dream world.  It does not matter whether or not they realize they are reenacting the monomyth, any more than it matters in the monomyth whether or not the hero intentionally sets out on a quest or blunders into the Other World.

To be continued…..

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[1] As a Kierkegaardian aside, this is basically the message of Either/Or.  In the first part, Kierkegaard presents the life of the self-centered hedonist or esthete, the person who lives for no higher purpose; this life is shown to disintegrate into disconnected, meaningless episodes and to finally be empty.  This emptiness is experienced as boredom, “the root of all evil,” which the esthete fears the most and can never escape.  Only when the individual comes to see his or her life as a task and chooses to seek and express higher values does life become meaningful.  To put it in gaming terms, you need a story, a quest, so that all this striving feels like it means something.

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. ii)

Joseph Campbell published The Hero with a Thousand Faces in 1949, but his theories have roots in the earlier writings of Carl Jung.  As an avid gamer, Jung’s Psychology & Religion fascinated me from the moment I read it, because of how it resonated with my own experiences.  Before I began playing Dungeons and Dragons, I suffered from frequent nightmares; within a year of beginning role-playing I found the nightmares were under control.  I say “under control” because I literally learned how to take charge of my dreams, at least sometimes, because instead of being my own powerless and anxious self I would switch to being my D&D character.  I found too that my friends frequently recounted dreaming they were characters or were in their D&D world or something of that sort.  Jung offers an explanation for why this would be, by linking dreams and mythology to the unconscious.  In dreams, one’s unconscious speaks through symbols and images.  The man who is seeking a pattern for his own life dreams of a “world clock,” a geometrically harmonious construction keeping time by strict ratios of rates of rotation for its hands.  Jung links this image both to the patient’s earlier dreams, which incorporated many of these symbols, and to such religious symbols as the Tibetan mandelas, to pagan mythology and to Christian dogma.[1]  The patient himself was unaware of these connections, Jung reports; but still, even in his private psychological storm he is part of a worldwide atmosphere, which Jung terms the “collective unconscious.”  Campbell largely works by adding his considerable knowledge of the mythologies of the world to Jung’s original discussions of religious symbolism and the collective unconscious.  Campbell says that certain symbols are “collective” because they reflect universal aspects of every human existence:  birth, growth, maturity, moving from the family collective into a larger social world, the struggle for individuality and for social integration, and eventually death.  Because there are biological and social patterns that are common to all human beings, there are stories and symbols that represent these in every culture.  If these were not known, the individual would have to invent them, as Jung’s patient seemed to; but in fact they are common in every culture and every individual can borrow and adapt those symbols to tell himself the story of himself (or herself).  All religions, Campbell argues, are variations on the “monomyth,”  as he writes:

            The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage:  separation—-initiation—-return:  which might me named the nuclear unit of the monomyth.

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder:  fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won:  the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[2]

Campbell argues with Jung, however, claiming that psychologists err when they see religion as merely expressions of the unconscious, collective or otherwise.[3]  The symbols may spring from the unconscious, but the myths are public and intentional attempts to understand life and the universe.  The unconscious is the metaphysical realm; the “collective unconscious” is the universal awareness that all things come from one source (God, mana, Being or whatever) and return to it again.  The monomyth is the product of monism.

Campbell’s theory says that mythology is inescapable and essential, even to the “modern” person, because it is the deeper attempt to reconcile oneself with one’s own self, with one’s social identity, and with the universe as a whole.  But as Jung himself said in his treatise on UFOs, the modern person often creates new “scientific” symbols to replace the fantastic and mythological symbols of the past.  Once we told stories of visitors from the divine realm who came with gifts of healing and gifts of love, who worked miracles and were persecuted and died but rose again to return to their former glory; now we have E.T:  The Extraterrestrial.  Campbell’s theories have influenced George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, the Wachowskis and others; if any filmmaker for the last thirty years has made a fantastic film that owed nothing to Star Wars or Indiana Jones or The Matrix, I am unaware of it.  Campbell’s theories are ubiquitous in film, and the influence of film is ubiquitous in gaming.

To be continued…..

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[1] Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion, (New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 1938) pp. 79-114

[2] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Bollingen Series XVII (Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 1973) p. 30

[3] Hero with a Thousand Faces, pp. 255-60

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise? Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. i)

The “Religion and Popular Culture” group for The American Academy of Religion has issued a paper call for “Games and theories of gaming of all types” for the 2013 meeting in Baltimore.  This got me thinking again about the connections and convergences between religion and role-playing games, two subjects I have been intimately interested in since the 1970’s.  I started writing my thoughts down, and I’m still at it.  I’ve submitted a proposal, but this draft is way over the reading time limit, so at this point I’m just writing for my own amusement.  I’ll be posting it here in installments; I hope you enjoy it, and I thank you in advance for any comments that prove useful, stimulating, and/or encouraging.

Is Role-Play Gaming a Religious Exercise?  Thoughts on Tolkien, Campbell and Role-Playing Games (pt. i)

 

 

            The topic for this session is, “games and theories of gaming.”  My first thought when I hear “gaming” is RPGs.  When I began gaming, Dungeons and Dragons was just a few years old, and the first hardcover edition of the rules had yet to be issued.  There were two aspects of the relationship between “religion” and “gaming” in those days:  the fact that “cleric” was a character class, and the fact that many religious leaders and others were “Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons.”  In the first case, back in the day, there was one role-playing game and, effectively, only two religions.  If you were a “good” cleric, you learned spells to heal, bless, and gained the power to repel the undead; if you were an “evil” cleric you learned to harm, curse and command the undead.  Aside from those differences in the spell lists and powers, all clerics were basically the same:  all used blunt weapons ostensibly because “shedding blood” was forbidden (unless your cleric was “evil” and was offering a sacrifice), all were allowed chainmail armor, and so on.  Supposedly these had religious reasons; but really, the only point was to differentiate clerics from fighters by reserving the best armor and weapons for the spell-less, and from wizards by reserving the best spells for the unarmored mages.  That is, it had a game-balance function that was justified in-game with a religiously-based reason.  The assumption, however, was that all religion was basically feudal European Catholicism, more or less, at least if it was “good,” so all class restrictions, all spells and powers and so on could be justified in terms borrowed from an unsophisticated Christianity; and if evil, then the religion was some sort of mirror image and thus still borrowing its terms from a superficial view of religion based on stereotypes of the medieval Church.

That is to say, when the gaming hobby began, religion was caricatured more than it was depicted.  A real religion was flattened, made to fit gaming conventions, and applied.  And the “real religion” likewise caricatured gaming.  Once cards and dice were the Devil’s playthings; in the 1970’s fundamentalist Christians who had long since made their peace with Pinochle and Monopoly saw Satanic plots in the pages of a rulebook and the spinning of a twenty-sider.  Much has already been written about the evils of Dungeons and Dragons, and about the paranoia and fallacious reasoning of those hunting that alleged evil.

What interests me more is the irony of the whole situation.  It seems quite obvious that a group of miniatures wargamers would not have begun adapting the rules of Chainmail by scaling down the rules for mass combat to individuals and introducing fantastic elements like magic and monsters were it not for the success of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth stories.  And Tolkien was a devout Catholic, who wrote out of a religious sensibility.  It is reasonable to say then that role-playing games grew out of Christianity; they are “Christian games” in much the same way that the U. S. A. is a “Christian nation.”  Three years after the publication of Dungeons and Dragons, 1977, a new role-playing game appeared on the market:  Traveller.  This time, the game was based not on fantasy but on science fiction, a genre more often associated with agnosticism and atheism.   However, 1977 also saw the release of Star Wars, a film based largely on the work of noted mythologist Joseph Campbell.  Through the 1980’s the gaming industry spawned dozens of role-playing games, with movies influencing games and vice-versa, and always with the original genetic inheritance of Tolkien and the continuing inspiration of Campbell.  And on one point in particular these two writers agree:  that fantasy writing of all sorts is inherently a religious exercise.  They disagree, however, as to just what that exercise is.

To be continued…..