I bought a few postage stamps the other day; the postal rate had gone up, and I can’t generally keep track of such things, so I found myself needing just a few stamps to send just a few letters. The postal worker behind the counter handed me what I’ve been taught to call commemeratives, stamps which carry an image of someone or something which we wish to honor and remember.
Unfortunately, I did not recognize either the picture or the name on these particular stamps. Always interested in learning more, I asked the woman waiting on me who that was.
“Don’t ask me to try to pronounce his name,” she said, “’cause I can’t. He’s some Hawaiian surfer.”
To my benefit, the girl in the next window intervened. “He’s Duke Kahanamoku, father of Hawaiian surfing.”
Having learned a bit about the Hawaiian language and its pronunciation back in fourth grade, I could have worked out kah-Hahn-ah-MO-koo; but I had no idea that there was a “father of Hawaiian surfing”, or even now what that means to people in California. Since his picture appears on the stamp, I conclude that he has died (postal regulations forbid featuring living persons on postage stamps; that means the U. S. Government has officially declared Elvis dead). But I know nothing more about him than these bare facts. And from this, I wonder why he appears on the stamp.
Don’t misunderstand. I do not begrudge him a place on a postage stamp. Surfing is a significant fragment of American culture, and if he is truly one of its great figures, let him be remembered. I wonder whether one day there will be a stamp commemorating the place role playing games have had in our culture, and who would appear on it (although honestly I suspect that, love him or hate him, recognize his contribution or argue it, there is only one person who would be considered for that honor). But there is a deeper level at which this question nags me: Why do we have a surfer on a postage stamp?
Perhaps it is not so great an honor as it once was. There was a time when former Presidents were most commonly featured on stamps, occasionally also founding fathers. In the 1960’s I believe there were a few presenting leading scientists of the past. Today the postal service survives in part by convincing people to buy stamps they don’t need, and so there is a continuing effort to confer the honor on as many people as possible, so that there will be a constant flow of new stamps for collectors to snatch up and place, unused or used particularly to gain the postmark, in albums. Yet still, to appear on a postage stamp is to be honored, to be recognized as something of a hero in America.
That tells me much about American culture, about the diversity of our heroes perhaps, but also about their nature.
I don’t wish to explore the nature of heroes in America. Rather, I wish to ask about other worlds–for this is meaningless but that it gives us insights into the worlds of our imaginations. What does it tell us?
It tells us that the heroes honored by a people reflect their values and interests. Once our postage stamp honors went to political leaders and scientific pioneers; today we confer them upon those who entertained us and gave us popular recreational pastimes. Then we lived in a world in which we were worried about maintaining our position as world leader, staying technologically ahead of competing world powers and encouraging strong leadership for the future. Now we’re more interested in our creature comforts, our leisure activities. I don’t mean that either view is more altruistic; both ultimately boil down to self-interest one way or another. But the content of that self interest tells much about us.
Bringing this into our game worlds is difficult and subtle; but the starting point it to avoid assuming that they will all have the same kinds of heroes as we, or that they will always have the same kinds of heroes from generation to generation. Statues of military leaders are not the icons of this age, although many such honors may be found from the past still with us. Does your culture honor educators? Do the icons of this race do homage to religious leaders, or peacemakers, or statesmen? Are great philosophers the subject of its art and song? Do sports heroes hold this place in the hearts of the people?
Remember, what the people honor reflects what they value in a person; and what they value in a person will become that to which their young aspire; and this in turn becomes the strengths of the next generation.
Remember also that wherever the strengths of a generation lies, these things will be seen as the ordinary. Thus the generation that succeeds in becoming that which its parents revered will revere something else, and so the world changes.
What are the ways in which heroes are honored in your world, and in the countries and cultures of your world? Who are the heroes of the past who have been so honored, and how do the icons to their memories impact the world today? Who are the more recent heroes, those who are revered by the culture today, and how do they differ from their predecessors? In the effort to create the cultures of your world, these details are more than color. They are in a sense fabric, the warp and woof of the culture, the mute testimony of what your people have valued in the past and now value in the present. If you have the answer to these questions, you may know a lot more about how your people think and feel than you realized.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
