Not too long ago I was talking with a friend of mine (Mark Winokur, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Movies, Flicks, and Film, an excellent book you should all rush out and buy immediately) about his next project. He had professed an interest in role-playing games and wanted to do a chapter on them as part of a larger work on race and class in popular culture. Jokingly, I responded, “You’re in luck, Mark. Those are the second and third chapters of the D&D Player’s Handbook.”
Now I’ve got to beat him to it. I’ve got to discuss the issues of race and class (culture, gender, etc.) as they pertain to those funny little games we all spend so much of our time playing. But there’s a problem. I have this idea of what I want to say but I find myself lacking the ability to fully articulate it. To hopefully solve this, I’m going to just start writing and see where it gets me. Here goes…
By and large, role-playing games paint a very politically correct, modern, and “enlightened” view of class and race differences. That is to say, they generally reduce them to zero. For example, when was the last time you came across an RPG that had something in the character creation rules along the lines of “male characters have one additional strength while female characters have one additional agility?” They do exist, yes, but they are by far the exception to the rule. Simply put, RPG’s stay far away from gender inconsistencies and, quite often, point out that they are doing so. Now, does this mean that they are providing an inaccurate representation of reality? Maybe. I don’t want to get into that particular issue because I know I’ll end up pissing off someone and for very little gain. I think it is safe to say that there are differences—physically, at least—between the genders when one steps back to broad, demographic levels.
What is interesting is that, while they are so good about keeping the sexes on equal footing, RPG’s love to show us how different the races are. Orcs are dumber than humans. Elves are more agile than dwarves. And so on and so on until you reach the absurd levels of, say, the Forgotten Realms. Now, I do realize that we’re talking completely different species here. Goblins are goblins, not some subset of humans. And so it’s okay to make them weaker or faster or less intelligent. Because they’re not the same. But try pulling the same thing with humans. Imagine a cyberpunk game, for example. It’s 2044 and there are no dwarves. During character creation, you pick what nationality your character claims. And, upon turning to the first page of the Nationalities chapter, you’re confronted with a huge list of, for lack of a better term, stereotypes. Asians get +1 Intelligence. Norwegians get +1 Strength. And it goes on like that. Chances are, it’ll strike you as odd, even as being in slightly poor taste, especially for those nationalities that get hit with a bunch of penalties. I would agree completely with that reaction. Such a chart would be, quite bluntly, racist. But when disguised as different types of elves, it all somehow becomes okay.
Science fiction has always served as a way take important—and current—issues and present them in surroundings that make discussion of them easier. Want to deal with religion without offending sensibilities? Make your story take place in a far future society and change the names of the god(s). It’s a technique that’s been used for as long as people have been writing literature. Shakespeare had some not-so-nice things to say about the royalty sponsoring his plays. The solution was to set the stories in far away times or other (barbaric) countries so the nobility could watch and say, “Look at those horrible, backwards people. It’s a good thing we English are beyond that.”
Role-playing games are doing exactly the same thing except they’re coming at it from the other direction. We know the world operates in a certain way. But we’d (unconsciously) like it to be something else. As animals, there are reactions and attitudes that function within us that we like to think we’ve “grown out of.” Most importantly for this discussion, there is a dislike and distrust of the Other. Intellectually, we are able to act against this and not attack each person we see who doesn’t look like us. However, that animal aspect is still there in some respect and it pops up every now and then. Does this make each and every one of us a racist or bigot? No. But the unconscious is often much more complex than we would like it to be and those ideas pushed out of the conscious mind will frequently show up there. So, while most of us are disgusted by the KKK members on Jerry Springer who talk about how inferior all those races are, we are perfectly content to break open some fantasy RPG and read paragraphs and pages explaining how the northern halflings are fine folk, if a little slow, and the southern halfling are artistically minded and much smarter than their cousins on the other side of those mountains. It’s just fantasy, after all.
I realize that the above has the potential of sounding like a condemnation of role-playing games as subconsciously racist propaganda. That is not my intention. I’ve never been a fan of the trend towards politicizing every last piece of popular culture, of trying to figure out what hidden meaning there is in the fact that the cartoon kid on the back of the Cheerios box is white while the kid on the back of Lucky Charms is black, or any of the other ridiculous details one can delve into if the inclination strikes. RPG’s are games and should be looked at as such. However, they are a very specific kind of game, on that directly involves the players on a level exceedingly more intimate than Monopoly or Final Fantasy VIII. RPG’s are tools for creating worlds, worlds built entirely of our own minds. As such, they present an interesting method of insight into us.
Next week, part one of a series about names, identity, the Gaming Outpost, and even superheroes. Also, I’ll have a review of Schism from Memento Mori Theatricks.
