orthogeeks

Chris wrote recently about this topic and I wanted to give my formal response. In interest of full disclosure, I am also an avid fan of Role Playing Games (or RPG’s as we have called them since the days of yore) and played D&D in high school. I’ve also played since then, though with less frequency, as being away from the school environment makes it harder to get a good gaming group together.

As Chris pointed out in one of his comments, the deep concern at the heart of all of the hysteria and/or reaction against role playing games is the concept that they are in some sense not make-believe at all, but real.

As the story goes, this tract is based on the experiences of a particular convert from paganism. The story is not true, but the author was a pagan who was visited by Gary Gygax (may God rest his soul) for an explanation of how they did incantations and magic. In other words, to some extent the magic system in Dungeons and Dragons is inspired by or modeled after real people who believe they can do magic.

The rest of the tract is of course made up; there is no evidence provided that Dungeons and Dragons is anything but a simulation of medieval combat with fantasy elements, in the same way a flight simulator or combat simulator cannot really be compared to the real experience.

As a geek in Gygax’s shoes, to simulate magic for a rules-based system you’d have two choices: The first is the magic from what originally inspired all Role Playing Games: Lord of the Rings. The problem with this is that magic in LoTR is not explained in any systematic way; if anything, the ‘magic’ system in the Phantasy Star games more accurately models LoTR’s understanding of magic: some people have natural supernatural powers that are essentially ‘magical’, but do not involve cults or specific deities or any kind of witchcraft.

The second choice would be to base it off of an extant magic ‘system’. The only one available is of course, that of the neo-pagans who practice a kind of witchcraft. As a consummate geek, it would be better to use the latter, since creation of a simulation requires some kind of basis in reality, even if the material is only used to approximate or model the actual vision. And this is important to note: while there are elements of real witchcraft or Golden Dawn kind of magic in D&D, by and large those elements are used to fill in the missing pieces to create the background for doing fantasy magic: lightning bolts, summoning fiery arrows, banishing demons, raising the dead as skeletal warriors and so forth.

Now, before I make my argument, I want to stress as Chris did that in all of this there is a danger of real paganism. While you have folks like George MacDonald and Lewis and Tolkien writing fantasy, you also have the fact that others who were Christians were also dabbling in the occult who were into fantasy and myth and symbolism: The famous poet W.B. Yeats and the author Charles Williams. Therefore it is important to note: This is not a safe world; this is not CCM or Vacation Bible School. It is akin to the book of Revelation as we Orthodox understand it: difficult, and possibly dangerous. But worth it? That depends on your approach, your gifts and your personality.

The contention here that we have with the so-called ‘fundamentalist’ Christians (it is an unusual title) is that they are saying that the magic and the occult in these games is real. Now, how they explain it has mostly to do with a belief in the power of names and invocations, i.e. ‘speak of the devil and surely he shall appear.’ From this perspective, being involved in the activity, even if you are not conscious of the power the invocations, endangers your mind and soul. This overall is a shaky argument, and I think it is more of a defense created against possibly dangerous cultural elements than an actual metaphysical argument. It takes more guns than most of these guys tote to really have a complete philosophical system around the power of names and invocations.

In fact, this belief itself, if taken seriously, makes the delusive powers of the Christian Hermeticists real, and while on one hand defends someone ignorant from involvement in possibly damaging activities, it ultimately gives the game away to evil, since it is claiming that these things have real power. All that remains for a fundamentalist to get involved in such activities is a little greed, and wasn’t that all it took Eve to listen to the serpent? Believing that the apple somehow had real power to make her a god (though she already was one by grace, of a sort?)

I should buffer this with my personal experience. We were always taught that the occult was pretty much people deluding themselves into believing what they imagined was real. Thus we (my brother, friends and myself) never dabbled. What was the point? As part of becoming Orthodox I came to understand that this is not totally accurate; but most importantly you cannot make a blanket statement about whether there is real power in any kind of occultation. And secondly, it is the willing participation of the person in sin, which may be greed for power or money, lust, or others, which is more significant in any of these cases than the form it takes: Lewis very handily pictures this in the Last Battle where the Calormene prince who supposedly served the demon-god Tash finds himself among the elect because he served Tash in a righteous manner, like he was serving Aslan. I still believe that most occultists are self-deluded, and that the majority of the work that demons do is against righteous people, not with people who are already mired in sin and harming their humanity and life.

But I think that the fundamentalists have the correct sense of the issue: It is just that they lack the tools to properly express the problem. In fact, the real problem is whether the Role Playing Game is ‘real’ or a ‘game’. But what is the distinction? A person who gambles with limits (a limitation of money for instance) is unlikely to be harmed by the activity; but those who do so without limits have it take over their life.

What is the distinction here? What I’m going to argue is somewhat more troubling in some ways, and less in others.

In discussing the highly-addictive facebook/web application Farmville in Cultivated Play this March, Mr. Patrick Liszkiewicz uses Roger Caillois’ criteria for games in Man, Play, and Games to claim that Farmville is actually not a game.

The important part is here:

Caillois stated that games must be free from obligation, separate from ‘real life,’ uncertain in outcome, an unproductive activity, governed by rules[1], and make-believe.

Ultimately what the ‘fundamentalists’ are most concerned with is that D&D is not a game. This is the premise of the Chick tract, even though the story is fictitious. While there is a focus on the idea of the literal occult in a game making the game not a game, I think that this is not really the issue.

Back in the day, there were some kids who committed suicide over Dungeons and Dragons; imbalanced personalities trying to escape via a fantasy world. For them D&D was not a game! But was it specifically D&D which was to fault, or the way in which it was being played? The Chick Tract is trying to argue that D&D is not make-believe and has social obligations, therefore it is either not a game or is the gateway to a non-gaming occult activity.

As for the first, we can definitely say that Farmville is a far worse threat to men’s souls than D&D: For those who have played it, they can confirm with you that it meets the six criteria. Beyond the gaming table no obligations extend (other than to try to show up for the next session) it is separate from real life (LARP’ing can call this into question, but the absurdity of D&D helps keep it apart) dice rolls keep the outcome uncertain, it is completely wasteful and unproductive, it is governed by rules (see the three major rule books and the hundreds of others!) and it is make-believe. D&D expects that like reading a fantasy or fiction novel you are suspending disbelief and entering into a what-if world.

However, given certain personalities, like other games (Sports especially) it can become invasive, stop being ‘make believe’, be transformed into a productive[2] activity (gambling on games for instance) and so forth.

Does D&D compel the player to break the laws of gaming? The evidence suggests, NO. D&D itself is a game which depicts elements that were inspired by the occult. But, if you are a person who cannot separate fantasy from reality, who believes in the power of simple incantations and words to change reality like a push of the hand moves a ball across a surface, D&D is extremely dangerous for you. (But so are many other things – including reading Pentecostal literature and Chick Tracts!)

As it is, Farmville is for most people a more dangerous activity spiritually than D&D. According to the article it creates a web of obligations that pulls players back in, and does not even pretend to try to keep the laws of gaming.

But if you are suggestible in the way I described above, the fact of the occult elements in D&D makes it even the more dangerous. It goes from a Lewis novel to a ‘game’ of Ouija board: the premise is that the magic is real.

If this is the case, find a priest.

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Footnotes:

1. It should be obvious that Gygax was correct from a gaming standpoint of trying to create or mimic a working rule system for magic: games are governed by rules. Christian stories provided no framework: he had to develop one. As to whether he could have developed one in a different way, I think it would have taken he himself being a Christian to do so.

2. The rule about ‘productive’ activities is taken from Adam Smith: A productive activity is one which produces a profit in its doing. Therefore while having to pay for a video game, board game or pass to a football game is a productive activity for the ticket-seller, unless the players do a productive activity *in* the game, it remains unproductive. In sports more than anything this line can be very shaky, but recall that the kicker does not get paid for each kick he makes; he is kept on the payroll to kick if needed, and if he fails to do the kicking right he will lose his job. It would be as though you were solving a word puzzle and each word you found earned you a cent. That would be a ‘productive’ activity (even though it might be ‘make work’.) Paying for the puzzle game only makes game-selling a productive activity (the selling of stock, as Smith would have it) not game-playing. Professional players risk losing themselves in the game!