Abigail at Asking the Wrong Questions has the most thoughtful review I've read yet of The Dark Knight Rises. At The Secret Sun there's also a thoughtful response to ideas about the first day.
A question. How much of the action of The Dark Knight Rises could your preferred tabletop gaming system handle? If it's a wargame, I'm guessing not too much. Even a tactical roleplaying game could have trouble, if it's not as different as we might think it is.
Another question. How far could your preferred game system handle the real-world events that made the news on release day? That situation also had weapons, possibly armour, low light and the element of surprise. All common factors in this kind of gaming.
A question. How much of the action of The Dark Knight Rises could your preferred tabletop gaming system handle? If it's a wargame, I'm guessing not too much. Even a tactical roleplaying game could have trouble, if it's not as different as we might think it is.
Another question. How far could your preferred game system handle the real-world events that made the news on release day? That situation also had weapons, possibly armour, low light and the element of surprise. All common factors in this kind of gaming.
Are we being inconsistent if we refuse point blank to play out a scenario like that? After all, how many factions or individuals in any given game world are really 'good guys'? The fictional deaths we cause in-game may not be justified, assuming death ever is. Some units or individuals might be more or less draughted in, unwilling, innocent. One side usually aims to hurt the other whoever it is fighting. It's what the rulebook suggests.
Would it be more acceptable for the tabletop if the audience were made less people?
If they were, say, zombies, and the scenario involved them, in Dawn of the Dead style, returning to a site of strong experiences from life, in this case to a cinema? Or if the audience were hostile forces in a brutal campaign, but off duty? The Allies firebombed and nuked civilians. Or aliens? Xenophobia also features in game settings; they may be lifeforms, but they're not like us, right? If they are, we can always make them look bad.
A few more questions. Who is too much of a person for the purposes of gaming? Are we consistent in deciding? When fictional action makes the front pages, how much of the front pages makes the fiction? Where does the real world begin, and where does it end?
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7 comments:
Von and I had a conversation a little while back about the Original D&D and how Gygax made demi-humans mechanically second-class options as they were designed from the ground up as sidekicks for the human heroes.
This is interesting as it seems to me that fantasy has gone the other way now, in a sort of reverse of master-race ideology. Instead of objectifying others until our people are the only real people, modern fantasy gives subjectivity to non-humans in an ever-expanding circle. Stories exist from the point of view of Vampires, Werewolves, Orcs, ETs and soon enough I don't doubt we'll have, zombies and hive minds with subjectivity we've assigned them.
All of this should make us feel less comfortable about having our characters simply slaughter these beings and take their stuff. The worrying thing to me is that I'm not sure that it does.
Oh, and I'd just like to add that in the context of a wargame, Infinity does it well I think. There are no heroes and villains, just different factions willing to regrettably use violence for their political aims.
There are only different degrees of otherness. The Combined Army only seems evil(ish) because their methods of war are alien and therefore horrific by human standards. I think this is close to a thoughtful 21st century westerner's understanding of the relationship between cultural moralities.
"... modern fantasy gives subjectivity to non-humans in an ever-expanding circle."
That's a good summary of the way things have been moving. It seems to reflect a general change that means there's more variety in humans being expressed too.
"All of this should make us feel less comfortable about having our characters simply slaughter these beings and take their stuff. The worrying thing to me is that I'm not sure that it does."
I feel the same on both counts, although in the latter case I do think it does make us less comfortable to some extent, in the sense that because we're better able to see the beings as comparable to us, and on certain levels maybe even see them as near indistinguishable, it's likely that we do. But if we don't recognise this happening around us as much as we might expect, maybe other factors are in play too.
I think one critical factor suppressing the effects of this change is the essential and continuing power of the author, and the motivations for the authoring. By this I mean the causes of the creation, the reasons the work appears. These could be many of course, but generally we understand them to include remuneration for the author and entertainment for the audience.
One effect of this authorial drive could be an overriding of the solidarity with other beings by creation of a certain context for or within the work, which either the reader doesn't see as contrary with the solidarity, or agrees to regardless, a kind of willing suspension of disagreement; a compact proposed between author and audience - maybe through subtle prompts - so that while one or both parties feel perhaps they shouldn't, they'll do it anyway.
The author could gain in sales, say, or prestige, or less directly through the reinforcement or promotion of a certain relationship among beings. The audience could have a need met, a desire to be carried away to another place for example. Or maybe there's a resistance to the challenge of the solidarity itself. Or maybe it's more an overwhelming of the audience with something more base or so loud it obscures the nuances or the recent steps forward in comprehension. The question then becomes one of how far the audience is complicit, and maybe how far they recognise they could be complicit.
"The Combined Army only seems evil(ish) because their methods of war are alien and therefore horrific by human standards."
I think this is a key issue. To some degree a solidarity with other beings might need us to overcome ingrained responses, and change our modes of thinking and means of expression. It comes back to that resistance, and the willingness to suspend agreement. What's the push and pull? How hard are we willing to work and why?
We may need to reshape or remake our natures to fit our developing values. After all, as a lifeform we seem to have come a long way quickly, and our more fundamental capacities may be struggling to keep up with our higher reasoning. How far can we reshape ourselves? How far can we even recognise there might be a need?
I think that it's the historical context of works of fantasy more than anything else that makes for this disconnect between empathizing with other beings and also seeing it as natural to fight and kill them. Fantasy draws fundamentally on mythology I think, although it may be buried so deep and at such a remove that the author themselves is not aware of it, thinking that they are drawing only on previous fantasy. Mythological stories have, in the very sorts of events they portray, the uncritical assumptions of pre-enlightenment cultures. Fighting, killing, and taking from others who are not of your tribe is not a moral issue, merely a practical one. Mythological heroes worry about how to kill the giant, not whether or not they should. Even in a story like Beowulf, where we are introduced to the monster's family and learn that they too are motivated by familial ties, this doesn't make Beowulf (and presumably, the original audience) think twice about diving into the lake to kill Grendel's mother. I infer from this that ancient Geats would have treated their human enemies in much the same way.
Modern fantasy has inherited that attitude, but it's brutal purity has been undermined by our culture's own social battles with sexism and racism and the horrors of 20th century race warfare. We want to understand the others, but at the same time we feel the pull back to the simple world, where my family are the only people worth considering and the world is a dangerous place where you might be called upon to put aside your empathy and kill the giant at any moment.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, out of all the possibilities you presented, I think they are all to some extent at play. But I think the one most salient is perhaps "an overwhelming of the audience with something more base or so loud it obscures the nuances or the recent steps forward in comprehension. The question then becomes one of how far the audience is complicit, and maybe how far they recognise they could be complicit."
The way we in the west relate to societies that are not our own and persons who identify as not-us is radically different to the way any civilization has before - at least to my knowledge. We have lost the path of retreat into insular tribalism, where we can admit that the others may be people without requiring us to extend moral consideration to them. Now we have predicated moral consideration on personhood, instead of proximity of relationship. If Grendel's mother is a person, then we must treat her as we treat our own mother.
But the old tribalist way has been and still is a natural form of self-other relations since the earliest stories and moralities. It's no more natural than our justice and person-hood based view of morality (or any view), but it easily overcomes the problems of relativism that our view is prone to and so is understandably attractive to us as fantasy.
It makes me think of Bronze Age Minoa on Crete, a major power to the Greeks and a big influence on western thought. There's evidence it was a matriarchal society and a sense it was a transitional one too, where a prehistoric matriarchal social structure moved towards the more patriarchal we're familiar with today. More subtle suggestions are there in things like the moon symbolism of the bison horn reflected in how important the bull was, and not least the Minotaur myth as a perversion of fertility, with Theseus killing the half-human 'monster' to end the deaths of those being fed to it. Whatever the political importance of that particular myth for the Athenians - which might have been a guarantee of the myth sticking around to inform in other ways - it can be read as a watershed, an allegorical end to the days of a small number of humans struggling to survive in a harsh natural world, with every birth a gift, and the beginning of a time in which the major trials were human made, and humans almost became an enemy to each other by their existence.
The point I'm getting at here, in a very long-winded way, is change in the world around us, and the relationship of that to the maintenance of mythology. Western mythology is strongly coloured by the 3,000 years of the Bronze Age, probably more than by the three million plus of the Stone Age, but it spoke to the people of the time and comes down to us to influence us in turn. If it's true "The way we in the west relate to societies that are not our own and persons who identify as not-us is radically different to the way any civilization has before", we might well be overdue a new body of myth better suited to who we are now. Then again, looking round, those myths could be here already - and maybe helped get us this far - or may be emerging, especially with the explosion in recorded expression since western printing appeared, and most of all in the past century.
If this is all true, and fantasy does borrow from myth, maybe fantasy will change quickly now as time goes by? The fact we're discussing the issue suggests it could. This might be especially true if the relativism becomes more comfortable, or necessary, and the sense of an alternative fades.
I think that's likely. Fantasy feels to me as though it is going through a transition, and I also have this dim sense that our culture is creating new mythology right now.
The reason I think this is that western culture at the moment seems far less concerned with creating novel works than with collaging existing tropes and figures. We've talked about this before, but it feels to me as though people are desperately trying to build cultural connections (memes, fan-fictions, alternate "histories" and uses of beloved fictional characters) to prove that we are all sharing a common heritage.
Perhaps periods of novel creativity and scientific revolution like the renaissance and the 20th century are always followed by periods of backwards-looking myth-making, in order to rebuild the shattered culture?
That would be an interesting way of looking at it - what we normally think of as creativity is actually destruction, and what we think of as turning the novel creative works to derivative use is really rebuilding.
We may well end up with stories about people in previous eras, exhibiting morality that we find comfortable. Which is pretty much re-telling and re-shaping mythology.
It would be a very interesting way of looking at it. What are the implications of that? In terms of motivation and effect, of how much we understand what we do, and do what we intend, and the consequences even a long way down the line as the more delicate strands come to the surface? It's asking us to reassess history with a finer critical eye than we might do now, and look at our own actions differently too. It deserves a lot more thought that's for sure. In the central three paragraphs especially - and the central most of all - you've set out a compact and beautifully clear starting point for an approach.
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