Okay, now enjoy a rob ramble!
Gaming, politics, Life, the Universe and Everything. This is a rambly, not very well-thought-out post but sometimes it helps your head to write it all down…
I’ve been thinking a lot about two specific things that have really shaped my view of the universe – for better or for worse. Parents, of course – but everyone’s got those. Music? Certainly – but my brain was wired for art and there was an inevitability to my Life spiraling inwards on SOME form of self-expression.
But somewhere in the accretion disc of that hapless spiral, very early on I started journaling (and eventually the Journal) and gaming.
Both are very responsible for a coping mechanism that might not entirely be healthy, but sure has provided me with a toolkit that, well – I don’t know how anyone gets through Life as a THINKING human being without it.
The Journal is simpler. It’s a helpful reminder that this too shall pass, that no matter what’s going on now, eventually it will be done and those still remaining will turn it into a story. It means that as I’m standing mortified on a stage over ripped jeans, or being stuck in traffic, or thinking about how awful dinner is – I have the retreat of thinking “how can I make this into a good story for the Journal”. It’s surprisingly therapeutic.
The gaming side is maybe a little more complicated and rears it’s head in lots of different ways. It helped when I was choosing classes in college because it sort of reflected skill selection – prerequisites to enter your chosen Occupational Character Class, whatever. It made sense because I’d done it a billion times.
Taxes. It’s numbers and rule-gaming to the nth degree. There are very real-world consequences, and as it’s gotten more and more tied up with things like health care and marriage it’s gotten more difficult, but I’d argue that pulling the rules apart on a system and trying to re-jigger them to your advantage has been a useful skill while comprehending my taxes as a self-employed artist / musician (cross-discipline OCC).
Gaming is also important in my head as I contemplate privilege and upbringing, luck and fairness in Life.
We all need a little narrative, I think, to help us not just despair our complete unimportance in the world. For each individual person, the world is perceived to revolve around OURSELVES because… from our perception it does. And so having a narrative in which we’re actually important to the overall universe just makes sense. Whether it’s because a mythological beard in the sky has created an Earth in which we’re trying to subvert the Evil One or we have a path in which we’re trying to better ourselves or Finding Ms Right before we’re too old to do so – having some perceived reason for existence is pretty important.
Gaming always made me feel like I know that I’m leveling up skills, accruing knowledge, moving forward on a path that’s incremental if not always linear. I think in terms of character generation to boot. I have this narrative in my head where some people are stronger but they’re not as charismatic. And some people are charismatic but they’re not as smart. And some people are smarter but they’re not as tough. Base character attributes that somehow are rolled and in theory average out to some baseline that is human.
In addition there’s the balanced character classes. Warrior classes don’t get to pick up as many sociable skills and clerics don’t get to fight. Somehow, surely, my brain says there’s balance.
I KNOW this not to be true, but again, it helps as a framework to define many things. One of these things is white privilege. Something that I think people might understand if they’d grown up gaming – not computer gaming (I’ll get to that) but pen and paper roll the dice gaming.
If we had our choices with character generation… we’d look at all the pros and cons of being male, female, white, black, rich and poor and everything in between. And maybe we’d make the same choices, maybe we wouldn’t. In 2018 there are different pros and cons to these character classes than there were in 2014. Vastly different than the pros and cons from the 90s, 70s, 50s…
In rolling for your initial wealth… chose your race : white gets 2d6 starting income while black gets 1d6. Yeah, you COULD roll a 2 for your white starting character and your black character could roll a 6. But the odds aren’t stacked well. I think people who don’t believe in white privilege forget about that aspect of their character generation. They think about who is touted as cool on television right now and who’s so often regulated to being “white and nerdy”. Dance attributes seem not to be stacked in the white man’s favour but when it comes to being killed by firearms, well a white guy has to roll a critical 1 on like… a 1d100000 while the black OCC has 50 times those odds.
Too nerdy? Perhaps. But when reflexively bitching about how people don’t know how white horribly men are demonized right now, or griping about equal opportunity employment, a gamer’s mentality is kind of helpful, because you need to remember to look at the whole character and not just their skill selection or their race attributes. It’d be a whole lot easier if you were thinking “hrm, do I wish I was an elf with night vision or a human with greater physical endurance?” as opposed to “is the perk ‘Affirmative Action Helps Me’ worth getting the flaw “more likely to gain the attention of police”. Maybe if the perceived female perk of “they can have sex whenever they want” was balanced against the flaw “if you make eye contact with someone, they will think you want to have sex with THEM” was a little bit better laid out (no pun intended) people would think about it all more.
No. No they wouldn’t. And why? We could talk about Trump effect. We could talk about the innate selfishness of human beings and how we have trouble seeing the world in terms outside of ourselves. We could talk about herd mentality or self-selecting pools… but really… damn it… it’s video game RPGs vs pen and paper RPGs.
See, when you had to sit down with your Game Master and roll your stats – you rolled those dice and, well shit – if you rolled low you were just going to have to make up for it in other ways. You selected your OCC after carefully perusing all the options and then you played to your strengths, recognizing your weaknesses, putting together an overall party that worked well together.
Video games? You pick and choose, you steadily level up. You don’t have to make concessions. You wipe it and start over. It encourages powergaming, swift rebuilds and steadily leveling all your stats.
Hell, a lot of pen and paper RPGs nowadays base themselves on a “selection” system rather than dice, forgetting that sometimes the dice are NOT in your favour and you have to roll with punch / fall / or impact to get through the session.
1 thought on “December 18th, 2018.”
Holy cow that swirly twirly brain of yours! The analogies are sharp and compelling even if I don’t fully understand the gaming references… And you know I’m super glad about your journaling obsession!