It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye: Five games that players take seriously

1. Dungeons and Dragons
All conversations about games and role playing must start with D&D. As I mentioned last week, the game conceptually builds on Tolkien's Middle Earth, but offers players a chance to create characters and adventures within that world. The Dungeon Master constructs the specific narrative while the players act out the campaign itself, rolling four-, six-, eight-, and twenty-sided dice to see how successful their fights are.

The real appeal of D&D, though, comes just as much from the narrative as it does from the sense of community that's engendered in the game, beautifully captured in the final episode of Freaks and Geeks. Gordon gets to the heart of most of the items on this list when he sums up D&D's appeal, saying "you can be someone you're not in real life." That's true, but the other thing I notice is how it gives these guys the opportunity to be someone they are, but didn't think they could be--Daniel is able to be good at something, Harris can control the scene, and the geeks can finally become cool guys, if only by association.

One thing that strikes me as sadly true about the utopian community presented here, though, is how it's so aggressively male--where are Millie and Harris's girlfriend and the other girl geeks? The homosociality is part of what makes it possible for the characters to lower their guards, but it's sad to me that there's no D&D analogue for girls. I tend to agree with creator Gary Gygax when he decries the lack of imagination needed for video role playing games, but they have made these gendered distinctions beside the point.

Ultimately, though, the real carrot offered by D&D is the opportunity for community--you need at least three people to play, forcing introverted outsiders to come together and form relationships. These coalitions of outsiders are behind the purported connection between D&D and devil worship in the eighties (and apparently still), but the absurdity of these claims becomes clear when you see actual gamers at play.

Since the shape of role-playing games has changed so radically in the last fifteen years, D&D has lost a lot of its geek stigma, and now seems to be part of nostalgic hipster culture, mourned in the AV Club and memorialized in funny t-shirts. The anachronism of classic D&D is key to its viability as a geek-chic marker, I think--after all, you don't see guys with ironic mustaches showing off their obsession with...

2. World of Warcraft
When people talk about "video game addiction," they're usually talking about World of Warcraft (or World of Warcrack), a massive multi-player online role playing game (or MMORPG) based on Dungeons and Dragons. Like D&D, WoW depends on ongoing relationships between players to work. However, because of the limits of the internet, those relationships can be confined entirely to gameplay--forming the kind of alternative community from the Freaks and Geeks clip would thus be considerably more difficult. Since the game is both limitless (unlike a specific Dungeons and Dragons campaign) and competitive, it's easy to play almost endlessly. Furthermore, since MMORPGs like WoW are still relatively new phenomena, people are more likely to jump to radical conclusions about the games' power over their lives.

It's worth pointing out, though, that WoW players exhibit much less control over gameplay than traditional or live-action gamers. The narrative of Warcraft's fictive World is determined by Blizzard Games, and players advance levels by spending more time (and money) online. The best example of this problematic corporate control over gameplay comes in the case of Sara Andrews, who tried to start a GLBT-friendly guild. When she did, she was immediately chastised by Blizzard Games staff that she was violating the game's anti-discrimination policy by mentioning the sexuality of guild members (in an attempt, of course, to create a space where they would actually be safe from harassment). According to the emails she received from the corporate office, mentioning the sexuality of her guild members would serve as bait for attacks from other players--in other words, if they were hassled, it would only be becasue they were asking for it. After Andrews went public with her complaints, Blizzard recanted and apologized, but the incident shows how the corporation is ultimately in charge of the shape of the narrative. As Andrews points out, non-player characters regularly make homophobic puns, and the incident wouldn't happen if she were playing D&D with a queer Dungeon Master.

3. Second Life
This Onion story on "World of World of Warcraft" is funny, but ultimately not that different from Second Life, a MMORPG that abandons the fantastic aspect of hyper-diegesis for a kind of hyper-realism that places this game squarely in the uncanny valley. Well--maybe hyper-realism is the wrong term. You can, after all, outfit your avatar with a "furry skin"or wings in Second Life which severs the connection to reality almost immediately.

But let me back up. Second Life is essentially a MMORPG version of The Sims, but instead of making worlds to control, you enter into an existing world with an avatar--an online version of yourself, but with whatever improvements or additions you want to make. Second Life differs from many other MMORPGs in that there's no competitive object you're working toward--instead, it functions mainly as a kind of social networking site. Unsurprisingly, then, the main activities in Second Life seem to be buying stuff and having virtual sex. Second Life has its own system of currency of Linden dollars, which are bought with real money (unlike gold in WoW, which you earn for various tasks). In the writing class I'm teaching right now, my students and I talk a lot about the way hyperdiegetic narratives offer an "escape" from real life, and Second Life seems to be constructed specifically around that appeal. If your real life feels disappointing or complicated, Second Life offers an uncomplicated alternative, where social ideals are easier to live up to (it's hardly coincidence that there are so few old, overweight, or nonwhite avatars).

In her article “Same Shit, Different World,” Lauren Bans of Bitch Magazine points out how the fantastic aspects of Second Life don't breed utopian or even different ways of relating to
other people:

The problem is that the virtual worlds these relationships are forged within are actively set up as relatively consequence-free play worlds. It's easy to be Hollywood-thin, never put your foot in your mouth, and have porntastic sex in Second Life, which in turn makes it easer to abide by and not question those cultural standards in the first place. What's more, the bias that members can bring into the virtual arena as fairly anonymous citizens--like deep racism and misogyny--remain unchallenged because Second Life is still a lawless universe looked upson as a light pastime people should be allowed to enjoy in whatever way they want, rather than as an active, burgeoning society. (62)

The thing that blows me away about Second Life, though, is how this desire for "realism" makes the world itself so profoundly boring. When avatars talk to each other, they move their hands in front of them as if they were typing on air, and the Second Life "holiday" posted on youtube seems like an attempt to actualize some kind of prefab postcard experience we've been informed we should enjoy. Without the room for play offered by a dense narrative structure, people seem depressingly at a loss to come up with new stories. If we use the model of fan fiction, every story is a "Mary Sue" story, but the master narrative is just life. Dwight from The Office offers the simultaneously saddest and most awesome example of Second Life as a profoundly mundane "escape."

4. Society for Creative Anachronism
Of course, the drive toward "realism" as escape can also direct people into a past world rather than a virtual one. For members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, this means dressing in "authentic" pre-17th-century British garb and getting together for olde-tymey activities like archery or brewing mead. The society started in 1966 in Berkeley, CA when a group of Medieval scholars/science fiction fans (read "extremely nerdy hippies") had a backyard party that almost immediately morphed into a convention. From the beginning, then, the SCA drew on the same population as the established science-fiction/fantasy subculture. As such, the influence of figures like Tolkein can be seen in the map of the different "realms" of the SCA and in the fan-produced videos of staged battles.

The question of authenticity is an interesting one among SCA members--while they admit to only selectively recreating the period (many fans describe their activities as "recreating the Middle Ages as they ought to have been"), they're simulltaneously deeply invested in accurately recreating the period, down to making tunics and using period-specific language. The language might be the best example of the dynamic at work in the group--as much as it's about being a history nerd, it's about marking yourself as part of a group that stands in contrast to the dominant culture. This is the difference between the SCA and fairs like the Renaissance Festival--since no one in the SCA gets paid, the group is truly voluntary and can afford to be exclusive, particularly around these questions of authenticity. My friend Peter wrote a brilliant post on his blog describing the way that groups like the SCA or science fiction conventions can turn into pissing contests for authenticity--who liked Battlestar Galactica before it was cool, who has the most convincing medieval armor. Why is it that even in subcultures--and maybe particularly in subcultures--we set such stringent standards for inclusion? Is it possible to create an in-group that isn't contingent on an out-group?

5. Scrabble
One of the aspects that immediately marks a subculture as such is its modified use of language--do you know what a hit point is? Do you know what RBI means and why it matters? The difference between a Romulan and a Vulcan? The interesting thing about Scrabble, however, is the way that a hard-core player is marked by his/her ability to divorce language from meaning. The way you know a hard-core Scrabble player wouldn't be from her vocabulary--after all, she wouldn't need to know any words that were longer than seven letters--but she would know all the three-letter words without necessarily knowing their meanings. In fact, it would be profoundly poor strategy to learn the meanings of these words, since that time could be better spent memorizing all the words that use the letter "Q" but not "U." Scrabble, then, offers way to be a word nerd without being a bookworm (you could be one, but you could also be really good at patterns and never read anything more complicated than US Weekly). In fact, attachment of language to meaning is the mark of an underdeveloped player, not a mature one.

"But what about community?" you ask. "This isn't a blog about language--tell me about weird gatherings of Scrabblers!"

Okay. Scrabble tournaments are radically different from home play, particularly in the speed and scores achieved. The high-stakes feeling of a Scrabble tournament was gloriously sent up in the episode of King of the Hill when Peggy goes to a Boggle tournament (here's the recap if you can't bear to watch that awful link). The game itself has gone through several iterations over time, most notably as a game show and an internet game (which was then reincarnated as a Facebook application). Following the theme of corporate interference with communities, Hasbro threatened to sue the developers of Scrabulous--that suit remains unresolved. Ironically, Scrabulous and its Facebook double have introduced players to the game and most likely boosted sales of the "hard" version--but the loss of profit signalled by a free online version of the game is too high a price for Hasbro. I'm still bitter about the loss of the Bogglific application on Facebook.