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Playing Games
>> Tuesday, September 18, 2007
I fantasize, therefore I am.
William Shakespeare was wrong: All the world’s a game, not a stage. He was right about “all the men and women [being] merely players,” though. What else could explain all the weirdness in the world? Karma’s not that facetious.
Take former (possibly, by now) Iowa Sen. Larry Craig, for example. Now there’s a man who knows games. No one’s really sure exactly what game he was playing in that Brokeback Bathroom (certainly the gay community is confused by it), but evidently it has some very peculiar rules at which only Craig and an oddly omniscient police officer are masters. I’ll never again be able to think benign thoughts about the Hokey Pokey.
Note to Sen. Craig: If you have to hold a series of press conferences in order to proclaim, “I’m not gay!” … well, draw your own conclusions.
Although participants in virtual worlds like Second Life vehemently resist the “game” label for their endeavors, it’s probably easiest for most of us to think of them that way. After all, in the broadest sense, games are those participatory sports that may resemble real life in some ways (they have rules; there are consequences for actions), but in actuality they are where people go to avoid real life. Virtual universes, especially, are the worlds we’d create if we were God. They encompass the charades in which we’d engage if we were as self-actualized and self-determined as we’d like to be. They allow us to unshackle our inner children, heroes, villains, genders and fantasies and behave in ways few of us would dream of behaving outside the fantasy realm.
Maybe Craig is an ardent participant in some Beltway version of Second Life and momentarily lost himself in character. (Of course, there are those who argue Washington comprises its own make-believe world.) In the 1980s and early ’90s, there were rumors about Dungeons & Dragons players becoming so involved in the game that they suffered psychotic breaks, became unable to separate themselves from their fantasy characters and eventually committed suicide or murder, so there is precedent for such behavior, at least in urban legend. Come to think of it, though, the same could be said of religion. There is far more of that sort of antisocial activity documented among religious zealots than among role-playing gamers. Jim Jones’ little fantasy world at Jonestown, Guyana, stands as just one glaring example.
Less easily consigned to the realm of fantasy is the U.S. Army’s regrettable behavior on the night of July 5, 2007, when during a so-called “health-and-welfare inspection,” military police confiscated several very personal items that were legal but improperly declared contraband. No one knows what the people in charge or the MPs were thinking as they snagged two vibrators and a laptop computer from a barracks in Iraq and subsequently “leaked” the names of the women involved, but they weren’t playing a game. We know this because (as mentioned earlier) games have rules, and the army certainly wasn’t playing by its own that night. “Oops! Sorry. My bad” doesn’t cut it as an explanation, either, gentlemen.
War in the real world certainly is not a game. However, even soldiers are only human, and it is entirely reasonable to assume they might find a release for pent-up frustration and tension in fantasy. That might explain why so many RPGs incorporate elements of war instead of existing solely as Utopian societies. Even if — or perhaps especially if — the fantasies are sexual in nature, they provide a valuable security valve. Given that our fighting men and women and the civilians who support them are not faceless, nameless, soulless automatons (which, frankly, might be easier for everyone, since it’s much less traumatic to mourn the death of a machine than a human), shouldn’t the military hierarchy forgive them their fantasies as long as those fantasies remain within their heads and not out in the public view? Isn’t a sexual release valve preferable to one that results in the trigger-happy slaughter of innocent people? Although there are legitimate cultural reasons for not flinging Americans’ headlong dash into damnation in the faces of Iraqi Muslims who believe pornography and sexual devices are sinful, as long as deployed soldiers and civilians don’t make a spectator sport of their fantasy lives, is a “the terrorists will win” scenario actually imminent?
It seems engagers in fantasy could be doing far more harmful things with much larger ramifications … but then, I tend to live in a fantasy world where the majority of people are reasonable.
—Kathee “Ender” Brewer
(This column originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of AVN Online.)
William Shakespeare was wrong: All the world’s a game, not a stage. He was right about “all the men and women [being] merely players,” though. What else could explain all the weirdness in the world? Karma’s not that facetious.
Take former (possibly, by now) Iowa Sen. Larry Craig, for example. Now there’s a man who knows games. No one’s really sure exactly what game he was playing in that Brokeback Bathroom (certainly the gay community is confused by it), but evidently it has some very peculiar rules at which only Craig and an oddly omniscient police officer are masters. I’ll never again be able to think benign thoughts about the Hokey Pokey.
Note to Sen. Craig: If you have to hold a series of press conferences in order to proclaim, “I’m not gay!” … well, draw your own conclusions.
Although participants in virtual worlds like Second Life vehemently resist the “game” label for their endeavors, it’s probably easiest for most of us to think of them that way. After all, in the broadest sense, games are those participatory sports that may resemble real life in some ways (they have rules; there are consequences for actions), but in actuality they are where people go to avoid real life. Virtual universes, especially, are the worlds we’d create if we were God. They encompass the charades in which we’d engage if we were as self-actualized and self-determined as we’d like to be. They allow us to unshackle our inner children, heroes, villains, genders and fantasies and behave in ways few of us would dream of behaving outside the fantasy realm.
Maybe Craig is an ardent participant in some Beltway version of Second Life and momentarily lost himself in character. (Of course, there are those who argue Washington comprises its own make-believe world.) In the 1980s and early ’90s, there were rumors about Dungeons & Dragons players becoming so involved in the game that they suffered psychotic breaks, became unable to separate themselves from their fantasy characters and eventually committed suicide or murder, so there is precedent for such behavior, at least in urban legend. Come to think of it, though, the same could be said of religion. There is far more of that sort of antisocial activity documented among religious zealots than among role-playing gamers. Jim Jones’ little fantasy world at Jonestown, Guyana, stands as just one glaring example.
Less easily consigned to the realm of fantasy is the U.S. Army’s regrettable behavior on the night of July 5, 2007, when during a so-called “health-and-welfare inspection,” military police confiscated several very personal items that were legal but improperly declared contraband. No one knows what the people in charge or the MPs were thinking as they snagged two vibrators and a laptop computer from a barracks in Iraq and subsequently “leaked” the names of the women involved, but they weren’t playing a game. We know this because (as mentioned earlier) games have rules, and the army certainly wasn’t playing by its own that night. “Oops! Sorry. My bad” doesn’t cut it as an explanation, either, gentlemen.
War in the real world certainly is not a game. However, even soldiers are only human, and it is entirely reasonable to assume they might find a release for pent-up frustration and tension in fantasy. That might explain why so many RPGs incorporate elements of war instead of existing solely as Utopian societies. Even if — or perhaps especially if — the fantasies are sexual in nature, they provide a valuable security valve. Given that our fighting men and women and the civilians who support them are not faceless, nameless, soulless automatons (which, frankly, might be easier for everyone, since it’s much less traumatic to mourn the death of a machine than a human), shouldn’t the military hierarchy forgive them their fantasies as long as those fantasies remain within their heads and not out in the public view? Isn’t a sexual release valve preferable to one that results in the trigger-happy slaughter of innocent people? Although there are legitimate cultural reasons for not flinging Americans’ headlong dash into damnation in the faces of Iraqi Muslims who believe pornography and sexual devices are sinful, as long as deployed soldiers and civilians don’t make a spectator sport of their fantasy lives, is a “the terrorists will win” scenario actually imminent?
It seems engagers in fantasy could be doing far more harmful things with much larger ramifications … but then, I tend to live in a fantasy world where the majority of people are reasonable.
—Kathee “Ender” Brewer
(This column originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of AVN Online.)
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