I Hate Fun

(see also the May 12, 2009 look back: I Hate Fun - One Year Later)

I hate what I like.

I like cookies and McDonald’s and chocolate. I like Godzilla movies and all those fucking direct-to-video horror movies that only an idiot would look at and think, “Gee, let’s rent this!” I like sitting at the computer for hours on end playing Civilization IV.

It’s shit. It’s all shit. It doesn’t enrich my life in any way, but it does turn my brain off, quickly, conveniently, easily, cheaply. No effort. What it all does is separate myself from living life and reduces it to passing time. It distracts me and detaches me from the only thing I have – life - and therefore it is no good. Instead of doing, and being, all too often I am seeking sensory stimulation. Artificial feelings, stimulated most effectively through passively consuming things that other people have done.

The very idea of wanting to be entertained is an exercise in self-nullification.

I want more. I want that doing, I want that being, and I want it in a way that gives my life significance. I want engagement in the things I do, and I want meaning in the things I engage with. I want all the feelings that entertainment artificially instills in me, but I want them to be genuine.

Engagement and meaning is commonly attributed to those terrible things known as other people.

I can’t socialize. I won’t. It’s embarrassing enough to know that I waste substantial periods of my life seeking and accepting entertainment, being mentally comatose instead of being active and involved in my own life. How am I supposed to be exposed to other people behaving this way and have a shred of respect for them? I want to just shake them. “We are real people, we are together! We don’t have to be alone, dead in mind, vacant in spirit! We should do, we should create! Support each other in our times of weakness and make our mark in the world, for we are Human!”

But no. Much of our interactions with others is simply wasting more time, being entertained, sometimes being entertained by discussing entertainment which has been previously experienced. Maybe everybody even gets entertained together, focusing their attention on some thing while under the impression that they’re spending time with someone else. Nobody really discusses anything, nobody explores ideas together, nobody fucking does anything in their spare time with each other. Individual pools of waste are flooded by entertainment to become great lakes of worthlessness.

The problem is made all the more frustrating by the fact that people realize this. They know they are watching crap, but they watch it “because nothing else is on.” They know that eating another bag of potato chips is against their best interest and could even contribute to the ending of their lives, but those things just tastes so good, don’t they?

People settle for garbage because it is convenient to do so and we have all been trained to think that “effort” is “work,” and “work” should be reserved for those times when you’re laboring for the benefit of someone else in order to collect your paycheck. Work and effort outside of employment is a waste of time, so relax, sit back, and passively consume entertainment – you deserve it after all of that hard work you’ve done!

People have convinced themselves that they have no time. Today’s lifestyle is busy, on-the-go, so today’s entertainment had better be as fast-paced and compact as possible to deal with it!

This cycle of disempowerment and uselessness has crept into every facet of society, and it is no good. Change is constant in life, but not all change is progress. For all of the pressure placed on people, the final responsibility for their lives is theirs alone. Being influenced by others is a choice that is made. And rising above all of the negative, defeating influences is a choice to be made as well.

Deny passive entertainment. Demand to be engaged, enriched, and fulfilled by your hobbies and by the people you choose to associate with.

Reject convenience for convenience’s sake. It is all good and well to do things for yourself faster and better. It is no good to hand the doing over to somebody or something else so you are no longer putting in the effort at all. Know the difference and what it means to your life.

***

I wrote that about a year ago for the introduction of the next (and still unreleased… *sigh*) issue of the LotFP metal mag. I went on to describe how this mentality was killing the heavy metal spirit within the heavy metal scene as it once again rose to mainstream prominence. It also expresses a lot of my frustration with life, having all this energy and free time and want to do something but only able to find people who are being passive; the doers seem to have better people to be around already.

Throwing my hat into the “writing about RPGs” ring last month, I had a bit of a revelation… with metal, I was writing about something that I discovered after leaving high school, and had no ability to actually participate in – I was an observer, and a listener, and my writing was a means to be active within the scene. With RPGs, I can perform the core activity I’m writing about, and I’ve been doing so since I was eight years old. A quarter of a century. I’m much more qualified for this (not that I won’t stop writing about that).

And thinking about some blogging subjects, I came back to this old intro. It applies to RPGs just as much, if not more, as it does to music.

People want to be entertained by their role-playing, people want to sit down and get what they want out of it every time, and they want it quickly. They don’t want to work for it, and they don’t want to risk that it won’t happen when they try to play.

This is how I’ve come to interpret people when they use the word “fun” in relation to role-playing games. People wanting quick-fix, feel good entertainment exactly as they like it with as little effort as possible.

And I hate it.

Fun, in the context of RPG discussions, is like some Orwellian inversion of meaning (speaking of which, how big of an example of this is a certain internet forum's use of the word badwrongfun? It shuts down discussion and makes it clear that thinking that anything is important is foolish - no criticism or education allowed!). So much so, that I think that people who talk about "fun" in RPGs are destroying the hobby. Because fun ruins RPGs, much like it ruins everything else that requires time, imagination, and a fair bit of concentration.

Think about how often you see people on internet message boards talking about things which “get in the way of their fun.” What do they mean by that, really? Are they looking for the real satisfaction or the quick fix?

This is a particularly insightful read, talking about the “tyranny of fun” and how it cheapens role-playing games. It’s also why having an attitude of live and let live doesn’t work – those who demand everything easy and quickly will always outnumber those that don’t, and pretty soon a hobby that was custom-made for the studious and imaginative and thorough now belongs to an entirely different caste, while those of us that the hobby was created for are left on the fringes, told that we’re just not compatible with today’s gaming, and sometimes, even today’s life in general.

Fuck that. Fuck that. This hobby is ours. These other types can come and play and we’ll welcome them with open arms and show them the way if they ask, but to dictate fast-food mentality in my imaginative tools… that means war.

“Tyranny of fun” nails it – role-playing companies, in their doomed efforts in ignoring the anomalous nature of role-playing’s mainstream popularity of the 80s, target the type of people that aren’t well-suited for role-playing to buy their products. Because lets face it… it takes a certain something odd to be a real role-player. “Nerd” and “geek” and such are not terms of endearment, they are insults, but they do prove the point that we’re not normal everyday types. Now being different (or even abnormal) isn’t a negative thing – don’t confuse it with the mythical catpissman or lawncrapper – as it doesn’t preclude us from having a job, friends, and girlfriends (before we complain that I’m being sexist by assuming most gamers are male… first, fucking duh, of course we are - look at the source material, and second, what gamer girl ever had a problem finding a social group to fit into?). But pretending we’re normal and just anyone can pick up this hobby and enjoy it, without making wholesale changes to it, is simply nonsense.

Yeah, that sounds elitist, and it’s meant to. Elitism is not a bad thing, especially when it comes to something that you can choose to do, or not. Anyone can choose to role-play, but not so many are willing to explore the source material of role-playing and not many are willing to really immerse themselves in the game experience. Their choice, and pretending they’re the same as the people who really get serious about this stuff is just insane. I proclaim role-playing to be something based on its origins, and that no matter how things have changed –

Stop right there! Tangent time!

Never let anyone say that the game has “evolved.” It hasn’t. Ever. Maybe the way you play it has evolved, maybe, but the game itself hasn’t. You could say it evolved if you took the same book from the shelf and suddenly a rule was mysteriously different here and there, more and more, as the years go by. That doesn’t happen. The game is changed, intentionally, for better or worse. Changed, by people doing the changing. It’s not an accident, it’s not an evolution. It didn’t have to happen. It’s willful alteration.

Got that? Don’t let people get away with the “evolved” line. Always confront and correct. Sure, you’ll be seen as an asshole if you do, but it seems to me that it is better to be an asshole for challenging this wording than it is to passively accept being sort of genetic throwback Neanderthal freak since you haven’t kept up with the “evolution.”

Not evolution. “Intelligent” design.

Back to your previously scheduled rant:

– the best role-players are the ones that take it seriously, make it important in their lives, and give it their all. People who do this are the most important part of any hobby. You want to be a casual gamer? Fine. But don’t expect the same level of deference and respect that a lifer is going to get. Those who take their activities seriously are the only ones who matter.

But in reality, people who take things seriously and who actually become knowledgeable and who actually expect newcomers to respect tradition and who expect newcomers to actually learn something and who discourage equal treatment for every dumb shit that falls off the turnip truck… they are insulted by the turnip truckers. Peer pressure is important and there are a whole lot more dumb shit fun-seekers who balk at the idea of “fun” being related to “effort” and “investment of time” than there are people who want to learn and be immersed in their hobby as a whole, not just while they’re goofing off with some pals on a Saturday night. And companies want to be successful. They don’t realize that industries built on hobbies, especially this one, are fucked. It’s not a respect issue. Role-playing is done from the ground up, not from the top down, that’s how it started, and that’s how it exists. You know the argument, “Oh, if only RPGs were respected, then they’d generate a lot of money for the people that make them and all our products would be better!” How do you gain the respect? Marginalize and hide the people that take RPGs seriously. They’ll turn off the “normals” who would spend the serious money.

How do you nudge out the lifers and encourage more casual play? Absolute balance. Be able to participate equally in all ways, right out of the box. By making sure that there are plenty of hard and fast rules to master, instead of dealing with nebulous, ill-defined guidelines that make a human being, the referee, the final arbiter of a game. Rules, people can understand. Like chess! The closer you get to true shared imagined space, the more the man on the street freaks out and rejects, and the more companies see imaginary “what if” dollars going elsewhere. Also, you entice more casual play by having less harsh consequences in a game. You get the elimination of save-or-die, or level drains, or equipment destruction mechanics or creatures, because these could give a “negative experience” to those that believe that you “win” the game by always being successful.

It’s like these people don’t even know that “winning” in role-playing is done simply by enjoying the process of playing the game. Yeah, it’s more gratifying (dare I say “fun”) to succeed, but death and failure are hardcoded into the very essence of the game for a reason. It’s not the amusement park cheap thrill of simulated or illusionary danger… make a bad decision, rely on luck to get you by, and the danger smacks your character down.

But people out there have gotten the idea that if their precious imaginary equipment owned by their precious imaginary man is taken away from them, their fun has been sabotaged! And the game designers are listening.

The clue phone is ringing, and it’s a collect call for these fun-seekers: YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LIKE IT. Goddamn, risk and challenge and failure are as much part of role-playing as prancing around like Errol Flynn… er, sorry, Legolas (sorry, wouldn’t want to make a reference that the average modern person wouldn’t know off the top of their head) or something. Shit out there is trying to KILL YOU and there are critters out there that will fuck you up but good if you’re unlucky or not careful.

What part of, “The giant spider bites you… oh, you blew your save… roll up a new character!” is supposed to be fun or heroic? Obviously the game was built on a different type of satisfaction. But these people don’t want to spend their time figuring out challenges (that’s part of that large percentage of “not-fun” time that’s being had in the average session of old-fogey D&D, right?), they want to charge right in. They must, if they’re always getting their shit rusted, or their levels drained, or poisoned, or what have you. If they’re not getting nicked by these things, they wouldn’t complain, right?

The point isn’t to make role-playing some sort of masochistic experience where it’s all suffering and death and pain and failure. The point is, if all these things are real and present dangers, then success means more. And I think it’s telling that so many people reject this idea. Assigning value to in-game success seems to be something embarrassing to a lot of people, like a RPG is just supposed to be some interchangeable entertainment option to play with friends alongside a console system or Scrabble or watching a movie, with no worth or value in and of itself. I’ve already given my thoughts on this. Nothing beyond the barest essentials of life (food and water) has inherent meaning. Meaning is given to things and experiences by people. And assigning meaning to role-playing is not something to be ashamed of! It is a social game that strengthens social bonds, it exercises the imagination and encourages reading and knowledge and it is not a passive experience and nothing in the experience is just handed to you.

Take the introduction to Mentzer’s Basic Set. It is the finest introduction for D&D that was ever penned, explaining the basics of everything from classes and their abilities to combat in just seven pages – of storyform prose, not rules blather. And the first-time D&D player has an 80% chance to fail that saving throw against Bargle’s spell. An 80% chance of losing. Aleena dies. You can’t save her. You must run from the ghouls or you die. Some would say that traditional Dungeons and Dragons was poorly designed because first level characters were weak and that there was an uneven playing experience. It never seems to occur to these people that traditional Dungeons and Dragons was designed perfectly and that play experience was intentional. Mentzer’s introduction shows what Dungeons and Dragons is all about, and it’s not flashy heroism. It was never about that until Gygax was removed.

You’re not playing a game pretending to navigate your playing piece (called “a character”) through some story where you get to be the hero! You are using the rules to pretend to be someone and experience and react as that person would through a dangerous world. Nothing more, and nothing less. If you want to be the hero… then you get to try. To guarantee success is to defeat the entire purpose of role-playing.

Some will try to say that “Each edition of D&D is based on the common fantasy tropes of the time it was released.” That’s just ignorant bullshit. Dungeons and Dragons was built on classic archetypes (with some game elements added on) and literature that was decades, in some cases almost a century, old by the time Dungeons and Dragons came around. It was built to be timeless, not timely. And some of the more important influences, say Leiber and Lovecraft, certainly didn’t feature success as a common theme. And it certainly wasn’t all honor and glory, what with Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Conan and Cugel being thieves (and worse as far as Conan is concerned). Yet the focus wasn’t limited – there was still the influence of Tolkien and Poul Anderson and Lord Dunsany for the more positive, and even dreamier sides of fantasy. You could do it all with Dungeons and Dragons, back in the day. Nothing was excluded. And this is what Dungeons and Dragons was, focused through rules that sprung out of the wargaming culture.

As the game was altered through the years, this was lost. I don’t know why it was decided that games sold in the form of number-filled books with fancy vocabulary would appeal more to people that didn’t care to actually read literature, but that’s what happened. Real choice in the manner of game play was lost, or at least obscured and made more difficult to achieve, all the while increasing the options for individual characters… That was a great trick, giving players the illusion of more choice and increasing the detail and complexity of the rules while slapping the handcuffs on the game itself. Brilliant. Fuckers.

But while Gygaxian D&D was forged from classic stories, with the perfect capacity to deal with the current fads (and that’s where Tolkien comes into D&D, as a secondary “hip” source to lure the kiddies in, not as a core component), the next generation of clueless imbeciles decided to tell us what D&D was all about. It inevitably led, as did most fantasy fiction, to using Tolkien as the core. Grand quests. Heroics. And then it fed on itself. D&D became “literature,” which then influenced the game. D&D basically created most of the video game and personal computing industries (you think people at home were upgrading their computers to play the neat new version of Space Invaders, or were they wanting the sweet, sweet graphics from a particular version of Bard’s Tale?), which was easier to pick up and play with no investment of time or knowledge… and so then D&D took from that as well. If it was done to add to the current influences, maybe, maybe, it would have worked. But the new influences replaced the influences that created D&D, and what’s more the modern influences are seen as competition, so aren’t even explicitly mentioned. So D&D becomes more and more an ungrounded “adventure” game designed to be mindless entertainment, to only be taken seriously by the “professionals” who will lay out a specific path to “fun.”

It’s already been discussed to death how D&D has been retroactively described by its detractors as a hack and slash game, and how that description is dead wrong, as played by the people that created the damn game. We’ve seen how D&D increasingly makes the criticism come alive, making D&D more about encounters and carefully balanced tactical encounters than anything else, and we see that the same people who decried D&D as a hackfest now embrace it for being specifically built as a hackfest.

It is rather unfortunate that Dungeons and Dragons had the subtitle “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” It’s a historical problem that the term “role-playing game” (or any other suitable term to differentiate it from the wargaming hobby that was still in full swing) wasn’t used, as role-playing wasn’t its own genre at the time. It certainly wasn’t a wargame in any real sense, and Gygax (at least – I don’t know about Arneson), co-creator and writer of the actual text, didn’t even use miniatures! But this is another example of the instant-gratification crowd these days. The problem isn’t that they don’t know, I have no problem with people who are simply new, the problem is the people who don’t care to know and become insulted when informed that their assumptions are dead fucking wrong. But it would be inconvenient to research all this shit, and why bother when possessing this knowledge will make you some sort of weirdo and doesn't support what you've already made up your mind to do?

It's a pain in the ass to deal with people who have a "been there, done that, and found it immature" attitude when they don't even know where there is or what that even entails. Fucking hell, it's like someone not wanting to visit China for the Olympics for fear of the fallout from the two atomic bombs that got dropped there during World War II.

It’s time to stand up, and it’s time to make some noise. It’s time to stand up and stop letting the lies about the origins of our game, which are the origins of the entire hobby, spread. It’s time to stop letting the people who have no intention of taking all of this seriously dictate terms and create the labels. I’m tired of it.

“Old D&D is for old people.” I’m 33 and I’m not even as old as Arneson or Gygax were when Dungeons and Dragons was originally released… and their target audience was people like them. But, lest you say “people in their thirties are old,” remember that Gygax ran the game, in its original, pre-published form, for his kids. Original D&D, while it encouraged (and almost demanded) source material reading, was itself not very much reading compared to what came after.

Kill the misconceptions and the falsehoods. Stop taking the abuse caused by the assumption that “current” D&D is the “real” D&D and that everything that came before is some sort of 8-track equivalent relic. Hasbro may have a legal claim to the “Dungeons and Dragons” name, but they certainly have no moral claim to it. A multinational corporation (who aren’t interested in the “game” as much as the “intellectual property” it affords) bought a smaller game company, none of whose founders are still with the company, who bought another game company, none of whose founders were still with the company, and in fact the creators of the game in question that started this chain were forced from that company at different points. Stop acting like we’re guests in their house when it’s the exact opposite. Stand up, and when people complain that we seem to not recognize their “alternate playstyle,” (especially when they sure as hell aren't recognizing our playstyles, and "you play your way and we'll play our way" is dismissal, not recognition) tell them they better learn what the fuck they’re talking about before they get to say anything.

And this isn't directed at the stupid or the willfully ignorant. It's not even directed at those that know what they are talking about, know their history, explored their options, and decided the new stuff is better for them. No. Their minds are made up. The purpose of standing up and making noise is for the silent crowd that watches from the sidelines. We need to make sure our game isn't defined by people who don't like it, we have to be visible and make noise so these people see the earlier versions of the game are being played and are perfectly viable options for them. We have to make sure they know there is a history and a legacy and a depth to this hobby which can be explored. That there is life in this hobby beyond the shiny new release, which is to be given up once the trademark overlords decide it has outlived its usefulness and decides to create an even shinier, newer release. The silent crowd should always be reminded that the "industry" can never dictate the possibilities at their game table. If we manage to enlighten those actively dancing in the shadows, then yay, but that's not really the point.

So go home, casual players, and take your “fun” with you. For those of you who gain enjoyment from a more involved experience, or at least the attempt at such… welcome. There is much to gain, from everything you ever do on this planet, by digging deeper, discovering traditions, and realizing there is a way that things can, and perhaps even should, be done that often do not coincide with the ways that give the easiest and quickest pleasure.

Oh what are you gonna do
When there's a part of you
That needs to run with the wind

And the fire of burning yesterdays
Can only light the way
To lead you from
The garden of the dark
Stay out of shadows

Now look like the change is on
Tomorrow's never gone
Today just never comes

Go on and jump, yeah
Into the hurricane
You will forget the pain
It's only there
To exorcise your mind

Looking at the world
When you've opened up your eyes
You've got to see the promises they've made
They're bloody lies and broken dreams
Your silence screams

You're living in a time machine
And you can choose just who you are
Someone that you've never seen
Somewhere you've never been
You're living in a time machine

Oh what are you gonna do
When every part of you
Just needs to catch the wind

And the fire of burning yesterdays
Can only light the way
To lead you from
The garden of the dark

Looking for the world
When you've opened up your eyes
You'll see you've got invisible chains
They're only lies
Not what it seems
I hear your silent screams

You're living in a time machine
Nobody cares just where you go
Taken where you've never been
Somewhere you don't know

You're living in a time machine
Why do you stay who you are
Be what you've never been
Someone you've never seen
You're living in a time machine
Yeah

“Time Machine” from Black Sabbath’s Dehumanizer

"4E is like hair metal! It's a gateway for some people to something of value." - Matt Johnsen