Dungeons and Dragons as Pedagogy and Sociology

Posted on March 7, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I may be the last person this week to blog about Gary Gygax’s death. This spares me of having to come up with a variant form of the “he failed his saving roll” jokes, at least.

A lot of the commentary on Gygax’s career quite properly has noted how much he and Dave Arneson’s particular fusion of table-top wargaming and Tolkienesque high fantasy has influenced a great deal of American popular culture, most obviously the digital games industry, but also just in incubating the rise of geek culture.

There are other themes in the cultural history of Dungeons and Dragons worth mentioning at this point that sometimes get overlooked. In different ways, Sherry Turkle and Gary Alan Fine, among others, have underlined the psychological and social dimensions of role-playing and gaming. Once upon a time, this was at least one of the things about D&D that provoked mainstream panic: an anxiety about people pretending to be another person for the purposes of a game. I put aside some draft essays I was working on five years ago or so about histories of impersonation, but I’m thinking of dusting them off and reworking them over the next year. At least one of those commentaries would be about the weird subcultural history connecting Erving Goffman, Method acting, drag culture and Dungeons & Dragons, and how mainstream American culture came to be relatively at ease with performative concepts of selfhood.

Performativity was one of the things I got out of playing Dungeons & Dragons in high school, though I have to say that my own characters were not flamboyantly different than my everyday personality. I tended to play fairly straight-arrow good guys (though not paladins, who were obviously meant to be prigs).

I was much more drawn to being a game master, though, to subcreation, to playing out all the personalities and stories that inhabited a world of my invention. If I had to give an account of where I learned some of my pedagogical skills, to be honest, being a game master in Dungeons & Dragons and Gamma World was way more important to my development as a teacher than my doctoral work. I’d forgotten it until this week, but the first class I ever taught (and paycheck I earned teaching) was in the summer during high school, in a local enrichment program for intermediate school kids–it was a class on role-playing games.

Another thing that Dungeons & Dragons did for me, at least, was that as a teenager, it allowed me to be in the company of adults who weren’t my parents’ friends, weren’t my teachers, weren’t authorities. In this, D&D was like a number of other hobbies. The surfers I knew in high school had a different subculture that had a similar dimension to it. Yes, they were geeks, the young adults I played with. I probably wouldn’t be friends with them today, if I ran into them. One was a veteran who had a lot of anger issues just underneath the surface, another was a very fragile-seeming young mother, another a quiet 20-something guy that I really never got a clear sense of outside of the game. That was what was so good about D&D for me: I saw a different range of adulthoods than I saw through my family, and saw how people can make a subculture together around a common interest even when they were otherwise very different in background and character. It was an important thing for me to be able to get on a bus, meet one of my closest friends in high school and then sit down in the company of a group of adults and teenagers to guide my level 12 ranger through an adventure.

As in the case of any subculture, playing D&D also taught you how fundamentally untrustworthy mainstream opinion could be. Yes, we were geeks and misfits in various ways. Yes, there were people who took it all way too seriously. But I still remember being wildly frustrated by the way that role-playing games were depicted at that time, in the language of moral panic or sneering disdain. That wasn’t just an abstract frustration, either: every dumb news report, bad novel or TV-movie-of-the-week usually meant one more well-meaning, worried question from my mother.

Though I have to admit that I worked hard to keep the cover of Eldritch Wizardry carefully concealed from Mom.

Posted in Games and Gaming, Popular Culture | 5 Comments

You Gotta Love Gmail Ads Sometimes…

Posted on March 6, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Let’s just say that all the people wetting their pants about the intrusiveness of targeted ads can probably relax for another ten years or so, because the Google algorithms, amazing as they are in many ways, are in some respects just the 21st Century equivalent of Hans the Clever Math Horse. Occasionally the magic trick gets caught in the act and it becomes clear just how far it is from anything like an intelligent agent.

For example, downloading a .pdf of a chapter of Elliot J. Gorn‘s The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize-Fighting in America so that I can put it into Blackboard for my seminar, I get three ads for Star Trek stuff and one ad for Enterprise car rental.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy | Comments Off on You Gotta Love Gmail Ads Sometimes…

“We’re Americans First”

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Timothy Burke

The first job for the next President is not Iraq and not the economy. I don’t really hear any of the candidates talking to the key priority as forthrightly as I might like, but this is very much how I understand some of Obama’s emphasis on bipartisanship. Not as centrism, but as a desire to reconstruct processes of consultation, to remove politics as much as possible from those aspects of governance that need to at least strive for neutrality, to firewall off partisan calculation from ordinary administrative work. The key priority is to rebuild the way the federal government actually functions in both its everyday and extraordinary business.

Look around at the mounting evidence of relentless and reckless misuse of executive power in the last eight years. The next eight years need to be a kind of truth-and-reconciliation commission where we study openly just how disastrously we went wrong. Not went wrong in Iraq, or with subprime mortgages, or anything else, though those failures are a good demonstration of what happens when you fail to lead the nation and choose instead to lead on behalf of your narrowest if most passionate political base.

It really needs to be “we” went wrong, not “them”. This is the whole point of the U.S. Constitution, that it is an uncommitted, non-partisan prior constraint on the uses of governmental authority. If it turns out that its guarantees rest not so much on its formal provisions, but just on men and women of good will and honest commitment agreeing to live up to their responsibilities under the law and the social contract, then that’s what we need to work to rebuild and restore. The last eight years have been a test, and a lot of people, some of them surprising, failed it. Equally, many people in all parties and factions passed, which is also worth a lot of attention. A lot of the downward momentum has been arrested by people with whom I strongly disagree on political positions, but whose dedication to their office and responsibilities I appreciate. Much of what we know about what has gone wrong in the last eight years is due to Republicans inside and outside the Administration drawing some lines in the sand.

There was a good example of this in 60 Minutes‘ piece that aired this Sunday on the case of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, who very much appears to have been the target of a Karl Rove operation. Scott Horton has a good summary of the piece and some of the new information in it. I was really struck by the on-camera comments of former Arizona Attorney General Grant Woods, who is one of 52 former AGs calling for a Congressional investigation. Asked how he reconciles being a Republican appointee with his clear opposition to how this case was handled, he replies, “We’re Americans first”.

In a wider sense, this goes well beyond the Bush Administration. I think that we’re looking at an unusually raw and exposed example of the general and global crisis of liberal democracy that began in the 1970s, a crisis that extends to the institutional aspects of civil society as well. Modernity has created large social institutions, including the state, that have capacities and powers that really are unprecedented in human experience. Prior to the 1970s, most people fully expected that the state would grow beyond some of its internal contradictions, that its failures and problems and weaknesses were but growing pains, and that we could eventually hope to benefit from the manifest and obvious advantages of modern institutions without their dangers.

We thought that the state as well as civic institutions could be secured by structural reforms of some kind, by making states more responsive or self-reforming. We thought transparency could help, and it does somewhat. Transparency only helps, however, if there are strongly internalized professional and social ethical commitments that are widely distributed both in the general population and among the people who do the business of government, or education, or medicine, or any other major institution. If you don’t have enough people like Grant Woods, the liberal state will fail. So much as I might look to something like the U.S. Constitution as foundational bedrock, it tells you very little about what kind of building gets built on top of it, except that it has the possibility of being sturdy.

This is the crisis that is still unfolding, to which I see no easy resolution. Everything that works about institutional life rests on the habitus of professionals, bureaucrats, experts, on whether they are stewards or parasites, whether they recognize the fragile possibility of a better world or are just looting the till, whether they are humble in the face of wider and more distributed experience and knowledge or whether they are contemptuous of anything besides their own immediate power. We all know it: this is Arendt’s banality of evil. We do not need to fear the person at the top, but instead the mass force of institutional action. The libertarian answer, to sweep away all institutions (save those of private capital: a blind spot that I still find baffling), is no answer at all, any more than jumping off a cliff is a way to prevent being in an automobile accident.

Once the world all knew that this was the danger we faced, after 1945 (and have had it demonstrated repeatedly since), there has been no way to trust that some day the state or other institutions could be continually perfected until the danger would pass for all time. It will never pass, it can never pass. For the last eight years in the United States, we’ve gotten a reminder of just how close and ominously it lurks.

Posted in Politics | 10 Comments

Snow White, Sacheen Littlefeather and Great Dance Numbers on the Holocaust

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Is it just me, or are the Oscars now a real bore due to the efficiency and general good taste of the whole show?

I used to watch it with my wife, who really loves the Oscars, and we’d both be entertained in different ways by the self-congratulatory excess and kitsch of both the show and of the celebrity culture it showcased.

I had some work to do last night, but I couldn’t really stay interested beyond the opening presentation anyway. About the only thing left of interest is just the horse-race. Given that we have a real-life political horse race that’s vastly more intriguing, and that you can look at the Oscar results the next day and be just as amused and interested by who won what, this is a weak reason to endure a three-hour borefest.

I think they need to subcontract out some of the performative parts of the show, particularly the musical numbers, to the weakest or most self-delusional talents in Hollywood. It should be a requirement that there is a big mid-show dance number showcasing the most depressing and serious major nominee of the year. I would gladly stay up all night to see a big spectacular choreography called “I Drink Your Milkshake” that has oil-soaked dancers whirling around a wooden derrick while a guy on stilts stomps around them giving an evangelical sermon.

They should cut down the little speeches that the presenters give so they can budget more time for award-winners to say unpredictable or deranged things. There should be a requirement every year that the most certifiably crazed or self-deluded director, actor or producer be given 5 minutes on stage to say or do anything they want. Kind of like the Lifetime Achievement award.

Also they need to designate a major nominee as the Too Authentic For Oscar every year, and send him or her off to some kind of designated exile for the night of the broadcast, pictured only by a still photograph taken approximately fifteen years ago. They could alternate between Paris, New York, Tibet, McMurdo Station and Darfur.

Finally, there needs to be a strict quota on tasteful and elegant clothes. They could draw lots for it or something.

Posted in Popular Culture | 1 Comment

Puzzler

Posted on February 23, 2008 by Timothy Burke

1. Hillary Clinton has more political experience than Barack Obama. By claiming this, I take it that she’s claiming her time as First Lady and as the wife of the governor of Arkansas as political experience, since otherwise she has only fractionally more political experience than Obama.

2. Therefore she was part of an administration which pushed for NAFTA.

3. But, she says, it’s unfair to say she was a supporter of NAFTA, as she wasn’t in the Senate then to vote for or against it. Plus she’s against it now. Also, she was privately against NAFTA then, but couldn’t say so.

4. Doesn’t 3 cancel out 1? If being a part of the Clinton Administration means she has political experience, then she was part of an Administration which supported NAFTA. If she wasn’t really a part of that Administration and isn’t accountable for its actions (well, leaving aside Bill Clinton’s personal behavior), then it isn’t political experience that counts.

Posted in Politics | 4 Comments

I Wonder…

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Timothy Burke

How long the NY Times has been sitting on this story on John McCain? I’m guessing there will be plenty of talk tomorrow about it.

Posted in Politics | 9 Comments

One-A-Day: Louis Sachar, Holes

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I know some people are skeptical about whether you can teach people to write fiction in a conventional classroom. At the very least, I think aspiring writers can benefit by reading marvelous examples of particular kinds of writing or particular aspects of fiction.

If I were building such a class, I’d teach Louis Sachar’s novel Holes as a premiere example of brilliant plot construction. Every gun on the mantlepiece gets fired eventually somewhere in the story, and exactly when it needs to be.

I read the entire book to my daughter and my wife this past weekend. We started, got a little ways in, and then both of them wanted to hear the whole thing right away, which is a tribute to Sachar’s storytelling. You could use the book as a sort of sonar for detecting inauthenticity and excess in other fiction, especially young adult and children’s fiction. Sachar uses race, he uses history, he uses hardship, but it never seems forced or demanded by a didactic project.

I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Posted in Books, Popular Culture, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 2 Comments

Uncharacteristically Brief Remarks

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I’m very pleased by the vote in favor of open-access at Harvard. Not just because of open-access, but because it shows that it’s possible for faculty to choose dramatic changes or reforms in their way of business.

I don’t know why exactly, but I’m finding online arguments about Obama and Clinton really depressing, despite the fact that I feel very strongly about Obama being a good choice and fairly strongly about Clinton being a bad choice.

I liked some parts of this February 11th Inside Higher Education essay about liberal arts education. I think he’s right that a lot of our traditional arguments for the liberal arts approach are weak and unconvincing. I also think he’s really right that it’s important to build a liberal arts faculty around liberally educated teachers, that we shouldn’t be defining our faculty positions in specialized terms.

My committee assignments this year mostly involved budgets, long-term resources for planning, and helping to assess a plan for possible college participation in a commercial development in the town of Swarthmore. I’m still thinking through a lot of the issues involved, but I’m increasingly convinced that a big change in the underlying economics of private higher education is in the wind.

Speaking of the big development project, it’s hard to know how to get past basic personal preferences. I can see some institutional questions, I can see some questions about the economic well-being of the town and the county, I can see some basic “due diligence” issues, but a lot of it comes down to whether you like things the way they are or whether you’d rather things be some other way down in the town itself. I tend to the “some other way” feeling personally, but it’s kind of hard to say that to the “way things are” folks. On the other hand, pretty much every change in a community makes someone unhappy, and yet many such changes end up being impossible to imagine doing without once they take hold. These are hard conversations to have: they expose preferences that each of us normally veils so as to get along more happily with people whose tastes are different.

The intensity of the discussion about Cuba at Crooked Timber is interesting. I wasn’t wild about some of Chris Bertram’s post, nor am I convinced by some of the defenses of Cuba in the ensuing thread, though the point about having to consider the plausible choices facing any state at specific historical moments is an interesting one to chew over. I guess I’m more interested in and yet also kind of weary about the evident passion of the discussion itself. There’s part of me that just wants this whole discussion to go away, or at least to feel like history and less like a record needle skipping in place.

I’m not managing to read a book a day. Maybe I should call it Once-In-A-While.

Posted in Academia, Books, Politics, Swarthmore | 2 Comments

QA Google Books?

Posted on February 16, 2008 by Timothy Burke

In all the debate about Google’s approach to digitization, I haven’t seen much discussion of the quality of the results, though people do talk some about interface issues (the Open Content Alliance design is a lot better for readability and use, whatever one thinks of the philosophical issues involved).

Anyway, I raise this because I’m curious whether it’s just me, or everyone has noticed this and has already discussed it, but of the texts I’ve looked at recently in Google Books, quite a few of them seem sloppy: lines at the bottom of the page distorted or unreadable, half-pages missing, weird noise or distortion. It’s kind of charming that some scans come from library texts that have marginal notations by generations of students, on the other hand.

Posted in Books, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 4 Comments

The Ecosystem of Asychronicity

Posted on February 14, 2008 by Timothy Burke

Every educated person should learn some basic skills for getting information out of online environments, but I would be the first to admit that reading asynchronous, threaded conversations for information is a much more challenging and low-value activity most of the time. I’ve been doing it for so long that I’m accustomed to it: it is a skill that old-time participants in the Internet acquired long before they learned HTML or tagging or search. Reading and writing to bulletin boards or Usenet is pretty much the ur-Internet, along with email.

When I stop to think about how I scan through an ongoing asynchronous discussion, I can break down some of what I’m seeing and how I’m seeing it. Let me take as an example a thread at Boing Boing from yesterday, concerning a YouTube video of a raccoon stealing food from a cat.

There’s 52 comments as I write this posting, which is the first piece of information I get about the thread. The post count is higher than most Boing Boing discussions. So there’s something going on in that discussion. But high post-counts appear for three different reasons. 1) Because the original post attracts reader attention more acutely and responsively, and many enter the thread with the intention of replying directly to the original post; or 2) because some single respondent has said something exceptionally provocative which is driving many later posters to reply; or 3) because two or more very distinct and persistent factions or divisions of opinion have chosen the post as a site to play out a long-running disagreement which is widely distributed across a range of conversations and websites.

What’s nice about this particular thread in terms of that list is that all three of those forces are present in the responses. Even near the end of the thread, you can see some posters commenting on the original post without any acknowledgement of or interest in the conversation that has developed, where they’ve clearly watched the video and want to comment on it directly and so enter the thread. Long-running threads in asynchronous forums often draw this kind of delayed response, but this kind of reply can also be a real irritant to people who have been participating in the conversation all along. To them, it is just a repetition of something already said, and may even reset some evolving consensus back to its “original” state of disagreement. But this also points to the laborious character of asynchronous discussion: someone excited by an initial claim or provocation may not want to have to read days and days of back-and-forth posting. Asynchronous discussions can be somewhat like the collision between someone who only has a long-term memory and someone who only has a short-term memory.

You also see individual posters who enter the thread with unusually provocative statements that become an occasion for further comments, such as the person who suggests that he’d rather see an eight-month old baby have to fight for its food against a raccoon than see a helpless pet do so. Finally, you see some fairly stable, long-term positions on animals, pets, wilderness, guns, YouTube videos and so on entering into the conversation.

Here’s the interesting question: when do participants in such a thread either change their own views because of the discussion, form a kind of consensus, or learn some new empirical information that “sticks”? (And thus: when might a reader of such a thread have the same experiences?) For example, quite a few participants observe that a raccoon active during the day is likely to have rabies. Other participants either contrast their own personal experience against this assertion to challenge it, or make more authoritative knowledge-based claims that raccoons active during the daytime, particularly in suburban areas, are not necessarily or even probably rabid. Some threads move towards consensus on factual claims, with people who originally asserted one fact eventually conceding that some other information is more accurate. Some don’t.

Another example from the thread concerns the question of whether this is anthropogenically-caused behavior in a raccoon, or whether the raccoon’s adaptation to suburban or human environments is in fact “natural” to the species. Here we’ve got something messier going on, because this is only partially a factual claim. It’s also a philosophical framework, in ways that the various respondents may not be fully conscious about. So it’s less likely that either view is going to be persuasive, or provoke respondents to simply concede a statement of fact. But this is informationally interesting to a reader: you’ve learned something about some common frames of reference that different people bring to bear on the original video, some deep assumptions in the wider culture.

You can also see a movement towards consensus and community-building in the discussion. By the end of the conversation, I would say that almost every respondent seems to think that the person who created the video is irresponsible on some level, even if the video is amusing, that some sort of social contract between the cat-owner and the cat has been broken. (Which the cat’s frequent entreating looks back at the camera hammer home.) That’s interesting both rhetorically and sociologically.

I would completely agree that many asychronous conversations are frustrating to participants and difficult to parse for any reader who wasn’t there at the time. With practice and familiarity, however, I think there are a lot of things you can learn from reading such conversations, even with a very long time lapse between the creation of such discussions and the interpretation of them.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy | 6 Comments