But I have to say that these lists still puzzle me. They summon an image of a nation full of phobics who don't mind, you know, killing orcs with a mace, or casting fireballs, but can't handle eyeballs or hurricanes.
What, exactly, is terrorism? If an evil wizard sends his minions to kill all the men in a town and carry the women into slavery, is that terrorism? Help me out here. Is this for people who don't want to be sent on a mission to blow up the Super Bowl? Or is it just the word "terrorism" that's at issue?
Who counts as police? The guards in the royal palace? The rangers who patrol for orc raids? Starship troopers?
How are we going to have Vikings without homophobia?
And then it gets really fun, because we have people who can handle dragons whose acid breath eats away their flesh but are terrified of "real world religion." Which real world religions? Ishtar worship? Santeria?
And did you notice that one of the fears not mentioned on this form, or on any of the others I have seen tonight, is Death?
This is actually a really important divide within RPG players; in some games people keep the same characters for years, while in others death is a constant danger. Losing a character you have put months into developing can be pretty traumatic; I've seen grown men cry over it. But that, it seems, is less of an issue than rats or thirst.
I don't know; if this is what people need to negotiate getting a bunch of con-goers to game together, whatever. But it's another one of those signs that we may live in a nation of special terrified snowflakes, each with our own phobia, or maybe a whole checklist.
I think I'll just keep gaming with my old friends.
I don't know why I find these consent forms so upsetting, but I do: perhaps because a concept from business is being imported into a world of play that I cherish, and it seems insulting to the referee, who is being treated like a hireling (there's a good old D&D word!), rather than the valued friend--to whom the players should owe an enormous moral debt--he or she is far more likely to be. I also wholly agree with John about the moral perversity of the exercise. These are in 99.9% of the cases games which end, after differing amounts of intellection (and the exercise of funny voices), with _killing_ imaginary enemies.
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ReplyDelete@JEL
"Moral perversity"!?
This is nothing more than people making sure they're all on the same page and playing the same game ahead of time, and you judge that on a moral level? Good gods! Get over yourself!
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We're talking about people playing a game together in order to have fun, and not wanting to have their fun ruined. We're talking about an exercise in recreational power fantasy wish fulfillment, and the pitfalls that might get in the way of that.
Yes, obviously, if you're playing with friends, this is unnecessary - you already know many of the pitfalls and can avoid them, or if any of them come up accidentally, you can make changes to accommodate things. If you're playing with an old grognard who came back from Vietnam with PTDS, you likely already know that maybe you shouldn't run a campaign set in a jungle during a rebel insurgency.
If you have no use for an item like this, great! I myself have no use for it! But I also have no use for a crutch, yet I don't look at those who do and judge them for it!
I guarantee you, 99% of the time, these sheets get handed back virtually blank. And in the few cases where they don't, I guarantee you, all of John's questions about "What, exactly, is terrorism?" get asked by the DM, and they quickly go over it with the player, and make a few simple adjustments to suit the player's comfort level.
"Oh, so you lived through Troubles in Ireland? Wow, that's awful. Well, I can promise the game won't involve a bombing campaign."
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ReplyDeleteIn a home game, I once played D&D with a lovely woman who no one else at the table knew was a civilian survivor of the Kosovo War who saw, and personally experienced, truly brutal and monstrous things - quite obviously, that seemed wholly unrelated, so of course it was unmentioned. But at one point, the party of heroes came back to the capital city to find it under attack by orcs, with a breakaway group having gotten past the defenders and having begun slaughtering and brutalizing women and children.
From the DM's perspective, it was a good source of heroic motivation, and for most players it would be - but I immediately noticed my friend reacting badly, but working to hide how it was affecting her from the rest of the table, because she was too kind to want to ruin the fun of the other players or the hard work of the DM.
I asked the DM if I could have a quick word in private, he saw the seriousness of my expression, we discretely discussed the problem as I understood it, he asked my friend over to chat, we confirmed her discomfort, the DM apologized, and simple changes were made to address the discomfort of one of his players - because he valued her ability to have fun infinitely more than he valued the particular dramatic elements he had chosen.
Nine games out of ten? Ninety nine out of a hundred? Total non-issue.
But in that one out of hundred? It made all the difference in the world.
It went from someone having their entire evening ruined (and everyone else not understanding how or why, and probably having their own fun ruined as well when a player eventually had to abruptly leave the table without explanation), to everyone being able to have a wonderful time with only one brief stumble.
That's literally all these sorts of checklists exist to do - catch those weird outliers ahead of time, to avoid blundering into them later on. You hand your players a checklist; they take forty seconds to run through it going "No, no, no, no..."; if someone DOES have an issue, they mark it down; you take five seconds to look at the collected lists; you notice the one person who has one specific issue; you take them aside discretely to ask about it; and you make minor adjustments to ensure that everyone playing this fun, escapist fantasy game gets to do so without having their enjoyment affected detrimentally by some weird quirk you couldn't predict.
If that's morally offensive to you, I think you need to go do some serious naval gazing.
@G-
ReplyDeleteAs I said, in a practical sense this doesn't really bother me. I think that understanding the basic level of violence and horror in a game before you join is actually a great idea.
But like JEL I am still troubled by the proliferation of these forms. They seem to gesture toward a world in which everybody walks around on eggshells for fear of triggering somebody else's phobia. This would be annoying, but more importantly it is, I think, immoral in a serious sense. It is immoral to be so obsessed with your own fears that you expect the world to accommodate tehm, that you actually expect other people to change their lives because your fear is so important.
The reason I write about Simone Weil is that I am fascinated by her insistence that ultimately all immorality springs from over-valuing the self. Not wanting to join a game that might have rats in it is a small instance of egotism, but it is egotism nonetheless, and therefore, in the Weilian sense, immoral.
The master moral virtue is courage, because if you are afraid you will constantly sin out of fear. To be a moral person you must strive to get past your fears. I mean this at a very serious and deep level. Ok, fine, it really doesn't matter if you hate rats; but these checklists are immoral in the sense that they exalt your fears over other things of value. For JEL and me those include the artistry of the dungeon master and the use of games to get into and deal with horrific situations that one hopes to never encounter in real life.
When you join a playground basketball game, you might watch for a while and judge the overall level of physicality these guys play with before you join. But you don't join and then say, "No dunking on me, man, that hurts my feelings."
And, you know, indulging phobias is *exactly the wrong approach* to treating them. The way to get over phobias is to encounter the things you fear in safe circumstances – like RPGs – until they don't scare you any more. I have a phobia of deep water and used to have awful nightmares about drowning and giant squid. But when my family wanted to go whale watching I stuffed that down and took them. There were some moments of vertigo but on the whole it was great. Maybe other people's problems are worse than mine. But it really doesn't matter how much you have suffered, the psychological literature does not support avoiding the thing you fear as a way of dealing with it. The main treatment for PTSD these days is to bang your head on those awful memories over and over until they no longer control you; the biggest advance in years is using Ketamine to make the process work even better. Consider how many Holocaust survivors got on with their lives, not by avoiding the topic, but by becoming witnesses and telling their stories over and over in print or in person. One Roma Holocaust survivor struggled all her life until she started painting pictures of the "Devouring" -- I think I featured her on this blog.
Ok, not everybody can get there. And as you say, if the idea is to have fun for a few hours with strangers, maybe you don't need to do any important work on your psychological issues just then. I don't actually have any serious practical objection to doing this. But If you go through life fearful of encountering your own special fear, this is, as far as I am concerned, a serious weakness and a moral failing that you should be doing your best to overcome.
A society that was constantly bending over backwards to accommodate the fearful has real problems. Consider all the bizarre things we are doing because certain parents are terrified of school shootings, even when those things actually increase the chance that their children might die, besides terrifying their children to no good end. Indulging phobias like that is a bad idea.
So, yeah, I don't care if people want to use such lists, but the harder I think about that whole approach to life the more it makes me worry.
@John
ReplyDeleteI would absolutely disagree that courage is the supreme moral virtue. It is a tool one can use, but moral questions related to its use are to be judged on the basis of the cause in which it is used. My experience/impression is that, among other things, it is a regular quality of "dark triad" types (though, of course, not exclusive to them).
Courage is indeed the most important moral virtue for masters--and your choice of words ("the master moral virtue") makes me wonder if that's what you're really thinking of. And after all, one speaks of "mastering one's fear," and I've heard the goal of psychotherapy sometimes formulated as "a sense of mastery"--and I think there's worth in that. But I would question the idea that *all* moral virtue has to do with or derives from self-mastery. Some moral virtues come quite easily to certain people. (Did Simone Weil really have to master herself? Wasn't she always kind of that way?)
I also distrust using selfishness as a name or stand-in or whatever for all immorality, particularly in judging social interactions. The question of the fearful individual vs. the group that wants to have fun in a certain way, seems to me a clash of competing selfishinesses. And it is not clear to me that the selfishness of the many has a virtue that the selfishness of the one necessarily does not.
Selfishness is a protean, pliable concept, and, like grease, both clinging and slippery. As I said, many social interactions come down to competing versions of it. And, arguably, doesn't the fetishization of selflessness lead inevitably to suicide, or at last to a wasting non-self-preservation, as it did in Weil's case? I've long wondered if selfishness may not arguably be inseparable, on the most fundamental, even (dare one say) molecular, level, from the very fact of organic life.
On overcoming fear in particular, I'm skeptical that success in overcoming phobias is only a matter of confrontation. I think self-motivation is key. You overcame your fear of deep water because *you* wanted to go with your family on the whale-watch. Without that sort of positive self-motivation, I think a program of confronting the feared thing would probably spring more from mere compliance with others, or maybe self-hatred, and very likely not work. Either that, or one descends into a sort of pure behaviorism, which I've always been skeptical of (for what that's worth).
(Note: all of this is simply to indulge my pleasure in philosophizing, as well as to indulge actual beliefs I have--both, in a sense, selfish motivations, of course. On the specific issue of RPG consent forms, I'm prepared to regard those as simply an amusing "the way we live now" phenomenon, and move on.)