The myth of the deadly RPG (again)

The quasi-role-playing-game Fugitive earned some negative attention this week after a Phoenix-area teen, Andrew Arellanes, died while playing about a week ago.

While this is awful and tragic — as a parent, I don’t know how I could survive the loss of a child — I’d hate to see this turn into a blame game, with Fugitive bearing the brunt. Unfortunately, the TV news report in the link above is full of finger-pointing turns of phrase, describing Fugitive as “a dangerous game,” a “deadly game,” and a game with “a new element — a twist that caused Arellanes to fall to his death.”

Let’s be clear here: saying Fugitive caused this boy’s awful death is like saying a person who dies of a heart attack while strolling through a garden was killed by the garden.

Kids in other places are apparently playing Fugitive unsafely, but the game doesn’t require reckless behavior. There are many ways to play it wisely and safely. That’s up to the players.

We’ve been down this road before with role-playing games, but it’s clear that, for the most part, play-acting is really good for us. So go; play Fugitive. Be safe. Have fun.

How a life among monsters can help you learn

RPG gamers: come out of hiding! Photo by Flickr user greenwise art.

Once upon a time, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons were something kids and teens played in secret, for fear their parents would find out. Some parents had become convinced that these games allowed kids to flirt with the occult or even suicide and murder. Today, we mostly laugh at those ideas, and those who hide their RPG tendencies do so less out of fear of what their parents will think, and more out of fear that they’ll be branded as nerds stuck in childhood. Some stigma remains.

Which is why, when an accomplished writer like Samuel Sattin writes about his history as a role-playing gamer in Salon, it’s in somewhat hushed tones:

Now, I realize I’m risking no small amount of social capital by putting my history with Dungeons & Dragons into print. I’ve made similar confessions concerning my long time love of video games, a medium many respected cultural arbiters—Roger Ebert comes to mind—says can never be art. New forms of media, new forms of creative exploration, especially when they try to assume dignity or—shock—artistic respect, are bound to be repudiated by establishment critics who maintain genre is divorced from aesthetic permanence. There’s a reason Ursula K. LeGuin hasn’t won a Pulitzer yet, and it’s not because she isn’t amazing. It’s because there’s a war going on right now, especially in the literary world, over the definition of cultural value.

That, however, is not really the point of Sattin’s essay. Instead, the point is that his experiences playing D&D actually gave him the skills he needed to write his debut novel, League of Somebodies, which is coming out next spring. He talks about how all those hours spent creating characters and stories provided the building blocks for his imagination to craft a story and that, someday soon, we will all be able to experience. Tolkien and Lewis, Milne, George Lucas — they have all created worlds that don’t exist, but that do now because of their imagination, and to some extent they were all role-playing.

Okay, so maybe you don’t want to write stories. That’s not the only useful thing to come out of RPGs. Take, for example, 12-year-old Julian Levy, whose D&D monster manual helped his dad, psychologist Alan Kingstone, solve a conundrum about human behavior. Kingstone was studying where people look when examining a new creature; usually it’s the eyes, but what if the eyes aren’t in the expected place?

The recordings showed that when volunteers looked at drawings of humans or humanoids (monsters with more or less human shapes), their eyes moved to the centre of the screen, and then straight up. If the volunteers saw monsters with displaced eyes, they stared at the centre, and then off in various directions. The volunteers looked at eyes early and frequently, whether they were on the creatures’ faces or not.

This isn’t just an academic exercise, says Kingstone. “If people are just targeting the centre of the head, like they target the centre of most objects, and getting the eyes for free, that’s one thing. But if they are actually seeking out eyes that’s another thing altogether,” he says. It means that different parts of the brain are involved when we glean social information from our peers. It might also help to explain why people with autism often fail to make eye contact with other people, and which parts of the brain are responsible.

Kingstone’s research paper is called “Monsters Are People Too,” natch.

Maine WoW gamer wins seat on state senate

Some of you may recall that I posted about Colleen Lachowicz last month, because the social worker’s history of playing World of Warcraft — and saying some very WoW-appropriate but violent-when-taken-out-of-context things — came up during her campaign for Maine’s state senate.

Well, she overcame that, along with ethics-violation claims, and trounced opponent (and incumbent) Tom Martin in last night’s election.

Hopefully this is a sign that the media-reading public knows better than to buy the idea that a candidate’s gaming passion could be a detriment to her leadership abilities.

How RPGs make you more confident & successful

In light of Monday’s post about the negative flak directed at Maine Senate candidate Colleen Lachowicz and her WoW alter-ego, I thought it would be nice to end the week with his video from the PBS “idea channel” on the benefits of role-playing games — and how they can make you a more confident and successful person.

It gets into all kinds of good stuff, from Martin Heidigger’s concept of thrownness to how gaming can help players overcome shyness, disorganization, and other attributes that don’t fly so well when you’re trying to succeed. Not to mention how to cope with the random chance that life tosses your way.

Remarkably, many of the comments on the video’s YouTube page are thoughtful and coherent (something YouTube comments aren’t known for). Most of them bolster the idea that RPG builds skills that are useful and important in everyday life. What do you think?

Can RPGs bridge the Israel-Palestine conflict? Norway’s newest minister thinks so.

Heikki Holmås, Norway’s new minister of international development, believes role-playing games can solve real-world political problems.

Since the Israel-Palestine conflict began many decades ago, there’s one solution that probably hasn’t been tried: role-playing.

Heikki Holmås, Norway’s new minister of international development, is a lifelong D&D player and LARPer — and believes such games could help make headway in that longstanding struggle. He recently spoke with Imagonem, and mentioned a Norwegian LARP project taking place in Palestine this year:

I don’t know all the details, but there’s no doubt that you can put Israelis into the situation of the Palestinians and vice versa in a way that fosters understanding and builds bridges. Those things are an important aspect of role playing games which makes it possible to use them politically to create change.

His comments sound right in line with Jane McGonigal’s gospel about how gaming can solve real-world problems. Could it work?

Many remember when role-playing games were demonized after a pair of high-profile suicides by young men who played RPGs. Many of us laugh now at the idea that these games can harm people. In fact, they’re used in psychological settings, and in the classroom, because they’re recognized for powerful tools that teach players empathy. Given the chance to step into someone else’s personality and situation for a while, we learn a lot about them, whether they’re a treasure-hunting orc — or a lifelong political enemy.

Holmås had more to say about the benefits of role-playing games:

RPGs can be extremely relevant in putting people in situations they’re unfamiliar with. Save the Children have their refugee games. I have friends in Bergen who’ve run human rights-RPGs. But you have to be professional. You create real emotions when you play role playing games, real emotions that stick, he says.

That’s kind of the slightly scary aspect of role playing games, which has to be considered. At the same time, it’s what makes it possible for RPGs to change the world. LARP can change the world, because it lets people understand that humans under pressure may act differently than in the normal life, when you’re safe.

RPGs: still not to blame

Belegarth fighters on the battlefield. Photo by Flickr user Glenn Loos-Austin.

Once upon a time, a grieving mother went on the warpath. After Patricia Pulling’s RPG-playing son, Irving, shot himself in the chest, she set out to convince the world that such games are dangerous for kids. Her “evidence” included numerous cases in which obviously depraved individuals used role-playing games to “lure” kids into harmful activity. Pulling believed the games were to blame, and she was successful in shutting down many smaller games and game publishers.

Those days are long gone — or are they? Police in Tennessee told reporters this week that a man used live-action role-playing games to get close to families with kids, and then molest the kids. The man, who participated in Belegarth, went by the name Sir Lotek. (To be fair, Belegarth is less a live-action role-playing game and more of a medieval combat society). Police told a NewsChannel5 reporter:

“Mr. Agostinho met families through the medieval social networking group, and that’s how he became involved with the victims. He would befriend the families, take vacations and trips together, and befriend these kids.”

Fortunately, the article doesn’t end there. It also includes this very important comment — suggesting that times have, perhaps, changed after all:

Authorities said it’s important to remember the medieval role playing group had no clue about Agostinho’s alleged actions, and had no involvement in the criminal acts themselves.

Unfortunately, the line is buried at the end of the story. I only hope that concerned parents would read that far.

Still, the whole scenario requires some further unpacking. For example, it doesn’t sound like the kids themselves were playing Belegarth with Sir Lotek. It sounds like he made friends with their parents through a common social hobby, and had access to the kids in other situations. It also follows the pattern of most child sexual abuse, in which the perpetrator is a family member, family friend, or acquaintance.

Parents who are worried that kids might become victims of this kind of abuse, either because of Pulling’s work or because of articles about this Tennessee gamer, will get a lot out of Gavin de Becker’s book Protecting the Gift, which helps parents recognize dangerous behavior in both strangers and acquaintances. He also offers these insights:

Hard as it is to accept the idea that some well-liked neighbor or friend of the family might be sexually abusing a child, imagine the idea that it’s someone in your family. The denier doesn’t have to consider this because it’s so easy to replace that unwelcome thought with a warmer one like ‘Not in this family.’ Yet, one in three girls and one in six boys will have sexual contact with an adult, so somebody must be responsible. You can be certain that wherever it is happening, a denier is sitting in a box seat watching the performance that precedes the crime, watching a predator snake his way into a position of advantage, watching an adult persuade a child to trust him. During the beginning of sexual abuse, deniers will volunteer for the job of designing theories to explain the onset of a child’s sleep disturbances or eating problems or sudden fear of that same adult she liked so much just a week ago…

If a discussion requires exploration of some hard reality, the denier will first try to wriggle away … ‘Yes, I know all about that stuff; can we please change to a happier subject?’ Under pressure, he or she will acknowledge a given risk, for as a seasoned veteran in a long battle with reality, the denier has learned that appearing to get it, to really get it, is the best defense against unwanted knowledge. And the denier is not stupid – to the contrary, there is brilliance in the creative ways, that his or her children can be excluded from the discussion. ‘You’re so right,’ denier says, ‘sexual abuse is an enormous problem, particularly for young teens. Thank God mine aren’t there yet.’

No, sorry, says reality, the most common age at which sexual abuse begins is three….

‘Yeah, but that kind of pervert isn’t living in our neighborhood.’

Sorry, says reality, but that kind of pervert is living in your neighborhood. The U.S. Department of Justice estimates that on average, there is one child molester per square mile.

‘Well at least the police know who these people are.’

Not likely, says reality, since the average child molester victimizes between thirty and sixty children before he is ever arrested.

Do you know anyone who was molested? If so, who was the perpetrator — and how did s/he get to know the victim, if they weren’t already family? How did adults find out what was happening? Tell your stories in comments.

Now taking your questions!

When I started Backward Messages, it was with the goal of debunking misconceptions about the most controversial teen media. But I also planned to take questions and offer advice to parents who are concerned about their kids’ media or spiritual interests.

Starting now, I’m taking questions. If you’re worried about your kids’ taste in music, video games, spirituality, or other media influences, or you just want more context for what they’re exploring and why, send inquiries to me at backwardmessages AT gmail DOT com.

Are RPGs still the enemy?

A trio of Belegarth players pause between battles. Photo by Flickr user Glenn Loos-Austin.

Twenty-five years ago, you couldn’t toss a 20-sided die without hitting someone who thought role-playing games were a gateway to Satanism and suicide. Today, those suspicions have moved on to Harry Potter and Twilight. But role-playing games, both tabletop and live-action, are still alive and well. Hopefully, as a new generation is introduced to them, those Reagan-era fears won’t resurface.

Recently, gamer and author Ethan Gilsdorf penned a piece for Salon.com called “How Dungeons & Dragons changed my life.” It’s a worthy read, full of insight regarding how this nerdy game-based culture has now worked itself into modern life as the gamer geeks of the 1980s move into positions of corporate power and influence.

[Author] Myke Cole, 37 — the first in his military-fantasy “Shadow Ops” book series is forthcoming — echoed Brett’s thought but added one more wrinkle: “We are socially enfranchised and successful because of our D&D days.” A nine-year veteran of military operations and federal law enforcement, he’s been to war three times. “I wasn’t raised to the sword. My parents were committed aesthetes who eschewed violence and the institutions that wield it, and worked hard to instill those values in their children,” he wrote me in an e-mail after Boskone. “It was D&D that permitted the pasty, scrawny weakling child that I was to imagine myself as a broadsword-wielding knight of the realm.” He played a lot of fighters and paladins before he became one in real life. “That game gave me a gift I will never forget: It stretched my mind around the possibilities that hover around us, unnoticed, all the time. D&D taught me to imagine, and that was the first step to bending the world to my will.”

In another recent look at RPGs, Anna Van Straten wrote Planet LARP for City On A Hill Press, a student-run newspaper in Santa Cruz. Straten examines, among other things, a Belegarth group that re-enacts medieval battles in Santa Cruz. Like their tabletop counterparts, LARPers are in it for more than just a good time.

Some LARPers see the game as not only a hobby but as a form of escapism. Rick McCoy, for example, said that as a child he read books constantly.

“You know, that was my escape,” McCoy said. “Then I found role-playing games when I was 10, and it was the ultimate escapism, the ultimate way of getting out of reality.”

Instead of escape, the game can also be seen as a form of control, of building a character up from the ground in whichever way the player desires.

“I think it’s a way of controlling your own person, controlling your own destiny despite what life has thrown at you,” Andrew “Sieglatan” Hodnet said.

It’s a shame that something so psychologically rich would frighten parents. Then again, these kinds of riches — which kids so desperately crave and need — have always frightened adults, who would much rather have their kids remain in the shallow, “harmless”, risk-free worlds of Disney, Barney, and so on.

The moral panic around RPGs and LARPing has died down, giving us the opportunity to look at folks who played these games and ask: were the fears justified? Did these games have any lasting harmful effect on players? If not, then are we right to yank video-game controllers out of kids’ hands when they want to play Red Dead Redemption or Bulletstorm?

D&D banned in Wisconsin prison

Photo from a prison in New Mexico by Flickr user Dana Gonzales.

It’s not like prisoners have a lot to do when they’re behind bars. You’d think playing a game or two to pass the time and stimulate the imagination would be pretty innocent, but the United States Court of Appeals doesn’t think so. The court ruled that prisoners in Wisconsin’s Waupun Correctional Facility can’t play the game.

Why? Because it promotes “gang-like” activity. Tuan Mai at Tom’s Style explains:

[The game] helps prisoners organize themselves into gangs that inhibit prison security. As ridiculous as this may sound, the Courts argued that the structure of the game mimics the organization of a gang and therefore promotes gang activity.

Bruce Muraski, disruptive group coordinator for the Waupun Correctional Institute in Wisconsin stated, “During D&D games, one player is denoted the ‘Dungeon Master.’ The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which Muraski testified mimics the organization of a gang.”

The prisoner involved in the case, Kevin Singer, argued that the confiscation of D&D was a violation of his first amendment rights and that the game in no way promotes or encourages gang activity. Singer argues that it does the opposite and deters prisoners from joining gangs.

One way of looking at this is: D&D helps gamers form strong, cohesive social groups. Prisons don’t mind if prisoners get along, but they don’t want that camaraderie getting in the way of enforcing rules. On the outside, though, you’d want your D&D-playing kid to have a strong, loyal group of friends, right?

The gamers I have interviewed said that role-playing games were a social lifesaver. Many were loners who had no close friends until gaming helped them find like-minded people to play with. Connecting within the game led to connecting in real life, providing friendships that have lasted decades.

Of course, parents may worry that the close-knit social groups formed within RPGs might lead their kids into friendships with unsavory types who wind up being “bad influences.” Given that approximately 110% of gamers are hardcore nerds with (at best) half-developed social skills, the likelihood of kids falling in with a “bad crowd” in these games is pretty minimal.

I can’t speak to the kinds of prisoners who play RPGs — or whether those kinds of close friendships in prison ultimately cause trouble to lead to recidivism. But it does sound a bit silly for the courts to block the game on the grounds that it helps foster friendships.

Questions for those of you who play (or played) RPGs: did these games help you make friends? If so, do you think they were the “wrong crowd?” And were the games to blame?

And for parents: Do (or did) your kids play role-playing games? What, if anything, worried you about this hobby?

RPGs alive and well

Photo from Flickr user Greg Turner.

These days, when people talk about role-playing games, they’re often referring to massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) such as World of Warcraft. But the old tabletop fantasy-based RPGs are still kicking all over the United States.

This week, Boston.com sat in with a group of thirtysomethings who play. Their game of choice is quintessential tabletop, with painted miniature dwarves who are living out — and creating — the history of the fictional land of Laratoa. While these gamers are beyond the age where their parents are (probably) worrying about their hobbies, their motivations for playing are essentially the same as they were when they started. Fun. Escape. Community. Building something together with friends. Imagining a world beyond our own.

In the mind’s eye, a light gray stone arch frames pale blue sky. Disgruntled peasants in burlap-colored clothes throng an open court floor. You glimpse them in your peripheral vision as you turn all your focus on protecting the red-brocade-clad king.

Near midnight, Barrett and Dew pack it in. They’ll figure out the specifics of the telepath’s ascendance to level 5 next time.

Next time … In olden days a much bigger group of players immersed themselves in Laratoa for eight hours at a clip. But life takes people away. Dew himself can only keep going because his wife runs her own, entirely different game Tuesdays, and they swap off watching the kids.

Humans role-play all the time, though it’s usually more subtle than this. We play moms and dads with our kids, employees at work, party animals at parties, and so on. We shift personas subtly throughout the day. But RPGs like this one allow people to really explore alternate identities — something we don’t get to do as often in reality. Doing so helps players understand people who are unlike themselves. Some always play characters that are different from their true personalities — others don’t like to stray too far from their own psyches. Either way, it’s educational.