This overlong and overwrought series
is a long and strange response to Lex's article, which was amazing to read and got me thinking. This may generate a few different blog posts from me, but for the moment, let's start here.
Let's be complete here: a militant atheist, Randian Objectivist whose father was the pastor of a Baptist church, mother was the bookkeeper, sister was (and still is) the organist. Grew up in the South and still lives there.
Just so I'm positioned in the fiction here properly, because I'm really curious about what's about to happen.
This produced an interesting conundrum. Philosophy creates mechanics. A Randian Objectivist will create a different game than an Orthodox Christian.
Wait. I am Orthodox. What might that kind of thing look like? If philosophy generates mechanics, no matter how unintentionally, what might an Orthodox Christian philosophy generate, on purpose?
And therein lies the question.
So here we go.
I have been in the Byzantine liturgical cycle since I was 13. I am now 38. I made it through my adolescence in no small part because of this liturgical cycle. That is not a boast. It is simply a fact. Whatever else you may conclude from this series, that is an objective fact. Somehow it soothed me. Later, I would learn that Orthodox theology's explicit teach is that their liturgics are the primary way to experience truth. I kept finding this to be true, because I could not just think it, I could feel it.
To paraphrase the Buddha: if it doesn’t comfort, heal, and invigorate while being correct, it’s not truth.
Years later, while in therapy, I would find this to not just be "correct", but vital. Your affective self must be in agreement with your more abstract self. And if your abstract self is oriented towards something wrong, it will destroy you.
Over the years, I learned another lesson: enjoyment with a clear head is the best. Whatever it is: food, drink, games, sex, the full human enjoyment is when the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of your person are engaged, at their proper proportions.
In other words, you encounter Truth because you encountered Beauty and then Goodness, together
as St Dionysius the Aeropagite says, and yes you should read this:
From this Beauty comes the existence of everything each being exhibiting its own way of beauty.
For Beauty is the cause of harmony, of sympathy
and of community:
Beauty unites all things and is the source of all thing»
Beauty is the great creating cause which bestirs the world and holds all things in existence by the longing inside
them to have Beauty.
And there it is ahead of all as Goal, as the Beloved, as the Cause toward which all things move, since it is the longing for Beauty which actually brings them into being.
Beauty is a model to which they conform...
From the One, the Good, the Beautiful - the interrelationship of all things in accordance with capacity.
From the One, the Good, the Beautiful - the harmony and the love which are formed between them but which do not obliterate identity.
From the One, the Good, the Beautiful - the innate togetherness of everything.
From the One, the Good, the Beautiful, also - the intermingling of everything, the persistence of things, the unceasing emergence of things...
- St. Dionysios the Areopagite, Divine Names
This experience is coherent. Completely coherent. It creates something so coherent that literally entire philosophies come from it, some of the greatest ever conceived.
Sounds great! Where’s the tabletop roleplaying games that do this?
Before someone points to the innumerable and insufferable “Christian” games made: stop. Memorizing Scripture for gameplay doesn’t count. Saying something is based off of older stories doesn't mean anything, because unless you're actually talking in ludonarrative, you're just blowing smoke.
Before you say "Yeah I know a game that does that," you need to ask yourself, and you have to answer it honestly:
Did that beautiful experience at the table happen to you because everyone was pushing for it, or did the mechanics make it so easy it was almost inevitable?
And before you go "That's not how that works"
it literally doesn't work any other way.
Why else do you think people use incense when they pray, or use particular positions to meditate? Why use repetitive phrases, like mantras, the Rosary, or the Jesus Prayer? Human. Psychology. Must. Be. Hacked. That is a fact of history. Denying this denies... literally every bit of psychological advice, ever.
And anyone who knows anything about the 20th century should know it's possible to engineer environments to break people. If you don't... your history is bad. Really really really bad. Go get an education. That's literally what brainwashing is: the weaponization of our ability to bypass our brains and get into our nervous systems.
This is all verified. Over. And over. And over. And over. History and thousands of years of multiple traditions of asceticism leave you without room to argue.
And videogames have been using these tricks of basic human psychology for years, and if you think on it, you'll find that you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Let's take Breath of the Wild. Seriously. Watch this video from Game Maker's Toolkit, which is exactly the kind of trick I'm talking about. It's not long. Watch it.
Oh, and the design of the Dark Souls map alone should have damned the argument that mechanics (aka mental design) cannot condition people into doing a particular thing.
Yes, it's an hour and a half long, this dude makes it worth it. Go watch. Get an education. Great games hack brains and psychology. It is not a question. It is an established fact.
Meeting beauty and goodness to receive truth is the work of any sane human being. And we have those methods.
So why the hell aren't we doing it???
Don't pretend. By and large we are not.
The OSR is based, historically,
on Prussian wargaming. You know, military stuff. Again, this should not be controversial to say, and if you're balking... go get an education. Please.
The thing I have to say that is controversial, although obvious, is that anyone who has ever touched anything molested by any military can tell you it's not for beauty. Or goodness.
It's for death. Killing. And in order to kill, your soul must be destroyed first.
Modern militaries are, by design, ugly and horrifying and utilitarian. So what do you think a military will design? Something that kills. Anyone part of a military should be revolting in disgust, because we know what a rot the military has been on our souls.
And most of our games are designed around it. Openly. I should not have to spell it out, but people sometimes need to: if you are playing something that is, at its heart, ugly and utilitarian, do you think you're going to run into anything beautiful without a good deal of effort?
Notice I didn't say you couldn't do it. Notice exactly what I said.
"without a good deal of effort"
Think on it. Actually think.
That answer should be obvious, if you're willing to accept basic human psychology and spirituality. I am not claiming that beauty and goodness can't be found while using a Prussian design. One of the most important moments in my life happened under live fire, which is a horrificall ugly thing. Something cohered in a way that was unexpected, and I met Truth.
But let's not pretend that that moment was easy to get at, and there's a world somewhere where I didn't make it that far, because the ugliness and utilitarian nature of the military choked me out. Total ugliness can make you find the beauty and goodness within. But it's not likely to happen.
The mere existence of Notre Dame should tell you how good idea it is to bank everything on someone finding the beauty within via ugliness without.
Don't get uppity, storygamers
you're not any better. Most storygame design is reactionary against the ugly Prussian design that is at the heart of the OSR. And most of the people who are designing these games are, to be kind, damn fool idiot Marxists. And they don't believe in beauty, just power, by obviously. So instead of saying the obvious:
This game's mechanics are ugly. I should go for beauty.
They instead say:
This game's mechanics don't play with power in a way I like.
And this mistake is damning. Without a telos for beauty, you can't design something that actually stands out. That requires an actual end point that you think is good, desirable, wholesome. That has nothing to do with power. Power is meant to protect those things. It is not a substitute.
Most storygamers never learn this, so their designs are incoherent garbage.
 |
| Picture coincidental, I assure you. Totally doesn't mangle the themes of the show it's based on. |
The pursuit of beauty and goodness for truth
is the foundation of all human activities. That should be especially trust of gaming, especially TTRPGs. However, we've gotten caught up in the legacy of one of the most awful parts of the 20th century (ask yourself what the people making those wargames were a part of, and ask yourself if you're really any stronger than them), and ask:
"Do my methods of gaming match the proven methods of finding the beautiful, the good, and the true? And, if not, can we somehow make something that does?"
Obviously, if you don't believe in the beautiful to begin with, you'll scoff.
But the rest of us with common sense should walk away thoughtful.
No comments:
Post a Comment