Tag Archives: nerd culture

Poetry, Theater, Dungeons & Dragons

01 Monday May 2017

Posted by in Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy, Games, Musings and ponderation

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I’ve written before about my childhood love of Dungeons & Dragons. When I was 11 years old, D&D transformed me from a kid who loved The Hobbit and the D’Aulaires’ books of Greek and Norse myths into someone who wanted to make his own mythic stories. D&D (and related role playing games like Call of Cthulhu and Paranoia and Traveller: 2300) were one of the few ways I interacted with other human beings during a challenging early adolescence: my friends and I would gather in my dad’s basement to roll dice and shout about spells and orcs for entire weekends, for long, oppressively hot summers.

I still feel a twinge of embarrassment when I tell people that I play D&D every Sunday evening. Anytime I mention my adult D&D habit to a casual acquaintance, I fight the urge to explain that it’s not what you think. Thanks to the Internet’s capacity to link the shy and geeky with one another, we celebrate nerd culture today in a way that I could never have imagined when I was 13; however, Dungeons & Dragons has remained a cultural signifier of beyond the pale nerdity. We’re all nerds for something, for Star Wars or Game of Thrones or Fallout, but the ones who play D&D, they’re, well, nerd nerds.

Popular culture has never been very kind to D&D players, holding us up for a special kind of ridicule:

Image result for art thou feeling it now

One might argue that the treatment of D&D in shows like Stranger Things is more sympathetic and sweetly nostalgic, and I suppose that’s correct as far as it goes. But even here the Duffer Brothers built their series opener around D&D as a canny quotation of the D&D scene in the movie E.T.–and in both E.T. and Stranger Things the D&D scenes serve to establish the main characters as misfits and somewhat ridiculous young nerds:

The party back together again [Netflix]

Stranger Things [Netflix]

(Viewers who rolled a successful spot check also noticed that the Stranger Things lads were playing an adventure in which the characters were facing the awful demon prince Demogorgon, a name-check which also dredges up the old 1980s terror of D&D as a plot to involve children in devil worship. D&D thankfully survived that literal witch hunt.)

Why do I continue to play a game that people typically regard as an obsession for socially awkward tweens? The short answer is that it’s great fun, and I suppose I need no more elaborate an answer than that. But as I reflect on why I still have fun playing D&D, it occurs to me that tabletop role playing games mean something more than nerdly entertainment. Role playing games represent a distinct art form, a mix of fiction and theater and puzzle that is hard to appreciate as a spectator.  But when it’s played well–and I acknowledge that D&D is often not played very well–the game can be transformational for participants.

D&D is a kind of collaborative storytelling in which each of the participants plays the role of one of the characters. Players choose to a large extent the characters they want to inhabit–their backgrounds, their motivations, their strengths and weaknesses. The Dungeon Master acts as a kind of stage director and omniscient narrator, describing for the characters what they can see and hear, acting out the reactions of the characters’ enemies and friends and environment.

It’s a historical accident that these stories generally take place in a Tolkien-esque (some would say highly derivative) fantasy world of elves and dwarves and dragons. Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, tried adding a Tolkien-influenced “fantasy supplement” to his tabletop medieval warfare game Chainmail, largely in an attempt to boost his game’s popularity. The first role playing game could just as easily have developed from a science fiction concept, or from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, or from film noir. It just so happened that Gygax was obsessed with medieval warfare and that his players were Lord of the Rings addicts (ironically, Gygax hated Lord of the Rings–he considered it bloated and lacking in action).

The key to Dungeons & Dragons is not the dungeons or the dragons. It’s the idea of a person creating a story whose outcome can only be determined by the others at the table, those people who in ordinary storytelling would be the listeners or the readers. If the Dungeon Master is a good storyteller, and if the players are decent actors–or at least willing to play along with a bit of enthusiasm, the experience is, well, magic.

Science Fiction: the New Philosophy?

06 Saturday Aug 2016

Posted by in Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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One of the best books I’ve read in a while–and one of the most engaging graphic novels I’ve ever read–is Logicomix. It’s one of those books that seems so improbable that I think a lot of readers probably picked it up just to see how the authors would carry off a graphic novel biography of Bertrand Russell and his quest to systematize all mathematics in Principia Mathematica. Frankly, the topic sounds about as dull as Principia Mathematica itself–I’ve always thought of Principia as being one of those books that people refer to in order to sound educated but which nobody has actually read. And, after learning that Russell and his collaborator, Alfred North Whitehead, spent several hundred pages of densely-packed logic script in order to “prove” that 1+1=2, I suspect I won’t be reading Principia Mathematica anytime soon.

But Logicomix is about so much more than Bertrand Russell’s monumental (and ultimately failed) endeavor to create a self-contained logical system for all maths. Really it’s a surprisingly engaging story about how human beings make meaning out of the universe. I loved the book and will be giving it to loved ones that are into that sort of thing. And, the book made me curious about Russell, whom I’d never really encountered very deeply in college, even though I spent a couple of meandering years as a philosophy major as an undergrad.

I looked up this delightful little interview with Russell, filmed near the end of his life, one of the millions of forgotten treasures on YouTube. In front of the curtain painted to look like a library of ancient books, Russell holds forth in his high-pitched, elfin voice on the uses of philosophy. His basic thesis is that science deals with questions of “how things are” in the world, while philosophy serves to speculate about “how the world might be,” that is, to ask questions which science is not yet prepared to answer.

I think that’s a pretty solid explanation, though it immediately got me thinking that Russell’s definition could just as easily apply to science fiction. Perhaps it applies to science fiction even better: far, far more people read and watch science fiction than philosophy. The field of philosophy has ceded much of the intellectual territory that it occupied in Russell’s day: topics like metaphysics and epistemology get much more airplay in fields like theoretical physics and cognitive science than they do in traditional philosophy departments. Even in 1960 when the interview was filmed, Russell was speaking of the retreat of academic philosophy from topics that could be properly answered by science. But I think even in the realm of thought experiments and counter-factuals, science fiction is adding at least as much to the questions of “how the world might be” as philosophy–or any other academic subject, for that matter.

I know that not all science fiction is Stanislaw Lem and Margaret Atwood–there’s still a huge body of science fiction that doesn’t even try to concern itself with serious questions, science fiction whose sole purpose is an escapist entertainment about laser guns and robots with big boobs. And that stuff can be fun–I’m not too much of a snob to enjoy a Guardians of the Galaxy-type confection. But as we explore the deep stuff, the nature of our universe and of the human predicament, it’s hard to think of a question of metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, ethics or aesthetics that hasn’t been explored at least once by some pretty great science fiction.

I’m sure someone who sees this post was a better philosophy major than I. Can you think of an exception to my claim in the paragraph above?

Science Fiction As a Gateway Drug

14 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by in Biology, Games, Journeys, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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For a few years in boyhood at least, I loved science and technology. One of my fondest childhood television memories was of watching the original Cosmos miniseries with my dad, seeing Carl Sagan in his turtleneck and corduroy blazer as he traveled the universe on his “Ship of the Imagination” over Vangelis’ spacey soundtrack. I can remember my dad scoffing pretty frequently at Sagan’s goofily over-acted facial expressions–Sagan perpetually appeared to be having some kind of ineffable and mystical experience on his dandelion-seed ship–but the show appealed to the ten year-old me, so much so that I believed in 5th grade that I was destined to become a physicist.

I left science behind in junior high school for the same reasons that a lot of kids do: math and science classes were difficult (often not all that well-taught, too); I struggled with the emotions of puberty and my parents’ divorce and didn’t find factoring polynomials to provide much of an escape from my problems. For a couple of years I became a lackluster student in most subjects, but especially so in science and math, culminating in my freshman year of high school with the lowest grade I received in my many years of formal schooling (a D+ in biology).

Somewhere around age 14 I realized that the kids I thought were cool–the orchestra and debate kids who watched Stanley Kubrick movies and listened to classical music for fun–seemed to get As and Bs pretty effortlessly. And I wanted enough to be like them that I wised up in school a little. However, my perception of those cool kids was that coolness was all about literature and music, Camus and Sartre and Kafka and Stravinsky and Bauhaus (the band, not the architectural movement). Coolness had little to do with science and math beyond getting good grades. And so my trajectory through high school, college, and some time beyond kept me almost entirely in the humanities, with results which I probably could have predicted and which might have depressed me if I had predicted them: by age 24 I had a master’s degree in English and was an adjunct faculty member of a tiny community college.

Given where I ended up, how did I come back to science at all? I came back the same way that many, many young people get into the sciences in the first place: through science fiction. In 1998 I purchased one of the seminal computer games of all time: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Players of Alpha Centauri guide a faction of colonists through the development of humanity’s first settlement beyond the solar system. I was fascinated by the idea of a planet-wide university, of colonists building supercolliders and space elevators and massive ecological engineering projects.I loved the idea of a human society devoted to the acquisition of knowledge and careful stewardship of natural resources–an ideal that sometimes seems far removed from the society I actually live in.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - PC - IGN

I also realized (pretty slowly, after a couple hundred hours of game play) that all of the projects which the game modeled on this fictional alien world were projects that real human beings were actively pursuing on this planet, for good and ill. Among them, there are massive environmental protection projects, ecological restoration projects, and sustainability efforts whose success or failure will determine the future of human civilization. I realized that I wanted to live in a world of science, not merely as an observer, but as an active participant.

In years since, the burgeoning of the internet, with its powerful democratizing effects, its incubation of the citizen science movement, of “outsider science,” of the makers’ movement, has convinced me that the ideal of a human society made entirely of scientists, naturalists, and ecologists could be our society. All people can become scientists. Becoming a scientist requires time and dedication, but it requires no secret gnosis that is kept from non-scientists. Do I want to learn how volcanism works? I have only to read and observe for several hundred hours before I will know a good deal about it (ironically, that’s about how much time I spent playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri). Do I want to learn calculus? Khan Academy is right here on the internet, assuring me that I can learn anything, for free, forever.

You Can Learn Anything | Valley Oaks Charter School Tehachapi

As there is in most science fiction, there’s a lot of hand-waving and pseudo-scientific ersatz explanation in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Some of the hand-waving, now that I know a little more about science, seems pretty laughable in retrospect. But that hand-waving got me in the door, years after I’d thought I’d closed the door. People like Gene Roddenberry and Sid Meier have done as much to recruit scientists as anyone on earth.

 

 

Finn the Human Boy: a Modern Gilgamesh

27 Friday May 2016

Posted by in Biology, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation

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I’ve been trying to learn a little more about graphic novels–a literary genre that I have almost no experience with–and pulled from the public library shelf Gilgamesh: A Graphic Novel by Andrew Weingarner. I have always been fascinated by the epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest written story known to humanity: I loved the old John Gardner translation of the story, and I had a good time with this graphic retelling. The various cosmic monsters that Gilgamesh battles are drawn very well–they’re intense, original, but also evoke a Mesopotamian vibe.

The central partnership in the story–the ur-dynamic duo that informs so many later character dyads–is that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu: Gilgamesh, the civilized, anxious, ambitious king, and Enkidu, the wild and natural “hairy man.” The duo appears later as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,  as Prince Hal and Falstaff, as Han Solo and Chewbacca.

And, I realized a little later, as Finn and Jake from Adventure Time.

Besides the cosmetic similarities of the two pairs, Finn the human boy and Jake the magical talking dog are also spiritual and characterological siblings to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Finn and Jake are perfectly matched combatants, each unable to defeat the other, whether in combat, in their long-running pranking competitions, or in their frequent video game and Card Wars match-ups. Like Gilgamesh, Finn is a rambunctious upstart, eager to attack real or perceived injustice head-on, usually through violence. Like Gilgamesh, Finn is also beset with anxiety–often as a result of his phobias or bad dreams–yet Finn and Gilgamesh are also paradoxically able to set aside their nagging dread and fight fearlessly, even foolhardily, in battle.

Jake is a striking modern recreation of Enkidu, literally a magic talking animal. In much the same way that Enkidu advises and guides Gilgamesh, Jake is wiser and more experienced than Finn in most matters, especially those relating to the basic animal appetites for sex and sleep and food.

Both duos spend their time hustling from cosmic battle to cosmic battle with monstrous or demonic antagonists. It’s easy to imagine Humbaba, the earlier epic’s demonic guardian of the cedar forest, as a creature drawn for Adventure Time (even Humbaba’s name would fit well in Adventure Time); it’s just as easy to imagine an Adventure Time antagonist like Hunson Abadeer appearing in a sculpture from some Sumerian ruin.

Found on a Mesopotamian fresco…

The mapping of one duo to another isn’t perfect–Gilgamesh is a character rooted in a 3000 year-old value system that doesn’t translate well to our own. He is cruel by our standards: violent, an abuser of women, a despoiler of the environment (ironically, the pre-civilized Enkidu is much easier for contemporary readers to sympathize with). But the Gilgamesh-Enkidu pairing still speaks to us in much the same way that Finn and Jake speak to us, because the relationship is archetypal. The relationship speaks to our odd predicament as creatures that are both animal and transcendent of our animal nature: we are, as Hamlet says, “in action how like an angel! In apprehension, how like a god,” yet we are at the same time deeply aware of our brutish status as just another mammal, tied down to the “Four Fs” of feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing that govern all animal life. For both Gilgamesh-Enkidu and Finn and Jake, we are promised that all good things in life–justice, mercy, peace, love–come to us when these two natures are reconciled and act in partnership. We are warned that madness follows when we act in opposition to it.

On the Popularity of Vampires and Zombies

10 Saturday Oct 2015

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For my first post in three months, I’ve been wondering what accounts for the popularity over the last ten years or so for vampires and zombies in genre literature. Of all the monster archetypes that seem to say something about the human predicament–the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character, Frankenstein’s creature, the cosmic hostility of Cthulhu–I’ve seen more vampire and zombie books, movies, video games, Happy Meal toys, and cutesy merchandise than for any other monster.

I say this knowing that vampires have largely passed from the flow tide popularity they had during the heady days of the Twilight Industrial Complex. But Twilight was really just a recapitulation of the energy of the Anne Rice books and movies that had been popular 20 years before. I fully expect that a few years from now there will be another vampire fad, hopefully less annoying than Twilight, but still mining the anxieties and desires that the vampire represents for us.

My tentative conclusion is that both zombies and vampires are about exploitation. What resonates with us, I think, is that modern people are dimly aware of–and anxious about–having been domesticated. The modern American is in some ways as domesticated as cattle and laying hens: our time is strictly managed by school and work, our food comes to us pre-processed (and often pre-cooked and practically pre-digested), and we are all taken advantage of, to a lesser or greater degree, by companies and agencies and authorities that understand human psychology and probability and algorithms better than we do.

In other words, we see ourselves in the zombie: the zombie is in a kind of un-life, a feeling people are all too familiar with after binge watching a TV show for 14 hours (or playing X-box or trolling YouTube or Facebook for 14 hours). In the vampire, we see the exploiter: the advertisers and employers and investment bankers whom we perceive to be insatiable for our money and our labor. We vote and play the lottery and pay our insurance premiums, all while being dimly aware that those asking for our votes or advertising the lottery are playing us for suckers, figuratively sucking us dry. Perhaps we are unconsciously anxious about the power the exploiter (the vampire) has over us, as well as of the chaos and misery to come when the exploited (the zombies) turn their indiscriminate and poorly thought-out hatred on the world. As a community college English teacher not so far from Umpqua Community College, where an ordinary English class ended very badly last week, I’ve been thinking more than I usually do about young men’s poorly thought-out hatred.

I’m genuinely curious, though, about why these monster types have such staying power with us. The Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde character, or Frankenstein’s creature, both seem just as relevant to me as the vampire and the zombie, yet neither of the first two have anything like the resonance of the zombie to us today. I suppose one could make the argument that our AI fears, as represented in Ex Machina or Blade Runner or 2001, are our modern reworking of the Frankenstein myth. Even if true, though, zombies are still more popular right now. Why?

Why Fantasy?

17 Sunday May 2015

Posted by in My Fiction

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When people ask what I write, I almost always say science fiction. I almost never say fantasy, even though in many ways fantasy is my first love, going all the way back to reading The Hobbit and Watership Down and Roald Dahl when I was a kid. I’ve wondered lately why that is: am I embarrassed that I read and write and teach fantasy fiction?

In spite of all the blessings of nerd culture entering the mainstream, I guess I do feel more guarded about my love of fantasy. Both fantasy and sci-fi are snobbishly dismissed as escapist genre writing by some who have a very specific, Harold Bloomish notion of what literature is (I say “Bloomish” because the real Harold Bloom has been a vocal supporter of the work of fantasists like John Crowley and Ursula LeGuin). But even in the realm of nerd fiction, I get the impression that it’s more popularly acceptable for adults to be into science fiction than into fantasy. Perhaps that’s changed in the current market of the Lord of the Rings-Industrial- Complex and Game of Thrones. But I think there’s still a residual shame for many folks about their love of fantasy. Science fiction is about heavy, heady ideas: the ethics of progress, the shape we want our future to take. What’s fantasy about? Dragons?

podcastleHere’s an answer that took me a while to come to, but which makes me more ready to tell strangers that I write fantasy: fantasy–if it’s good–looks at the human experience sideways. All art is about what it means to be human, but fantasy (like surrealism or avant-garde music) takes a look at the human experience from an oblique angle, representing our fears and desires as creatures and powers that don’t exist in the everyday. This is what mythical stories did for earlier people, and fantasy for me is an attempt to apply mythical thinking to fiction, in a world where change comes too quickly and radically for traditional myth-making structures to keep up.

I’ve definitely written more science fiction than fantasy, but this last week I had a fantasy story picked up at the first place I’d sent it (PodCastle, the amazing fantasy podcast). I’m excited to hear it read, and to have others hear it, and I’m ready to say to people, when they ask, that I write science fiction and fantasy, and to be able to say why I do.