DUNGEONS & DISCOURSE: INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

Philip J. Clements

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

December 2019

Committee:

Timothy Messer-Kruse, Advisor

Paul Morris Graduate Faculty Representative

Esther Clinton

Jeremy Wallach i

ABSTRACT

Timothy Messer-Kruse, Advisor

Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) has been a pervasive force in American culture for over forty years, and while it has frequently been examined as both social practice and cultural text,

rarely have both the texts and the praxis of D&D been studied with a focus on how race and

gender interact within the game. This research looks at how race and gender intersect (or more

often, contrast) within the text and practice of D&D.

This study culls data from a wide variety of sources. It includes literary analyses of

important source material for the game, such as the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E.

Howard, describing the way these authors influenced the way the game understands and uses

race. It also examines later works that both influence and have been influenced by Dungeons &

Dragons. This includes texts like Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, a fantasy epic

that began as a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. In addition to textual analyses, this study

includes data and observations taken from interviewing players and observing numerous sessions

of D&D. These interviews and observations are essential, as they provide information on how

people talk, act, and think around the gaming table, and how players engage critically with

concepts of race and gender in and out of the game. The ethnographic work in this study also

provides critical information on the characteristics of D&D gaming groups as social units, and

how the social qualities of those groups impact the messages imparted during play.

The basic conclusion of this study is that knowing that someone plays D&D means very

little, while understanding how and why they play D&D is highly informative. While both ii

D&D’s origin as a game and its literary basis are marked by a predominance of white male voices, there is a surprising amount of flexibility in the stories that players can tell. While there is no guarantee that players will use their narrative freedom to tell morally uplifting stories (and they often do not) a great deal can be learned from understanding why people enjoy specific tropes and concepts. iii

For Mom and Dad.

And for S. iv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Timothy Messer-Kruse. He has been invaluable throughout my doctoral work, and a truly encouraging and mentoring person besides. I would also like to thank Dr. Esther Clinton, and Dr. Jeremy Wallach, for support and patience, and reams of good advice over the years, some of which I have even been smart enough to listen to. I would also like to thank Dr. Paul Morris, for being an exemplary graduate representative. And finally, thank you to (Future!) Dr. Beck Jenkins, without whose moral and victual support I would not have made it this far. v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

Why Dungeons & Dragons Matters ...... 1

A Brief Primer on D&D ...... 7

Playing Race & Gender ...... 14

The Gaming Narrative: A Sample of Play ...... 18

CHAPTER 1: CRITICAL FRAMES ...... 32

The Racial Frame ...... 33

Haraway, Hill-Collins, and Complex Identities ...... 37

Critical Perspectives on Gaming ...... 41

Race, Revisited ...... 46

CHAPTER 2: LITERARY FOUNDATIONS ...... 58

Alignment and the Moral Center of D&D ...... 63

J.R.R. Tolkien: Godfather of Fantasy ...... 74

Pulp Fiction: Lovecraft, Howard, & D&D ...... 82

Emergent Properties: Texts About D&D ...... 98

Out of the Game and Onto the Page: D&D-based series ...... 104

CHAPTER 3: REPRESENTING D&D ...... 116

On the Small Screen: D&D In Mainstream Television ...... 117

Moral Panic, and the Mockery Thereof ...... 126

Convergence Culture and Fan-Made Products ...... 129

CHAPTER 4: D&D AT THE GAMING TABLE ...... 145 vi

Player Demographics ...... 146

The Gaming Environment ...... 149

The Impact of Observation ...... 154

Race in Play……...... 155

Gendered Play & Sexual Dungeoneering ...... 168

CONCLUSION……… ...... 184

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 190

APPENDIX A: LIST OF THINGS MR. WELCH IS NOT ALLOWED TO DO ...... 196

APPENDIX B: IRB APPROVAL LETTER ...... 197 vii

LIST OF TABLES

Table Page

1 Player Race & Ethnicity ...... 147

2 Player Gender Identity ...... 147

1

INTRODUCTION

Why Dungeons & Dragons Matters

This dissertation attempts to do several things at once. I discuss what Dungeons &

Dragons (D&D) is: a combination of tactical simulation, story-building system, social activity, and celebration of fantasy tropes and concepts. I analyze how the elements of the game, especially the tropes that make up its foundation, are in turn representative of larger American

cultural constructs. I focus mainly on gender and race, but socioeconomic class is also inevitably involved. I look at the differences between the way that D&D is written, and the way D&D is played. This last is especially critical, because D&D as a text is very different from D&D as a game or as a cultural practice. D&D’s instructional texts represent an idealized version of the game, but players of D&D are actors who constantly break the fourth wall. D&D is a space where the tropes and conventions of fantasy fiction collide with real life, a zone of tenuous reality where familiar cultural constructs are rendered strange in the guise of fantastic kingdoms, and where, sometimes, unexamined ideas about race and gender are questioned. D&D is a space of play, and that can include playing with, and even subverting, dominant cultural narratives.

Part of this text discusses the ways “whiteness” is created and deployed in opposition to

“non-whiteness” in the culture of the United States. People who play D&D are stereotyped as

“outsiders” in the white middle-class and working-class worlds. Even shows like Stranger

Things (2016) which look on the game with great affection, reinforce the idea that it’s the “weird kids” who play D&D. But even though nerds and geeks are traditionally “outsiders” in

mainstream white culture, being a “nerd” has traditionally been an implicitly white identity. As

Mar-Kell Law II wrote in his thesis Revenge of the Blerds, “To be Black is to be “down,” and to 2 be a fan of either music or sports. In short, to be Black is to be the antithesis of a (usually white) nerd.” (Law) In fact, being “nerdy” is in some respects the whitest way of being white. As comedian Donald Glover pointed out, being a black nerd was “Illegal until like 2003”. (Glover

2010) Nerds are marked as deeply, iconically white, yet they are also seen fundamentally as outsiders (or have been until quite recently). D&D is a major aspect of nerd culture and understanding the cultural touchstones and ideologies of D&D helps circumscribe the boundaries of whiteness.

D&D is also useful in understanding nerd culture, a cultural form which has become increasingly influential within mainstream American culture. Nerd culture’s influence has grown as a relatively small but highly influential set of nerds become cultural insiders through Silicon

Valley and the rising prominence of digital companies. The wealth of Silicon Valley and the burgeoning social and economic power possessed by nerds, combined with lots of nerds in

Hollywood writers’ rooms, means that the people who grew up as outsiders because they obsessed about “nerdy” culture are now the creators of mainstream culture. Superheroes, often portrayed as the domain of the lonely kid and the antisocial man-child, now form the foundation for some of the biggest entertainment franchises in the world. The success of Harry Potter and

Lord of the Rings as both literary and filmic franchises has normalized fantasy fiction. And

Disney’s saturation bombing approach to marketing its newly acquired Star Wars franchise is doing the same with science fiction. The franchises that were once considered “for nerds” are now the dominant elements of the media landscape. “Nerdy” hobbies, media, and franchises are now some of the most financially successful properties in U.S. entertainment.

Compared to the massive commercial success of other “nerd” interests, such as Star Wars and superheroes, D&D remains a relatively niche product. The company that produces Dungeons 3

& Dragons, Wizards of the Coast (WoTC), is itself a subsidiary of children’s entertainment giant

Hasbro and is a small but important earner in a large corporate portfolio. D&D is peculiar, in that

it is referenced constantly but is never a major financial success on its own. Yet there are 92

video games based on D&D, and several of them are commonly considered among the best role-

playing games in history. The Baldur’s Gate series is so popular that it’s getting another sequel

and has had an active community of players since the second game’s release in 2001. “Popular”

in this case is relative – even the most critically acclaimed and popular D&D games lack the mass appeal of games like Call of Duty or Madden NFL that are released every year like clockwork. Moreover, jobs in role-playing game publishing lack the glamour (and salary) of jobs

in Hollywood, or the respectability (and salary) of jobs in traditional publishing.

While nerd culture has become increasingly mainstream, nobody gets into tabletop

roleplaying gaming to get rich. Tabletop hobbies are big business, but it’s a chaotic and

disorganized business that is based on small retailers, word-of-mouth, packed convention schedules, and the passion of its participants. “Success” is defined more often as “surviving to publish more books” than “making a significant profit.” Throughout this work, I will write frequently of the problematic aspects of nerd culture, about elements of that culture that are racist

and misogynistic. But being a nerd myself and having been to several conventions in the process

of researching this dissertation, the people who make and play these games are, on the whole,

decent, creative, and passionate. These subcultures persist because people love them, not because

they’re commercially lucrative. Roleplaying and tabletop gaming still exist because many weird

and wonderful people put in nights and weekends to make them happen, and that, too, makes this

a subject worth studying. 4

But while D&D is not a particularly lucrative product, it is frequently referenced in other media. Though it remains esoteric to much of the American public, D&D is influential. People may only know about it vaguely, but they generally do know about it. D&D is important because the people making important decisions about media today grew up playing D&D.

Reading D&D as both a text and as a cultural practice is important because it reveals the racism and sexism that were (and still are) embedded in many parts of nerd culture, but also shows the progress that has been made towards increasing sensitivity and equality. D&D is a game where players combine many different pieces of media, and to analyze D&D is to look at not just one piece of fiction, but an entire cultural milieu. Reading the history of race and gender in D&D is an often-painful task for any fan of the hobby who also believes in treating people with fairness. At the same time, though, it helps both hobbyists and scholars understand the history and speculate on how the game and the culture around it can be made friendlier to everyone

D&D is also a space where the tensions of identity are made visible. Because the game is a space of play, and usually played with a small group of known friends or acquaintances, D&D often contains content and comments likely to cause censure in more public settings. Players can make uncomfortable jokes about race, class, gender, etc., not just within the persona of their game-avatar, but around the table. Perhaps it is because many players start playing the game at adolescence, the familiar environment encourages a sort of regression. Or, perhaps, it is simply because D&D is often played with people one trusts and who are part of a shared subculture. But people playing a game of D&D are, in my personal experience, more comfortable talking about race and gender. Sometimes the things that people say are problematic and upsetting, but they are usually more honest. And while D&D can be a space for insensitive or raunchy humor, it can 5

also be a place for serious social discourse, where players and their characters ask probing

questions about uncomfortable social realities through the lens of fantasy.

Studying Dungeons & Dragons is an intensely personal project for me. I have been playing D&D on the tabletop for over half of my life. I started playing D&D-based video games before I hit puberty. This study of how D&D shapes attitudes towards race and gender is also an investigation into a cultural phenomenon that shaped me. But even for scholars who do not play the game themselves, D&D has stories to tell. I know this, because I see the influences of

Dungeons & Dragons everywhere within American mass media. I believe this is because D&D tends to foster creativity. I do not mean that D&D makes a person creative, but rather that for people who are already inclined towards creativity, the game gives an outlet for creative energies and a way to develop them further. It is a game about storytelling. It is a way to practice both creative skills (developing plots and characters, pacing stories, etc.) and people-managing skills

(handling conflicting personalities, getting group input, and the fine balance between persuasion and coercion necessary to effectively lead people). Tabletop roleplaying games give people more preparation and practice for real-world activities than most people think. There has been a great deal of study into how D&D works as a sociological or psychological exercise, but relatively little on the complex cultural background of the game, and how the elements of cultural background and practical play come together to form the curious practices of Dungeons &

Dragons.

I hope and think that this work will be useful to gamers as well as to scholars. I began this

project with the assumption that gamers would have strong opinions on the questions I wanted to

ask, and my confidence was not misplaced. Almost every informant I talked to had strong

opinions about how race and gender manifested themselves in D&D, and they shared stories of 6

how D&D was and is important in their lives and in shaping their view of the world. One typical

response to the question of “how do you think D&D has affected you?” ran thus: “D&D was a revelation for me… It helped me make friends and taught me how to think more creatively and be expressive… I also think it made me way more open-minded” (Interview 30). Part of this project is trying to figure out how to improve gaming’s portrayal of race and gender, not just because its right, but because it will lead to more satisfying games that more people can enjoy.

After having worked on this project, I understand why work like mine is rare. Trying to draw connections between D&D’s instructional texts, the broader literary influences on the game, and the impressions of players has not been an easy task. This is not intended as a final or comprehensive word on the subject. As will become clear throughout this dissertation, D&D is too big a subject to be taken on in a single project. But with TV shows, webcomics, books, and even movies all referencing this common cultural phenomenon, it is vital to take a detailed look at exactly what messages and stories people are telling with this game. The type and style of

D&D someone plays is far more revelatory than the fact that they play the game. The way that players choose to construct their shared world matters, and the interactions they have within their fantasy world can have lasting consequences for the way those players live in the real one.

In the rest of this chapter, I will lay out why D&D is a critical subject of study for cultural studies in general, and specifically with regards to race and gender. I will describe some of the game’s basic concepts, so that readers who are not familiar with the game can understand the significant parts of the game well enough to see where they matter to the broader subjects under investigation. I will also discuss how D&D is played and begin to explain how and why the game represents and influences player attitudes towards race and gender. This will involve a critical reading of the subculture of D&D players, and a critical reading of D&D’s instructional texts. 7

D&D’s attitudes towards both race and gender are firmly grounded in the canon of high fantasy literature, most especially J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth corpus, although as I will explore throughout this work, the influences on D&D’s content extend well beyond the fantasy genre.

A Brief Primer on D&D

D&D is the most famous example of a category of games called tabletop roleplaying

games (RPG’s), also called a pen-and-paper RPG’s (PnP RPG). These games are the

antecedents of massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPG’s) like World of

Warcraft. Tabletop RPG’s usually involve a small group of players, usually between three

and six, gathered around a table telling a story to each other.

The game of D&D can be summarized as a rules-heavy version of “playing pretend,” but the particulars of the game vary widely from group to group, because every group of players wants different things out of the experience. Some people take the drama and roleplay of the game very seriously, some are more interested in it as a tactical or strategic simulation of fantasy combat, and some people are less interested in the game than in simply spending time with friends. D&D shares key features with the “hangout” sessions between metalheads described by Clinton and Wallach in “Talking Metal: The Social Phenomenology of Hanging

Out.” Most significantly, one of the key attractions of D&D is what Clinton and Wallach call

“the pleasure derived from the fact of sharing within a common temporal context” (Clinton and Wallach 49.) The pleasure of D&D is, in large part, the pleasure of hanging out. People are brought together by a common desire to tell a particular type of story, but sometimes that desire is suborned within the desire for a more fundamental experience: hanging out with congenial friends, with the narrative as an important but ultimately secondary attraction. Like being a metalhead (Clinton and Wallach 48), the experience of playing D&D is a bit like a 8 religious experience, in that it is difficult to fully comprehend if you are not familiar with it, and almost impossible to fully articulate the power of the shared experience of the game, complete with the occasional holy war.1 But there are some core elements that remain constant in most D&D games.

I have chosen to focus this dissertation on D&D because it is exemplary of the broader category of tabletop roleplaying games. D&D is, as far as the admittedly sparse quantitative data can tell, the most popular tabletop roleplaying game. It’s certainly the most iconic game, and Dungeons & Dragons is why, when a piece of popular culture needs to portray a bunch of nerds playing a roleplaying game, they’re almost always talking about elves and orcs and wizards, if not about D&D specifically.

D&D is exemplary of roleplaying games, but it is far from the only one. There are dozens of different roleplaying games, many of which have significant player bases. And while some gamers stick to one preferred system, most of my interviewees had at least tried or bought the products for game lines other than D&D. Different systems are designed for different styles of play, both mechanically and thematically. As a general rule, the basic mechanics of roleplaying games (having a character sheet, a selection of skills or abilities that define your character, and using dice or some other random element to enhance the drama) are fairly constant, while the theme and tone of game can vary significantly. Bunnies & Burrows, for example takes place in a Watership Down-esque world of talking animals, while Call of

Cthulhu is a game about terrible secrets, ancient cults and tentacled monsters. And if you were playing GURPS, the Generic Universal Roleplaying System, you could freely combine elements of both settings, assuming your group was using the correct sourcebooks. But most

1 Some readers may suspect me of exaggerating for effect. I invite skeptics to ask a group of D&D players about what “alignment” means, or which edition of the game is best. 9 importantly for the purposes of this dissertation, different games offer different sets of tropes about gender and race, while at the same time partaking of universal tropes that remain valid throughout tabletop gaming.

This dissertation focuses on Dungeons & Dragons because it is the oldest and most widely played tabletop roleplaying game, and it is the “default” game as much as there is such a thing. But gamers are often more than just D&D players, and many of my respondents, when asked about the way that D&D handles race and gender, use other games as reference points for these issues, comparing D&D’s handling of the subjects to that of games like Vampire: the

Masquerade or Shadowrun. One informant pithily commented “racism is a bug in D&D and a feature in Shadowrun” (Interview 16), because while D&D’s handling of race and racial prejudice is often less than adroit, the game Shadowrun attempts to make a realistic and sensitive portrayal of racism as one of its core themes. I have tried to keep my examples simplified to keep this work approachable for a non-gamer audience, but it is important to remember that role-playing gamers aren’t just playing with fantasy genre tropes in their heads, though this dissertation is primarily concerned with fantasy sources for the sake of space and coherence. I am focusing on how D&D relates to fantasy race and gender tropes, but it is important to point out that D&D is only one part of the larger genre of roleplaying games.

There is a great deal of room for research investigating both how RPG’s as a whole influence the way that players think and investigating the individual differences in how different games both effect and reflect the worldviews of the gamers who play them.

Each player in a game of D&D has one or more characters who represent them in the game world. The character is generally described on several sheets of paper referred to as a

“character sheet” which describes their personality, appearance, and personal history as well as 10

their game mechanics. The amount of effort and detail put into developing the character’s

persona varies wildly and can consist of anything from a few lines to dozens of pages, though

somewhere between a couple of paragraphs and a few pages of written background is the

normal range in most groups. Amidst all these details, however, a few are of primary

importance: race, class, and level. In D&D parlance, “race” indicates which of several

humanoid species the character belongs to and has an enormous effect on the character for

reasons I will discuss shortly. “Class” is the character’s profession and determines what

abilities and powers the character possesses. These classes are based on fantasy archetypes,

and include roles such as “wizard,” “fighter,” “cleric” and “rogue” (also sometimes called a

“thief”). “Level” indicates how advanced a character is within their chosen profession. Low-

level characters may have trouble fighting a few orcs and spend their time running menial

errands, while high-level characters are capable of ruling (or decimating) entire kingdoms.

There are two more aspects of characters that bear mentioning: characteristics and

skills. Each character in D&D possesses six primary characteristics: Strength, Dexterity,

Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.2 These scores generally range between

eight (below average) and eighteen (exceptionally good) and represent the character’s innate

faculties or abilities. Skills, on the other hand, usually denote what activities a character has

learned to excel at, as opposed to characteristics which represent natural ability. As I will

discuss in further detail below, a character’s race affects both characteristics and skills by

providing bonuses and penalties to certain scores based on stereotypes embedded in the

fantasy genre.

While most members of a gaming group control the protagonists of the game’s story,

2 I have capitalized these characteristics in order to show that I’m referring specifically to the way they are conceptualized within the game of D&D. 11

one player3 takes on the role of Dungeon Master, and in the parlance of the game, this person

is not actually a “player.” This is because the Dungeon Master is assumed to be “outside” the

game, since he or she does not interact with the game world through a single character, but

rather designs and describes the world itself.4 The Dungeon Master, commonly called the DM,

describes the world, provides adversaries and challenges for the players to overcome, and

often provides the bulk of the plot, although player decision and input are vital to the process.

The other individuals involved in the game, the players, interact with each other and with the

non-player characters (NPCs) portrayed by the DM.

The “game” element of “roleplaying game” comes from the fact that decisions are

arbitrated not through player choice or DM fiat alone, but by a certain amount of random

chance. When a player wants to accomplish a task and success is not certain, he or she must

make a check, often called a “roll.” The player or the DM rolls a die and compares the result

to another number that represents the difficulty of the task. For example, if Jane the Dwarf

Fighter were to attempt to climb a cliff, her player would roll a die, then add together the

result of the roll with Jane’s Athletics skill5 and her Strength characteristic. This check would

then be compared with a difficulty determined by the DM, based on the narrative factors at

play. The game master might assign a very difficult check if it were a frost-covered cliff in

the middle of a blizzard, for example, while a check to climb a low wall might be relatively

easy.

While the rules for D&D seem to provide a rigid and complicated framework for

3 Sometimes players will take turns filling the role of Dungeon Master, but generally only one individual takes that role at any one time. 4 Not all dungeon masters create an entire world, since there are many pre-published settings and adventures available, but most Dungeon Masters customize the settings a bit.

5 This example is simplified. This check could be performed in several ways, depending on the edition of D&D. 12

using skills and characteristics to resolve challenges and determine the course of events

within the game, the practice of play is largely up to an individual gaming group. While

some uses of characteristics and skills are self-explanatory, many more are quite vague. The

above example of Jane climbing a cliff seems quite straightforward – roll a die, factor in the

character’s skills and characteristics, and determine the result based on a pre-determined

difficulty. But even for this relatively simple task, the DM can assign whatever difficulty

they think is fair based on the conditions. A DM might also decide to have the character

make multiple checks to represent a long climb, or require characteristic checks, such as a

Constitution check to determine whether the character becomes dangerously tired during the

climb.

The above example shows how the DM can tweak the rules, but the DM and the group

together have far broader power to choose how to use the framework that D&D provides. One

of the best examples of this is how the game handles interpersonal skills. The Charisma

characteristic denotes a character’s force of personality and general facility at influencing

people, and there are several skills6 that determine how good a character is at reading,

bullying, manipulating and persuading others. But while the game provides rules for resolving

interactions between characters, individual gaming groups have wildly different approaches to

how they use these rules to tell a story, and how much of an interaction’s outcome should be

determined by a player’s storytelling ability (i.e., “role-playing”) versus how much should be

determined by dice rolls and a character’s quantifiable skills and abilities (“roll-playing”). For

example, if a character was trying to bribe a guard to get a comrade out of prison, some groups

6 The number and exact details of these skills varies between editions. The current (5th) edition of the game includes skills such as Insight (“determine the true intentions of a creature,”) Deception (“convincingly hide the truth,”) Intimidation (“influence someone through overt threats,”) and Persuasion (“tact, social graces, and good nature”) (Crawford et al. 178-179). 13

would require a full narrative description of the event, with the DM and player carefully

speaking the exact lines that the player’s character and the guard were exchanging, up to and

including accents and gestures. In other groups, the player might simply say “my character

bribes the guard,” and make a skill check, treating the interaction as an abstract situation

completely arbitrated by the rules. Still other groups would strike a balance between the two,

with the player describing how he presents the bribe to the guard, the amount, and his general

arguments, with the DM using the die roll and the character’s skills and characteristics as a

basis, adjusting the difficulty of the task based on the player’s narrative description. While

D&D’s instructional texts provide a set of rules for playing a game, there is a vast range of

possible uses and interpretations for those rules. Players often categorize themselves based on

where they fall on the “roll-play” versus “roleplay” spectrum, and there are plenty of

stereotypes in the gaming community about players who fall too far to either extreme. The

heaviest roleplayers are cast as melodramatic theater camp rejects and die-hard roll-players derided as uncreative hacks interested only in finding ways to abuse the rules and make the numbers on their character sheets as high as possible.

While there is a constant tension between narrative and gameplay, the two are also inextricably linked. As Csenge Zalka describes in Collaborative Storytelling 2.0, her study of forum roleplaying games, “narratives can emerge from acts of play through creativity and negotiation” (Zalka 37). While Zalka examines diceless forum games, the principle is just as true in D&D. Gameplay, and the element of risk and randomization is essential to the narrative. The gameplay elements can introduce unexpected risks or challenges, as characters cannot always do what they would like, or are forced into desperate, dangerous, or ludicrous situations. The question is never “rolls or roles?” Instead, each group must decide how they 14

want to interpret the rules in service of story to create a mutually satisfying game.

Despite the latitude that gaming groups have in determining how to apply the rules of

the game, characteristics and skills are still a core feature of any D&D character. Without the

mechanical structure of the game, the players wouldn’t be playing D&D, they’d be

participating in a “freeform” or rules-less game, like those described by Zalka. Because race

has a direct impact on a character’s statistics in the form of bonuses or penalties to various

skills and attributes, it has an instant and indelible effect on the way that character is

perceived, both in and out of the game. Elves are quick but often fragile, with many editions

of the game giving them extra Dexterity at the cost of a weak Constitution. Elves have

traditionally also benefitted from enhanced senses, especially vision; a trait that clearly echoes

the superior senses of Tolkien’s elves.7 Half-orcs, on the other hand, are physical creatures,

and often have bonuses to Strength and Constitution, usually with a concomitant penalty to

Charisma and Intelligence. Because D&D is at once an exercise in storytelling and a sort of

small-scale wargame, these mechanical benefits both reflect the intellectual legacy of D&D’s

source material and reinforce existing racial stereotypes through the process of play. For

example, a player who wants to make a strong front-line fighter type will naturally gravitate

towards a half-orc, because a half-orc is far better suited to the role than an elf, according to

the game’s rules. An elf, on the other hand, would make a poor choice for a front-line fighter,

because of her inferior constitution, meaning she would be easier for an enemy to kill.

Playing Race & Gender

Many players without a strong preference for playing one race or another for narrative

reasons will choose the race for a character based on mechanical efficiency. This means that

7 For examples of the superior senses of Tolkien’s elves, see Two Towers (481), and The Hobbit (171). 15

the mechanical elements tend to reinforce the stereotypes of each fantasy race. Players get

used to seeing half-orc barbarians and elf archers, not just because these reflect established

archetypes of fantasy literature, but because they have become archetypes of D&D as well,

thanks in large part to the way that the mechanics of race shape player choice. There’s no rule

preventing a half-orc from being, say, a wizard, but there are significant mechanical penalties

to doing so, and so many players play stereotypical characters because they are more effective

in the combat simulation aspect of the game. While different groups place different levels of

emphasis on combat efficiency versus storytelling, mechanics are a key component of D&D.

The rules give the game shape and substance and make it more than just “playing pretend.”

That the division is artificial doesn’t matter. It works because D&D’s players accept it and

agree to abide by it, and because the rules provide a convenient central framework around

which to build the game. The rules are not just a convenience, though, but are essential to

D&D’s identity as a game, and they are equally important in shaping the way that players

understand race within the context of the game. The fact that D&D’s odd-shaped dice are

such an iconic part of its image shows how central the rules are to D&D’s cultural identity.

Attentive readers will notice that I did not include “gender” in my list of “important character elements.” Unlike race, gender is not important to D&D’s rules. This is not the same as saying that gender is not important to a specific campaign, to the players or to their characters.

As with most things in D&D, how much importance is placed on a character’s gender is determined by what aspects of character and story the players want to emphasize. But D&D’s instructional texts place very little emphasis on a player’s gender. In the “how to build a character” section of the 5th Edition Player’s Handbook, the character’s race is the first thing the

player is asked to decide on, as it “contributes to [their] character’s identity in an important way, 16

by establishing a general appearance and the natural talents gained from culture and ancestry”

(Crawford et al. 11). It’s assumed that a character’s race represents both broad physical

parameters and important cultural influences that shape a character’s background and life

experience. This makes a certain amount of sense. While “race” in D&D means species and

“race” in the real world is a socially constructed category, both have or can have important effects on the way a person (or character) lives and interacts with others. In real life, a person’s sex and gender are likewise vital elements of how a person deals with other people. And yet in

D&D, sex and gender are only mentioned in passing and by implication. Section 4, “Describing our character,” uses “he or she,” 8 indicating that a character could be either male or female, and

not seeming to place much importance on which option the player selects (Crawford et al. 13).

While one could certainly argue the intent of the authors is to avoid forcing players to treat

gender as a story element and give them as much creative freedom as possible, that does not

explain the vast differences in the way that sex and gender are treated within D&D’s

instructional texts. And the ability to not think about gender is a sign of privilege, as it is with

race.

While some of D&D’s published settings feature cultures with strong gender

dichotomies, the basic rules assume a bland sort of gender equality. This has not always been

the case. In the earliest editions of D&D, males and females received bonuses to different

statistics. Men had improved physical strength, while women possessed more toughness and

pain endurance, represented by Strength and Constitution, respectively. There are still a few

examples of this in the game, although usually only with “monstrous races” who exhibit

8 This phrasing is problematic in that it reinforces the gender binary. However, given that American culture as a whole has yet to arrive at a satisfactory solution to the issue of gender-neutral pronouns, I’m giving the authors the benefit of the doubt, since I certainly do not have a solution to that problem either. 17 gender dimorphism. But while modern D&D treats race as something which has important ramifications for how a character experiences the game world, the current edition of D&D treats gender as something relatively unimportant, like a character’s physical appearance. It is a cosmetic detail that might affect the story as much or as little as the players want it to, but it has no meaningful impact on the mechanical aspects of the game. More importantly, the seeming unimportance of gender in the game’s instructional text belies the fact that many of

D&D’s tropes and archetypes come from deeply sexist sources, with the “succubus” monster and the often-reused “rescue the princess” trope being only two examples. Sexism in D&D comes from the texts that serve as the game’s inspiration, but sexism not as deeply embedded in the rules as racism. D&D is a game that runs on tropes and genre conventions, and as we shall see in Chapter 3, many of those conventions evoke America’s history of systemic racism and sexism.

It might seem that the sharp differences in the ways that D&D approaches race and gender would make an intersectional approach difficult. The truth is that while the descriptions above are accurate as far as the core rulebooks go, trying to understand the practice of D&D just by reading the core rulebooks is like trying to understand life in a foreign country from nothing but encyclopedia entries. That’s not to say that playing D&D doesn’t raise issues of race, gender, and the representation of how the two operate together. But those problems arise not from Dungeons & Dragons as an individual game, but rather from the cultural mélange that forms the heart of D&D. I will explore D&D’s complicated culture lineage shortly, but first, I want to offer a more concrete example of how a game of D&D is played, and the ways that race and gender operate within the game’s narrative, and in the interactions between players. 18

The Gaming Narrative: A Sample of Play

While every other example in this document is drawn from my observations, what

follows is the first session of an imaginary gaming group’s new campaign (Clements

2015)9. This game and the players described herein are a gestalt of my experiences as a

gamer, stories from fellow gamers, my field observations, and the stories of informants.

There are two reasons I use a fictionalized narrative in this instance. First is that it provides

a convenient way to introduce a number of game concepts and ideas in a streamlined

fashion. Second, using sample gaming narratives is standard practice in D&D’s instructional

texts. When game designers for D&D and other tabletop RPG’s create a game, they usually include examples of play to help players understand how the complicated rules interact with each other. My model of applying intersectional analysis to D&D is simply another set of interpretive “rules” added on to the way that players understand the game. I believe it is appropriate to use the same methods game designers use to introduce new players to the game in order to help my non-gaming readers understand both the game itself and the way race and gender are represented within it. I do, however, flatter myself in thinking that my examples are somewhat less milquetoast and somewhat more accurate than those usually given in D&D’s instructional texts.

Below is a list of the players. I have given a brief description of each player, with details that are relevant to understanding the narrative. Next to their names, I have included the character they play within the game. The format is for these descriptions is (Gender, Race,

Class, Character level). This the standard shorthand way to summarize a character, which reminds the reader how central race is as an identity marker within the system and setting.

9 What follows is an edited version of a narrative that first appeared in my master’s thesis, Roll to Save vs. Prejudice: Race in Dungeons & Dragons (2015). 19

Alex (Dungeon Master) Alex is a white Performance Studies senior. Alex is gender nonconforming.

Tanisha (Shagga, Female Half-Orc Barbarian 7) Sharon is an African American Ethnic Studies senior.

Kevin (Biddle Bumpkin, Female Gnome Cleric 7) Kevin is a white English junior.

Gordon (Glorious Godfried, Male Elf Bard 7) Gordon is a Chicano Accounting junior.

Phyllis (Incanta, Female Human Wizard 7) Phyllis is a white sophomore majoring in Chemistry.

This group is composed of several friends who all attend the same small liberal arts

college. The members of the group come from a variety of backgrounds and are between

nineteen and twenty-two years of age. They have been gaming together for about a year, and

most of them knew each other well before that. Today, they are starting a new campaign, and

this section of narrative will focus on the character creation process. This will introduce my

non-gaming readers to some core concepts, serve as a starting point for demonstrating how

race and gender operate within the game, and show how players constantly switch between in-

and out-of-game contexts. Note that the narrative is single- spaced, while my interlinear notes

and explanation are double-spaced.

Finally, I should warn my readers that this narrative will sometimes contain crude

and/or sexual humor, moderately juvenile behavior, and frequent reference-based humor that

draws on a complicated and tangled network of novels, video games, movies, and other

fictional works. These sections are based on gamers that I and my informants have known and

played with. While this narrative has been crafted to help illustrate my thesis, meaning that

race and gender will come up in this group more often than it would “on average” at a gaming

table, these are meant to represent useful excerpts, not the entirety of a campaign. I am asking 20 non-gaming readers to trust me, and I trust that my readers who are also D&D players themselves will find verisimilitude in these accounts.

The group is meeting in Alex and Tanisha’s apartment, their usual gathering place. The scene opens with a discussion of the new campaign the group is about to embark on.

Alex: All I’m saying is that if you didn’t want a total party kill10, you shouldn’t have put the portable hole inside the bag of holding. Especially while you were already on the Astral plane.

Phyllis: It was sound in theory. And hey, we did kill the Lich Queen.

Kevin: I still think we should’ve tried to talk it out with them.

Gordon: It’s no good, man. Those with Githyanki. They’re a bunch of crazy xenophobic asshats. And, y’know, you did steal one of their Silver Swords.

Tanisha: And hid it from the rest of the group. Somehow.

Kevin: Yeah, investing those points in Bluff and Sleight of Hand was pretty much the best decision ever.

Phyllis: Until the Sword Stalkers jumped us. Githyanki pretty much kill other races on sight. If you steal a sword, they torture you for days first. I did everybody a favor.

This seemingly innocuous conversation about the events of the previous game illustrates several important concepts about the performativity of D&D and the places of race and gender within it. First, the players are always operating on multiple levels of performativity, without clear distinction (or, at least, without distinctions that are clear to someone not sitting at the table). Alex is speaking both in- and out- of-game, because they are talking about events that happened within the game, but also referring to the fact that the motivations for those actions came from the players are well as the characters. While there is

10 9 A term that indicates that all the player’s characters were killed at the same time. Often marks the end of the campaign. In some games, death is no more than a minor inconvenience, while in others it is permanent, and everything in between. 21 a theoretical separation between the reasons that the character might do something and the motivations of the player controlling that character, the difference is murky and difficult to enforce or perceive, and everyone at the table knows it. On the other hand, the separation between in- and out-of-game was maintained when Kevin’s character stole the magic sword.

His fellow players knew that his character had done it, yet because Kevin’s character prevented their characters from finding out about it, the other players were bound by the conventions of the game not to take the sword from him, despite knowing that it would cause their characters problems. A game of D&D exists in a constant state of tension between in- and out-of-game contexts, as players shift between playing themselves and playing their characters, with significant bleed between these states. Players try to assume or portray alternate identities, but the submersion is never totally successful. Yet it is successful enough to permit the players to engage in a fictional reality and play with concepts like morality, gender and race.

This example also demonstrates how race operates as a marker of inherent difference. In his first sentence, Gordon is speaking about knowledge obtained from D&D sourcebooks. According to these sources, the Githyanki, a race of sentient humanoids dwelling on a different but closely connected plane of existence known as the Astral Plane, are universally xenophobic. We can see that Phyllis has the same understanding of the information contained provided by the sourcebooks, based on the way she agrees with Gordon. We don’t yet know how either of these characters perceive race as operating in the real world, but we now have one example of them taking the racial attitudes contained within the game at face value, at least as it applies to a group of enemies. While playing D&D, many players accept the convention that race is a good way to judge the non-player characters, and many NPC’s are defined at least partially by their race, such as “orc warrior” or “dwarf blacksmith.” These are gross stereotypes, but they straddle an uneasy boundary between the way that players perceive stereotypes in the real world and the recognition of a genre convention. Fantasy race seems different, because players do not meet non-human sapient creatures in real life, barring some complicated discussions of ape or dolphin intelligence.Alex: Okay, well, that game’s done. You guys had a pretty good run. I also really appreciate the fact that nobody got pissy about the way things ended.

Tanisha: Eh, fair is fair. We all knew what we were getting into when we let Kevin 22

play a Rogue.

Kevin: I still feel a little bad about it, though. I’m going to run a cleric this time. Be the healer to atone for my sins and such.

Alex: Cool. This is as good a time as any to go ahead and do character creation, then. I assume everybody’s got their basic character layouts, and we can go ahead and roll for stats?

There is a chorus of assent from the group, and the players begin rolling dice to determine their character’s ability scores. Some games allow players to allocate a set number of points to determine their ability scores, but this group has elected to determine them randomly using dice.

Tanisha: Hmmm… not bad at all. One ten, but I can dump that in Wisdom, since Shagga’s going to be a bit of a hothead anyway.

Alex: You’re still planning on running that half-orc barbarian, then?

Tanisha: Yep.

Phyllis: Nice. That’s a strong combination. You going Frenzied Berserker, I assume?

Tanisha: I hadn’t considered that, but now that you mention it…

Kevin: An FB with ten wisdom and Barbarian will saves? Good god, she stubs her toe and we’re all gonna be mincemeat.

Gordon: Half-orc? That’s a little on the nose, isn’t it? I mean, don’t you get enough of being an oppressed minority in real life without playing one in D&D, too?

Tanisha: The difference is that here, if I run into Billy Bob Dumbass, I can put an axe through his skull and not go to jail for it.

Gordon: Fair point. And it’s still better than playing a Drizzt clone.11

Tanisha: Also, I’ve always wanted to try this archetype. I think it’ll be fun to subvert all that “noble savage” crap.

Kevin: You going full chainmail bikini?

11 Drizzt Do’Urden is the protagonist of a popular series of fantasy novels based on Dungeons & Dragons. Enough players create ersatz versions of the character that the idea of “Drizzt clones” has become a joke within D&D gaming subculture. It implies that the character is unoriginal, melodramatic, and a bit of a poseur.

23

Tanisha: Hell no. Conan wasn’t a moron, dude wore chainmail. All that stripping down and oiling up was for Arnie’s benefit.

Phyllis: Chainmail is still crap. I’d go with a chain shirt, since we don’t have the cash for Mithril breastplate. Eh… I got a lot of crap scores. So I want to avoid anyone with too much multi- attribute dependence. Think I’ll go wizard. Human for the bonus feat, natch.

Kevin: Gnome cleric for me. It’s been a while since I represented one of the short folk. Say hello to Biddle Bumpkin, trickster-priestess!

Gordon: Didn’t we have a rule about cross-playing?12

Alex: That was just while Big Mike was here.

Tanisha: And also one of the reasons Big Mike is no longer invited.

Gordon: Ah, yeah, gotcha. Just don’t go all Loki on us this time. As for me, I’m going to be playing Glorious Godfried, the prettiest elf dude in the kingdoms. Is there a spell to produce body glitter?

Some of the character names may sound odd to my non-gaming readers, but each one

has several layers of meaning that a gamer will recognize. The choice of a character’s name

can indicate how “serious” a roleplayer the character’s gamer is. “Biddle Bumpkin,” for

example, is frivolous-sounding and comical, and might mean that Kevin’s character is

intended as comic relief, or simply doesn’t take the game all that seriously. It can also reflect

how the player understands race as it exists within the game world. For example, Gnomes are

often stereotyped as buffoons, illusionists, mad inventors, and many characters play them as

intentionally “wacky” or anachronistic. Tanisha’s choice of “Shagga” for her half-orc, with its

harsh, heavy sound, seems to fit with the standard conception of half-orcs as brutish and uncouth. It also bears a striking resemblance to Tolkien’s “Shagrat.” (Tolkien The Two

Towers “The Choices of Master Samwise”) Roleplaying games like D&D usually borrow

12 A reference to playing a character with a gender different from that of the player. 24 from many sources for inspiration, and the player’s individual tastes, ideas, and beliefs are often demonstrated by the way they construct their character.

Rather more dubious elements of D&D’s cultural makeup are brought up in the reference to Tanisha’s character “going chainmail bikini.” This is a slang term referring to underdressed female characters in fantasy art, movies, and videogames, usually wearing ludicrous and impractical “armor,” which serves less to protect than to reveal. The film and comic character “Red Sonja” (Fleischer 1985) is one of the archetypal examples. In rejecting the idea, Tanisha refers to the original Conan stories of Robert E. Howard, which were highly influential in the formation of D&D, to the point where an entire character archetype and class, the Barbarian, is one of the game’s basic elements. Phyllis, commenting that “chainmail is still crap,” is referring to the fact that chainmail armor is less effective than other options, mechanically speaking, rather than commenting on the worth (or lack thereof) of the chainmail bikini stereotype. These three players are all talking about the same character, but they are focusing on different aspects of the game at once: The ideas they want to represent with their character, the varied origins of those ideas, and mechanical effectiveness within the game’s rule system.

In addition to the cultural lineage of gaming, this portion of the narrative shows the complexity of navigating between performative frames, and the nuanced and highly individualized approach that different players have towards character creation, as well as how their epistemology of race fits in with that concept. Because the players are focused mainly on the mechanical aspects of the game during this creation process, gender seems to take a back seat. It is often assumed that a character is the same gender as the player, unless specifically stated otherwise, and this example bears that out, except for Kevin’s cross-playing, which I 25

discuss in more detail below. Where race is an explicit factor, gender often remains an

implicit one during the character creation process, in large part because D&D’s rules

encourage this by making race have more of an effect on how capable a character is at certain

tasks.

Players have a variety of reasons for the choices they make during character creation,

and the example above gives a sense of the way that each of these players thinks about their

character in both in- and out-of-game contexts. Tanisha and Gordon, for example, both

explicitly connect the functions of race in- and out-of-game. They both feel that half-orcs represent a wrongly-oppressed minority group within the game’s setting (As I discuss in chapter 3, this is a trope that the writers of D&D have repeatedly and deliberately invoked when writing about half-orcs,) and they believe that this is a point where the function of race in-game mirrors the way it’s deployed as a tool of oppression out-of-game. As is discussed in chapter 3, the awkward racial coding of half-orcs is a contentious topic among some D&D players.

While Tanisha and Gordon are joking, and Tanisha’s implication that she’s playing the character as a sort of power fantasy about getting back at racists is only half-serious, both players see a direct connection between the operation of race in real life and the function of race in the game. This is particularly interesting in the case of Gordon, who seemed perfectly content to take an essentialist view of race when it came to the antagonistic Githyanki but seems interested in examining the nuances of race when it comes to player characters. On the other hand, Gordon is also deploying a well-known stereotype within the gaming subculture of elves being androgynous and effete. While this stereotype isn’t something that Wizards of the Coast puts in the instructional texts, it is such a well-known and often-deployed stereotype 26

that anyone who has played D&D (or other games set in high fantasy worlds) will be familiar with it. The idea of “effeminate elves” also exemplifies one of the ways that race and gender intersect in D&D: races other than human sometimes display exaggerated gender stereotypes as part of their “racial characteristics,” which makes both race and gender roles seem more

“natural” within the game’s context. But the existence of stereotypes is one thing, and the way that players use and think about them is something else. Since we have not yet seen the

players working with race inside the game, we will have to wait and see how their

understanding of race within the game world develops.

Issues with both player and character gender can arise during character creation as well.

The “chainmail bikini” issue is one example of how this can occur. Although the game’s rules are not nearly as interested in gender as they are in race, that doesn’t mean the players ignore

it. The genres that D&D draws its inspiration from are riddled with gender stereotypes,

whether the distant and inactive female characters in Tolkien, the temptresses and trophies of

Howard, or the vamps and victims of dozens of other examples. There are more positive

examples of female characters, of course, and many players have and do use these as the

inspiration for their characters. What’s important is that during the process of character

creation, the players are using not just the example of D&D’s instructional texts, but rather

drawing on many texts from multiple genres for inspiration in every aspect of their character,

including race and gender.

There are also some issues of gender particular to role-playing games. Perhaps the most

significant is “cross-playing,” or the act of playing a character not of the player’s own gender.

This is a tricky subject. Some groups have no problem with it, while in others, it can become

a major problem. Naturally, it’s not really the act of cross-playing itself that causes problems, 27 but rather who’s doing it and how it’s done. Stereotypically, problems occur when a male player of low maturity tries to play a female character. One of the best examples of this stereotype comes from Gamers: Dorkness Rising, a film that dramatizes the play experience of a group of gamers, with the focus split between the real-life group and their in-game counterparts (Vancil). Gary, one of the is playing a seductive sorceress named Luster, but because of his rather limited understanding of sexuality in general and female sexuality in particular, the character often ends up as a hollow caricature of a vamp or the “seductive sorceress” trope common to so many sword-and-sorcery fantasies. To highlight this, the character Luster is sometimes played by a female actress during some parts of the story, but when Gary’s actions are particularly egregious or ill-thought, the same actor as Gary takes over and portrays the character. This device reflects a common experience shared by many gamers of male players who cannot convincingly play female characters, and moreover demonstrates the distaste most players have for such misogynistic individuals, but at the same time acknowledging that a certain amount of misogyny is inherent in many of the hallmark tropes of the setting. The implication is that “Big Mike” is one of these individuals and that his attitudes and behavior resulted in him being disinvited from the group.

The putative problem “Big Mike” is not a unique phenomenon. hostility towards female players is a commonly repeated theme among my female informants. Though women were in the minority among my respondents, many of them had stories about being harassed by male players (Interviews 17, 4, 11). The stories of harassment that my informants were comfortably sharing with me were in most cases not enough to stop them from playing the game, but often caused them to be uncomfortable within the group. Moreover, persistent stories of harassment had depressing connotations of “it’s just something you have to deal with,” as my informants 28

told the stories. Every female respondent had at least one story of going into a game store and

being made to feel uncomfortable because they were a female in a male-dominated space.

Sometimes it’s a case of active misogyny, and sometimes it is a matter of awkward men not knowing how to interact with a woman, but the net result is that many spaces where D&D is played are not friendly for women. The advent of the internet has changed that significantly, but it remains a major problem in tabletop gaming.

Female-to-male cross-play has fewer broad stereotypes associated with it. Whereas the

“immature male badly playing a female” is something of a gaming stereotype, there is no matching iconic figure of female cross-playing. When I discussed cross-play with my informants, it quickly broadened into a larger discussion about how gender operated around the gaming table. One female informant described her experience with cross-playing thus:

The only people who ever had a problem with me playing a male character were people

who had a problem with me being there in the first place, and the cross-playing became

something to make an issue out of… in one case it was a guy who was angry because I

called him out over the way he played female characters and in the other it was a woman

who clearly did not like having another woman at the table.

(Interview 31).

Another female informant reported that “I have had multiple groups, all guys, tell me that I “had to” play a female character.” (Interview 23) Few of my male informants overtly admitted having a problem with women cross-playing. One response that typified many was

“I think that groups should decide together whether its okay and apply the decision

unilaterally… it’s unfair if say that one set of people can do it and the other can’t” (Interview

14). The experience of women cross-playing is a microcosm of women entering typically 29 male-dominated spaces, where some people find ways to successfully negotiate the social tensions, others less so, but being a woman in those male dominated spaces inevitably brings a tension that must be dealt with.

But some groups, like the one depicted here, do manage to negotiate the tension, or eliminate it entirely by simply including more women so that the space is no longer male- dominated. I noticed that informants who had only started playing recently seemed to have had more equitable experiences over all (or at least fewer horror stories). This seems due in some part to gaming spaces becoming more friendly to women, but I also think that people who start gaming later have simply had more time to develop the skills to mitigate or avoid problematic people and social environments.

While gender politics are often more problematic around the table than in the game,

Phyllis seems to view race as simply another factor that influences how effective the characters are within the mechanical simulation aspect of the game, and she wasn’t interested in the question of how gender factored into character at all. She approves of Tanisha’s choice of race not because of the way she’s using it to subvert or enter into a conversation with ideas of race, but because playing a half-orc is an optimal choice in terms of the character’s mechanical effectiveness. Her own choice to play as a human is similarly motivated by her desire to increase her character’s abilities within the game. Kevin’s motivation is, at least explicitly, centered in the performative frame, since he wants to “make up for” his actions in the previous game by playing a role that will support his fellow players. This is a clear example of bleed between in- and out-of-game, because Kevin’s in-game choices are determined not by the story occurring within the game’s narrative, or how he wants his character to fit into the setting, but by the dynamics of the real-world social group. At the 30 same time, his choice of race, gnome, seems to suit his personal desire to play a character of the “trickster” archetype, since this is one of the roles frequently associated with gnomes as a race.

The process of character creation is inherently artificial. Different aspects of the character’s identity are assembled piecemeal, as they occur to the player, sometimes influenced by their fellow players. Moreover, many characters have one or more influences from fiction. Many players will take a concept they’ve seen in a book, on a television show or in some other form of media and combine it with other bits and pieces to come up with a character to play.

How different a character should be from its source material, and how much originality one is expected to put into a character is, as usual, widely different from table to table. D&D doesn’t just encourage mixing characters and generic tropes, it positively thrives on it. Perhaps

D&D is one of the reasons that mash-ups are now so popular in fandom, or, more likely, D&D just goes to show that the urge to crossbreed one’s favorite bits of fiction is a long-time habit of nerds.

The practical effect of all of this is that creating a character is an odd practice, and one that varies significantly from table to table, depending on the preferences of both player and group. At the heart of the process, however, is the use of tropes, and, as I describe in the later chapters, many of those tropes rely on racially or gendered stereotypes to work. At the same time, the process of character creation is also the process of reworking those tropes. The question becomes: Does D&D encourage its players more strongly to question tropes, stereotypes, and accepted wisdom? Or does it teach players to accept the status quo? Readers will probably be unsurprised to see that the answer is “both,” and that the different effects are 31

possibly inextricable. At the same time, my experience and the experience of my informants

tells me that a game built on empathizing with other people can be and is used for good, for

teaching people to think more kindly of others and question their harmful preconceptions.

An intersectional analysis of race and gender in D&D is complicated, as intersectional analyses tend to be. Race is much more explicitly present, at least in D&D’s core text, while those same texts suggest that gender is unimportant, or at least no more important than the players want to make it. But when the reader moves away from the core texts and explores the broader body of D&D lore, the representation of race, gender, and the intersection of the two becomes more complicated. 32

CHAPTER 1: CRITICAL FRAMES

The core of this project is ethnographic, an attempt to show how race and gender are portrayed and created around the gaming table, and how the process of play creates and recreates those concepts in the minds of the players. The critical framework for this project is primarily a mixture of critical race and gender studies. I use several prominent theorists as the backbone of my understanding in this project. Scholars Donna Haraway, Patricia Hill Collins, Lisa

Nakamura, bell hooks, Cornel West and several others serve as the bedrock of my critical understanding. While also discussed to some degree in the introduction, in this chapter I will describe exactly how I use each theorists’ ideas, which writings I am using to make my points, and exactly how each author both helps define my understanding on their own, and how they tie in with other authors. The purpose of this chapter is to explain my critical understanding of race and gender in American culture, especially as those topics apply to roleplaying games.

The second major group is what I call “current affairs.” These are the authors who have taken the concepts outlined in the core category above and done something new and interesting with them. This category also keeps me current and provides the background for my critical intervention into the field. In order to properly situate my own research and make clear why it is important, I have to illustrate the current state of critical thought on race, gender, whiteness, and gaming. But first, there is one scholar whose work does not fit neatly into any of the above categories yet is essential for understanding how Dungeons & Dragons works.

The work of Mikhail Bahktin is useful in understanding Dungeons & Dragons because of his concept of dialogism. First, Bahktin explained why novels should be read dialogically, with an eye towards the social relationships implied in the use of language, and to the way that generic conventions affect the meaning of the written text (Bahktin 288-289). D&D partakes of 33

this as well, since as well, since choosing how one’s character will speak affects how both player

and character are perceived. But players also participate in metatextual and intertextual dialog

while playing D&D, because players make deliberate choices about not just what to say and how

to say it, but what tropes to invoke during play as well. D&D is a game designed around playing

with concepts culled and refined from fantasy fiction, and an understanding both of the generic

conventions and the way particular authors or game settings use particular terms is not just

helpful but essential in understanding D&D. For example, if a Dungeon Master tells a group of

players that they meet a group of “fairies,” the creatures described could draw inspiration from

dozens of different sources, and could be anything from small, helpful winged creatures to cold,

calculating monsters eager to engage in torture and destruction. Accurate communication of the

concepts requires not only an understanding of shared conventions but the ability to decide, as a

group, which of those conventions are at play at the time. Bahktin’s understanding that use of

language is always in flux and is dependent on a constant conversation between the intent of the

individual and the culturally prescribed meaning of language is essential to understanding how

tropes are deployed in D&D.

The Racial Frame

Critical race theory is the first foundation of my work. My research began in critical race theory and grew from there when I realized that I could not speak of “race” without including the study of gender. Feminist scholarship is likewise a part of my work – as both Patricia Hill-

Collins and Donna Haraway make clear, a person’s identity is never singular. Humans are always experiencing the world through race, class, sexuality, gender, etc. While some identities may be foregrounded in each interaction as points of difference or conflict with other people, we can never not be what we are. I have chosen to limit my main critical framework to the subjects 34 of race and gender. These two components of identity are the ones most in evidence in the game, and they have the biggest impact on the stories that the game tells. D&D has no official rules for, say, sexuality, but race is a core component of any character, and both sex and gender are frequently on display, whether because some races exhibit sexual dimorphism, or because species like the drow elves13 have gender or sex-based caste systems that say a great deal about attitudes towards gender roles in the real world.

D&D is usually stereotyped “white” hobby; part a larger pattern of intellectual, scientific, and “nerdy” pursuits as a domain of whiteness. Understanding what whiteness means in a scholarly American context is essential to understanding whiteness and how it operates in

Dungeons & Dragons. Whiteness, as a category, is treated differently from any other racial category within American culture. Whiteness is the default of American culture, an artificial construction made to seemed like the natural and assumed default position. Whiteness is treated differently from other racial categories, because “white” is the category against which all the other categories are continuously being separated and compared.

From a popular culture perspective, it’s clear that “white” is a category that contains a certain list of traits – comedians like Dave Chappelle do impressions of generic white people

(Chapelle “New White People”). There are tumblrs and hashtags devoted to “things white people like.” These examples are humorous, but they rely on the fact that the category of “white people” or “whiteness” contains a specific set of readily identifiable behaviors and traits that the audience will understand.

On the other hand, from a critical and theoretical perspective, whiteness is often viewed as a default, rather than a category (DiAngelo); whiteness is the norm, the unmarked and the

13 A race of dark-skinned underground-dwelling elves that I will discuss in more detail later. 35

uncritical. To be white grants the privilege of not having to consider one’s racial identity. In fact, this is one of the primary criticisms leveled at attempts by white people to understand race: we are fundamentally incapable of understanding how race works in America, because we do not

have to think about it. One of the most unfair things about being white is that our very existence

does not force use to confront our racial subjectivity on a daily basis. We can choose to think

about it, and there may be times when we are confronted by it. But a white person can easily go

through their daily life and not be forced to consider how their racial identity makes them

different. They can easily avoid dealing with authority figures or people in positions of power

who are not like them. They can exist within a segregated space and not think of it as a negative

thing or consider themselves the poorer for it (DiAngelo).

The idea of “identity tourism,” as I describe below when discussing Lisa Nakamura’s

work, is critically important in understanding D&D. The concept of playing the racial outsider is

a popular one in D&D. Half-Orcs practically beg for this treatment, as do tieflings in the later

editions of the game. Those two races are, respectively, the offspring of pairings between

humans and orcs and humans and demons or devils. As such, they are often treated as dangerous

outsiders. Yet D&D’s default assumption is that they players will portray heroes. The idea of

playing the racial outsider who nonetheless protects the people who wrongly revile them is a

well-known trope built into D&D. The Drizzt Do’Urden stories of R.A. Salvatore, discussed

more thoroughly in the chapter two, are some of the most popular D&D novels in publication

and focus explicitly on the idea of the outsider hero who defends even those bigoted against him.

While the trope itself is not necessarily evil, it is problematic when a game with a largely white

audience encourages the players to focus on minority characters who support abusive and

exclusionary structures of power. Even if we recognize that fantasy characters operate under 36 different laws, authors use the same trope of the minority character supporting an abusive system across both fantasy and more “realistic” works. And in both cases, the solution is usually to focus on individual good, rather than confronting deeper, systemic problems of racial politics.

D&D is far from the only roleplaying game where players have identified issues with the way the game handles race. White Wolf’s early World of Darkness product line was particularly infamous among my informants, and several of them mentioned it (Interviews 1,2, 6, 17) when I enquired about how race was handled in D&D versus in United States. “Werewolf especially is kind of cringey when it comes to race… you get a lot of white guys sitting around pretending to be magic Native Americans.” (Interview 6) In each case, my informants compared the fantasy racism of D&D, which tends more towards speciesism (elves versus dwarves), against the way that “real-world” racism was portrayed in games like World of Darkness. The reason World of

Darkness was mentioned so frequently as a point of comparison is that it is somewhat infamous among gamers for its very dated 80’s and 90’s form of racial awareness. While it definitely addressed racism, it tended to bundle racial consciousness with an intentionally edgy gothic- punk aesthetic that, according to critics of the game line, was actually a white middle class pseudo-rebellion masquerading as awareness of institutional racism. One of the game lines,

Werewolf: The Apocalypse, was especially heavily criticized because it offered the opportunity to play in redface, as a significant number of the werewolf “tribes” the game offers for play are pastiches of Native American culture It also heavily plays into the stereotype of “Native

American as eco-warrior/wise spiritualist.” The entire game ran on stereotypes like this in a way that, depending on the reader, is either clever, self-aware satire or banal juvenilia masquerading as such. 37

This dissertation is about D&D, but the fact that so many of my informants used another

role-playing game as a frame of reference for talking about race in D&D shows how hard it is to separate D&D in specific from the larger context of roleplaying games in the minds of players

themselves. Meaning is made not just in one game, but in the body of texts constantly in

conversation with each other.

Haraway, Hill-Collins, and Complex Identities

Donna Haraway pioneered the concept of the fractured or “cyborg” self. Many references

to Haraway focus on the literal fusion of human and machine, making Haraway a favorite for

futurists and transhumanists. This is understandable, considering that as of this writing in 2018,

smartphones are a pervasive element of American culture. Most young people, and even quite a

few older people, are in constant contact with a global information network that provides them

with news, weather, traffic, the location and status of friends and family, and other important

data. Not having one’s cell phone is a major inconvenience, almost akin to losing a physical

sense. Just because metal and plastic are not grafted to flesh does not preclude us already being

cyborgs.

The pervasiveness of what we might call “cyborg technologies” also changes the way we

need to read Haraway. Part of the argument of the “Manifesto” was the need to accept and

inhabit the identity of the cyborg as the despised place. The cyborg is no longer what we despise.

It is what we are. Even if we are not all completely “chromed out,” to borrow the language of

cyberpunk roleplaying games, cyborgs are part of the mainstream, or at least certain elements of

the mainstream. Few things illustrate this better than the fact that video game developer Konami

helped a gamer acquire a futuristic prosthetic arm inspired by one of their video games (Serrels).

Life, both synthetic and otherwise, imitates art. The idea of being a reconstructed self is inherent 38 in D&D, too. Dungeons & Dragons is a game where players create characters who are both their avatars and a sort of other. While it’s possible to play a cyborg in a literal sense in D&D, what’s much more interesting is how the game allows the revelation of the cyborg self.

Yet for my work, it is not the science fiction element that makes Haraway so interesting.

Her writing is essential to my critical framework because she describes the idea that people are always multiple things. There is no single coherent identity of “woman” to which we can look.

There is no universal experience of sexism, no meaningful unification under the banner of sisterhood, and any attempt to create one inevitably ignores the experience of some of the people that the category would claim. Historically, those ignored have been poor women of color, whose experiences were often underrepresented in first- and second-wave feminist attempts to find power in a united front against patriarchal oppression.

Haraway is important to my critical framework because she describes the cyborg as a model for a new form of identity. “The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence”

(Haraway 292). The cyborg, in other words, is a hybrid creature which is aware of its hybridity.

The theory of the cyborg embraces its fractured and multiple nature, understanding that the confluence and conflict between multiple identities is a constant in human experience. From

Haraway’s writing, I take this: a critical scholar, and a thinking person must embrace the idea that no identity is universal and all-encompassing. All people are always being multiple things.

They are always representing multiple sides of self, whether that’s queer cisgender pacific islander woman or, as in my case, white male American cisgender heteronormativity, each person contains multiple identities which are functionally but imperfectly welded together to form a cohesive whole. We work, live, love, play, and die as multiple things, but when we look 39

closely, we can see where parts meet and fuse, and we need to be aware of those joins if we want

to understand how each part contributes to the whole.

Another point raised by the “Cyborg Manifesto,” is that of authorship. In the words of

Jackie Orr, “Haraway felt [“Cyborg Manifesto”] was already collectively authored,” and Orr

refers to the reader as “My companion. My intimate co-author” (Orr 277). I have tried to keep

this sense of collective effort with my as part of my writing and research process. D&D is a

collective and cooperative experience at its most basic level. One needs other players to play the

game with, to co-author the story that you’re telling. On the level, this dissertation requires the participation and cooperation of my fellow roleplaying gamers. I write and speak to fill the gap between two identities – gamer and academic. To transmit information back and forth between other members of both identity groups and, hopefully, enrich them as part of the process. Writing this dissertation is a form of cyborging, and it is not an individual effort. Identities are formed, not out of the void, but out of the interactions between people. This is a basic, seemingly obvious, but incredibly important thing to acknowledge. Playing a game of D&D is an excellent example of this, since it is an experience in cooperative storytelling. The fictional identities that the characters create may start as one person’s idea, but they only gain full reality through the interactions of the group.

As part of my critical foundation, Haraway goes hand-in-hand with Patricia Hill-Collins.

Hill-Collins’ notion of intersectionality is, in my mind, separate from but essential to the idea of

the cyborg identity. Intersectionality is different in that originates from the specific intersection

of critical race theory and feminism. Where the “Cyborg Manifesto” acknowledges that

feminism driven mainly by upper-middle class white women has ill-served poor women of color

in particular, Hill-Collins in Black Sexual Politics elaborates on specifically how the identity of 40

“black woman” has been the subject of oppression and victimization in ways that neither blackness nor femininity have suffered individually.

Not surprisingly, there’s also a great deal more evidence and depth to be found in Hill-

Collins. Haraway’s article, although profound and important, is much shorter than Black Sexual

Politics. “Cyborg Manifesto” outlines why hybrid identities are essential for understanding people, but Hill-Collins puts that into practice. If Haraway describes why identities are the product of multiple dimensions of social interaction, Hill-Collins shows what those social interactions are, and how the ways people get treated change drastically depending on perceived cultural identity.

Hill-Collins also serves as an example for my work of how to talk about social realities that aren’t always obvious or explicit until you’ve experienced them. For example, she describes

“sundown towns,” where black folks were expected to be out of town by sundown or face the threat of extralegal enforcement, including beatings and lynching (Collins 69). Being able to identify and discuss the pressures that fall on people because of who and what they are is vitally important to describing the culture of D&D. For example, there is no rule that says women can’t play D&D, and in the latest editions of the game, Wizards of the Coast has made an obvious and conscious effort to include women in the hobby. At the same time, given that the hobby has traditionally been male dominated, the spaces in which games are played can be hostile to women. Going into a local gaming store is the equivalent to rolling on a random encounter table:

Some of them are perfectly friendly to female gamers, some are generally all right but tolerate a few regular players with odious personal habits and attitudes, and some are outright hostile. As one informant said, “There’s two game stores in [Town] but one of them I won’t go back to… being a woman limits where I can go to do my gaming, but being a woman limits where I can 41

safely go in most ways” (Interview 13). There’s no rule that says a woman can’t go into a

gaming store, but the social reality is that some of them are distinctly unfriendly towards female

players, and a single negative experience can easily turn off a potential new player.

Critical Perspectives on Gaming

Lisa Nakamura’s work also deals with how the “insiders” of gaming culture, usually

young white Western men, handle the perceived “intrusion” of outsiders into their spaces. In Lisa

Nakamura’s groundbreaking essay “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game,” she investigates

how players in “World of Warcraft” react to the presence of “gold farmers,” players, often

Chinese, who are paid to play the game to acquire in-game currency. This currency is then resold

to players who pay real-world currency in exchange for the in-game gold. According to

Nakamura’s work, many white Western players were and are extremely hostile to these gold

farmers, claiming that they disrupt or otherwise ruin the game.

Much like real-world hostility to migrant workers, this aggression is both poorly aimed14

and ethnically charged. Gold farmers are the low-end, poorly paid result of a broken system.

They are harassed because they are perceived as being the problem, when the demand for the

service they provide comes straight from the same demographic that typically does the harassing.

On one level, Nakamura’s article is somewhat dated. This isn’t surprising, given that it

was published in 2007 and the world of online gaming moves quickly. Attitudes towards Chinese

players have become more complicated as the Chinese economy has continued to flourish,

allowing more and more Chinese players to enter the game for the sake of playing, rather than as

employees charged with harvesting as much gold as possible. Much like recent trends in

14 In that, in both cases, the aggression is directed against underpaid workers rather than the people who benefit from their exploited labor. 42

Hollywood, China is seen as an emerging market in video games. Yet here, too, the pattern of racism identified by Liza Nakamura continues. When material is released that Western players perceive as being oriented towards Chinese audiences, it is derided as “pandering” This was especially the case with the expansion game “Mists of Pandaria,” which introduced a playable race of anthropomorphic pandas and focused on a generically “eastern-themed” continent in its content. Players seem to become jealous, irate, or cynical when the content is targeted towards a different racial, geographic, or ethnic group, as if it were a threat to the white Western player base’s right to be the only demographic pandered to.

Lisa Nakamura’s work is important because it emphasizes the fact that all fantasy worlds are ultimately grounded in the people and politics of the real one. One of the biggest protests I have received, particularly from some gamers, is that race in a fantasy world (and to a lesser degree, gender) are not the same as they are in the real world. The usual justification for this is that race within the fantasy setting can’t mean the same thing as it does in the real world because the fictive world has a different history. For example, a modern American understanding of racial prejudice would not fit in a world where there was no Europe, no Africa, no American continent, nor any of the complicated real-world history that has led to modern American understandings of race as a whole. Closely tied to this argument is the idea that things that would be only propaganda in the real world can be literally true in a fantasy setting. Even cultures on earth that produce horror and genocide still contain within them people with basic humanity, people who love their children and only want the best for them, or whatever marker for universal human feeling one cares to use. But in a fantasy setting, the author really can have “evil” cultures, and species who are, according to the laws of the setting, predisposed towards murder, sadism, etc. Some gamers, and indeed some of my informants, argue that that in a fantasy 43

setting, racism could be a rational, even necessary response. “If the people in the setting know

that creature X is literally always a baby-eating monster, it’s not really the same as racism in the real world” (Interview 4). But Lisa Nakamura’s work shows that however distinctly imaginary the setting seems to be, real-world racism inevitably coats fantastic racism. The fact that both

Wizards of the Coast persist in using the term “race” when “species” would be more accurate

points to an inability to resolve the incomplete split between fantasy and reality. However, we

would like it to be different, we cannot escape real-world notions of race.

Related to Nakamura’s research is the question of representation of women and non- white folks in gaming. While Nakamura focuses on the question of how gamers in World of

Warcraft discriminate against non-white, non-western gamers based on economic principles, other researchers like Adrienne Shaw have asked “how does representation in video games affect the way players do or do not identify as gamers?”

The idea that “gamer” is an identity category unto itself raised by Shaw is important in my research. I would argue that “gamer” is an overarching identity, one with nebulous boundaries. People who play roleplaying games and people who play video games both refer to themselves as gamers at times, and there’s a lot of crossover. In my research, most of the people

I interviewed stated that they also played video games for at least a few hours a week. And at the same time, many computer games, especially roleplaying games, are direct descendants of tabletop roleplaying games. There is a great deal to be learned about tabletop roleplaying games from research into the identity politics of video games.

As Shaw points out, the dominant image of the white, heterosexual male gamer is being eroded (Shaw 29). This applies just as much or more to roleplaying games, especially in digital spaces. Many local gaming stores maintain a somewhat bare-bones aesthetic and attract white, 44 straight male players. The typical game store is a rented space in a strip mall with lots of bare shelving, most of the decoration coming from stock, posters on the wall, and promotional materials distributed by game companies. They are functional places and can often be intimidating to people who do not feel like gaming insiders – people who are not straight, cisgendered white males.

Online gaming spaces are often much easier to approach and enter. There’s a lower risk of harassment, and it is much easier to disengage with problematic individuals. It also seems to attract a more obviously diverse crowd. One of the online communities I visited has a very active

LGBTQAA+ membership, supports varied aspects of gender identification in its code, and offers its members the chance to full express a variety of identities. Although interestingly, the forum example reverses the dichotomy of race and gender representation found within D&D itself. On the forum, gender identity (or lack thereof) is made obvious in one’s forum profile, while there is no immediate indicator of someone’s racial identity.

Identifying “gamer” as an identity is also important because it changes the way I see my research. Gaming is not just an activity that changes the way that players understand other identity categories, i.e. “playing D&D changes my understanding of cultural norms regarding race and gender.” Instead, it is an identity category that interacts with and affects other identity categories according to the principles laid out by Hill-Collins and Haraway. I understand, for example, that being a “black gamer” in an American context is going to be fundamentally different from being a black gamer anywhere else in the world, because it is an intersection of a unique set of identities.

Shaw also identifies some of the reasons that white male gamers are the targets of most video game marketing, and, crucially, the reactions of people who fall outside the white 45 heterosexual male stereotypical target demographic. Her research makes a fascinating comparison to my own. The key differences come from the nature of roleplaying games versus video games. In most video games, the player has some sort of virtual avatar, whether a named character or a silent protagonist. The assumption of identity is literally coded into the game. In roleplaying games, on the other hand, there’s less text that defines the identity of the protagonist.

To put it more simply, most video games are designed around either a pre-made character or a character who is assembled by the player from a limited set of options, whereas in a roleplaying game, the only visual representations of the characters are a few pieces of artwork, which don’t usually need to represent the same character. The narrative is made in the character’s head, allowing for more creative freedom. Or, at least, theoretically requiring fewer restrictions on the player’s imaginations.

Shaw’s research serves as a useful comparison to my own in many other ways as well.

She identifies, for example, that most people who identify as gamers grew up with video games.

This may not seem surprising, but it agrees with both my own research and a 2000 study by

Wizards of the Coast that notes that most D&D players first tried the game when they were kids or teens (WoTC Survey). Shaw also notes that there seems to be a strong mental association between gaming and a certain breed of masculinity. Anecdotally, I can say that game stores I’ve been to have been more likely to accept people of color than women, so long as the people of color do not disrupt their predominantly white male “nerd” culture. In gaming spaces, race is disruptive when it is made obvious or emphasized, but being female or femme-identifying is disruptive simply by its presence, at least to a portion of gamers.

Shaw notes that there’s a dominant assumption that online gaming culture is deeply homophobic, but that this is not always the case (Shaw 47). This situation is even more 46

conflicted and confusing when it comes to pen-and-paper gaming. Sexuality is often glossed over in D&D (at least in the instructional texts, although there are several third-party texts that deal with sex, either seriously or humorously).15

As with Lisa Nakamura, understanding the close correlation between video games and

roleplaying games is important, because video games are part of the cultural mélange that

surrounds roleplaying games. While they are distinct cultural forms and activities, the

comparison with video games highlights the fact that one can’t really understand roleplaying

games without understanding the cultural context that surrounds it. This is true for most forms of

media, but roleplaying games take it to an extreme, because they are social games made up on

the spot, rather than a text designed for mass consumption. One can go see a horror movie, for

example, and understand the general themes (ooh, scary!) without having seen the other movies

that a director is paying homage to with their cinematic choices. On the other hand, an observer

or player who tries to sit in on a game session and who doesn’t understand the references that the

other players are making probably isn’t going to get most of the game. In this, roleplaying games

are excellent examples of Bahktin’s idea of dialogic culture.

Race, Revisited

Taken together, these foundational texts establish some core principles for my research

that inform the way I look at both the instructional texts of the game and the imaginary worlds

created for play. Identity must be treated as something which both has important individual

components, but which is more complicated than just an assemblage of those parts. I do not say

“greater,” because that is unnecessarily triumphalist language, and sometimes the different parts

of identity actually open the bearer up to deeper forms of oppression, such as black women who

15 See Nymphology: Blue Magic or Book of Erotic Fantasy for silly and serious approaches to sex in D&D. 47

are simultaneously the subjects of violence from white men and expected to shield violent black

men from crime out of a sense of racial solidarity, leaving them with little recourse in the face of

violence or abuse from within that community.

My critical frame also equips me with the tools to deconstruct claims that the fantastic

settings of roleplaying games transcend real-world politics. In addition to the foundational

theorists who have established academic notions of what race and gender are and do, I am also

participating in the current critical conversation about race and gender. The America of 2019 is

one in which issues of race, gender, and class are frequently subjects of violent, public rhetorical clashes, while at the same time, many people seem able to ignore their centrality. As an

instructor in a moderately-sized university in Ohio, I have students come in every semester and

talk about how great it is that we don’t live in the bad old days when people were oppressed. And

while many argue that we should fixate on equality rather than identity politics, Alexander

Weheliye points out that, “more often than not an insistence on transcending limited notions of

the subject or identity leads to the neglect of race as a critical category” (Weheliye 37). While it

is probably obvious to most academic or critical readers, roleplaying games do not exist in the

fictive spaces in which they take place. Even if the settings are imaginary worlds that have never

known the horrors of colonialism, they still reproduce the logics of a colonial or “post”-colonial world (and I remain unconvinced that we are post-colonial).

Weheliye is a recent and brilliant example of how to dissect race in modern scholarship, and several of his arguments have proven useful in formulating my own. For example, his discussion of the concentration camp figure of the “Muselman,” a term that compares the haunting, skeletal victims of Nazi atrocities with Muslims, he asks the poignant question “what, then, is racism if not the political exploitation and (re)production of race?” (Weheliye 40). This 48

question is asked in the larger context of whether the specter of the Muselman represents a new

or liminal form of biopolitics, or merely an extension of old forms of dehumanization, with

Weheliye coming down on the latter side. Similarly, race in the fictional environments of

Dungeons & Dragons does not represent anything new. Escaping to imaginary lands does not

change the basic nature of racism, or of the basic exercise of dividing sentient beings into

categories. The usual argument, as one informant put it, is that “it’s not racism if the enemy is

literal demons” (Interview 12). The idea that this is different from real-world racism misses the

point. The power of definition lies always in the hands of the players or the authors, and they

decided to create an entire race and conveniently define them as evil, simply to make them

acceptable to slaughter.

The way that D&D approaches race mirrors one of Weheliye’s comments on Foucault,

that “such a thing as alien races exist, that the confrontation between them (ethnic racism) need

not be explained.” (Weheliye 44) D&D imposes a formal system of ethical and moral alignment

on its races and assumes that some races (generally the ones that look more “bestial” or

inhuman) are assumed to be “always” or “usually” some form of evil. This is a way of dodging

the question of ethnic conflict. Why is it all right to slaughter orcs or goblins? Because they are

evil. “Evil” in game terms has several different meanings depending on who one asks or what

source what consults, but generally means either “anti-social behavior” or “causing harm to

others for selfish purposes.” Therefore, D&D assumes a basic moral incompatibility between various sentient races as a premise for naturalizing racial conflict. As Weheliye says of Giorgio

Agamben, D&D “dismisses the instrumental definition of racism without explicating its

historical or conceptual provenances.” (Weheliye 46) It does not question why these beings

behave as they do, or if it does attempt to construct a “culture” that is predisposed towards 49 violence and anti-social behavior, it does so out of whole cloth. The usual explanation is that the race serves an evil “dark overlord” or an abusive god, whose example is the proverbial bad apple that has spoiled the bunch. Weheliye is a useful scholar for breaking down how and why D&D replicates structures of racism, because so many of the patterns he identifies in prominent scholars and philosophers are replicated in D&D’s understanding of race and racism.

Weheliye is also useful because he focuses so heavily and so deeply on that analysis of philosophy. His work is unusually thorough in putting multiple scholars in open and obvious conversation. In addition to outlining how race and racism are often downplayed in cultural text, he scrutinizes on the attitudes toward race in some of the foundational texts of social studies. For example, Foucault was part of my education as well, and by showing how Foucault sometimes fails to take race into account, Weheliye serves as an antidote to some of the gaps in my own critical thinking about race that may have infiltrated through Foucault and others. This criticism also leads me to examine other problematic aspects of Foucault’s work, such as his lack of engagement with gender and with non-male perspectives. Weheliye serves as a guiding example of how to integrate a discourse on race into a larger intellectual discussion while maintaining its vital power.

Weheliye is far from the only scholar to address the issue of how racism continues to fester in a supposedly post-racial society. As Holling, Moon, and Nevis point out in their article

“Racist Violations and Racializing Apologia in a Post-Racism Era”, “Given strong stigmatization of overtly racist expression, their continued use in the public sphere highlights the fact that racism continues to wield significant power” (Holling, Moon, and Nevis 261). Since this article was written in 2014, the issue they raise has only become even more relevant. According to

“Racist Violations,” explicit and overt racism still exists, it has just become more subtle, with 50 race being encoded into the discussion of political issues and racial implications encoded into gestures, eye contact, and other non-verbal signals (Holling, Moon, and Nevis 263).

Furthermore, the article argues that white apologies for racist comments and acts have the net effect of turning racism from something structural that needs to be fixed to an individual misstep which needs to be forgiven (Holling, Moon, and Nevis 265). It puts the social burden of forgiveness onto African-Americans. Effectively, it says “oh, look, they know they did something wrong and they said they are sorry, now be nice and forgive them.” It is reminiscent of uncomfortable childhood experiences when parents force contrition that everyone involved knows to be false. Of course, even if the contrition over racist acts is sincere, it does not change the underlying problem: racism is a systemic issue that denies access to opportunities and resources to people of color, not something that can be fixed by a politician or a media personality apologizing for using the wrong language.

“Racist Violations” is also important because it highlights one of the key dichotomies in

American culture, the “racism is opposed to being a good person” dichotomy (Holling, Moon, and Nevis 277). In American popular culture, racism is typically portrayed in images of goosesteps and burning crosses. There is an idea that racism is always tied to obvious and belligerent bigotry, instead of a set of systemic conditions that give undue burdens to certain groups of people. “Racist Violations” examines how apologetic strategies by white authority figures typically rely on framing the violator as essentially a “good person,” who therefore cannot be racist. This has the effect of erasing the problem without ever talking about the systemic problems of racism. The violator, in effect, says “I am a good person who made a mistake, and therefore cannot also be racist.” The denial of complexity and the idea that a good 51 person cannot also be racist is a mechanism that allows racism to survive. If people cannot conceive of the ways in which they are racist, they can never move past them.

The stealthy way that race manifests in modern culture makes studying roleplaying games even more compelling, because tabletop roleplaying games like D&D are one of the few places where overt racism is still open and normal, or at least an expected trope. Killing creatures because they are members of an “evil” race is one of the basic conceits of the game. By studying

D&D and watching how players react to this notion, and how they play with the overtly racist concepts embedded in the game, one gets a sense of how players deal with the “us versus them” rhetoric that underlies racism. There’s significant difference between the work of “Racist

Violations,” and my own study, of course. Holling, Moon, and Nevis approach the topic from a communications background, while my research takes a more anthropological and literary approach. Furthermore, Holling, Moon, and Nevis are studying public utterances, while most of my research subjects are occurring in private spaces (gaming stores are a mix of semi-private and semi-public). At the same time, their work is important because it describes the background of how race is handled in American culture to contrast and compare against how it’s handled within the microcosm of D&D. Furthermore, reading “racist violations” was very useful to me for coming up with ways to examine spoken utterances. How did my subjects phrase and frame their statements about race? How did the way they talk about race compare with the way that they talked about race in “real life.”

Similarly, Rhiannon O’Neil’s. Gender, Identity and Tabletop Roleplay Games does an excellent job of describing how gender manifests through spoken utterance and performance through a game of D&D. O’Neil’s work focuses on the formal aspects of language and linguistics. She dissects the stops and phonemes of spoken play, and provides a theoretical 52

framework, both of how to understand the politics of gender in speech, and of how to

linguistically decode a session of D&D as it is being played.

O’Neil’s work is useful because it examines the way that gender is performed during play

(both in and out of character) and provides numerous examples of how players use language in

that performance. For example, in O’Neil’s case study, the DM and one of the players are a

married couple (the DM is the husband and the player the wife), and O’Neil notes that the

gendered performance of “husband” seems to contradict his role within the gaming group as

“Dungeon Master.” To invoke Mackay’s “sphere” terminology, roles within the performative

sphere seem to override and supersede roles being performed within the inner three spheres. In

this particular game of D&D, the DM seemed to interact with his fellow player in a way that

reflected the personal relationship rather than the in-game relationships. Likewise, Talin, the

female member of the aforementioned couple, often acts in a “hostess” role, making sure that the

environment of play is pleasant, and at the same time serves as the in-game leader of the party

(O’Neil 31). As O’Neil points out, this muddies gender stereotypes, as she is both fulfilling a

stereotypically feminine role as hostess and a stereotypically unfeminine role as the leader or

main character in a fantasy story.16

This observation highlights a pertinent issue when observing games of D&D: It is a game of social interaction that often, if not usually takes place within an established friend-group. Most of the people playing D&D together already know each other, and the way they interact with each other is going to be based on those pre-existing relationships, although it’s also common for different players to have varying amounts of connectivity within the group (i.e., one person

16 There are fantasy stories where women are the protagonists, even outside of Disney and Fairytales. But young white males as fantasy protagonists still serve as the default setting for epic fantasy, and many of the most venerable and well-known examples of the genre, like Lord of the Rings and Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time focus on male protagonists. 53

might know everyone, while others might only be friends of one or two people). A game’s

instructional manual can tell you the rules of the game, but most people do not read D&D

manuals to find out how to act around their friends. When my research asks “how does D&D

affect the way people treat race and gender?” The answer to that question must acknowledge the

importance of a pre-existing social relationships and standards.

In O’Neil’s case, there are several people in the group who’ve known each other for a

long time, as well as some subjects who are casually acquainted with one or two players, but

don’t know most of the rest of them well (O’Neil 16-21). So not only is it important to recognize that standards and performances of race and gender within a D&D group affected by the pre- existing relationships between members, many D&D groups are also “mixed company,” where members have various levels of knowledge about the others. So part of the “negotiation” part of the game where players figure out what kind of game the group wants to play includes, explicitly or implicitly, the process of finding out what sort of content other players are comfortable with.

Is someone going to be offended if my character contains a sly political reference or parody of a real life belief? Part of playing D&D is getting used to a group of people you may or may not have known before, and developing enough rapport to create a mutually satisfying story.

Most interestingly, O’Neil provides another perspective on how male gamers portray female characters. It is important, in viewing both her work and mine, to make a distinction between the DM and players. I have written before about the way that male characters playing female characters can invoke negative stereotypes, but it is important to note that this applies less stringently to the DM. To some degree, the DM is expected to play roles of any gender, because the Dungeon Master is responsible for portraying all the NPC’s (non-player characters). A male

DM who plays female NPC’s poorly can invoke similar reaction to a male player who plays a 54

female PC badly, but they are less likely to arouse initial suspicion than a male player playing a

female character as a PC.

O’Neil reports that her male dungeon master acts “more masculine” than normal when

playing a male NPC in that he acts more commanding and knowledgeable. (O’Neil 55-56).

Similarly, other (male) players were more likely to ask a male NPC for information, even when a

female NPC who was also an expert on the topic at hand was available. The female NPC, on the

other hand, is treated somewhat dismissively. She worships an “evil” god yet is treated as if she’s

merely “naughty” rather than actually evil or a threat. (O’Neil 58). Both characters are

represented physically by the same (male) person, so it is not the gender of the player that

determines the treatment, but the gender of the character. D&D is one of the few types of

activities where adults, in full knowledge of what they are doing, interact with fictitious

individuals, wearing a fictitious mask themselves.

But despite the way that players can apply different gender roles to in- and out-of- character personas, O’Neil identifies the close link between imaginary and real-life behavior.

Although the characters are fictional and the setting imaginary, the relationships between players have a direct effect on the relationships between characters. In O’Neil’s own words, “the character's interactions with her friends mirror almost exactly the players' interactions with hers.”

(O’Neil 47) Players are having real social interactions in a fictional setting. This helps confirm one of the central theses of this work: Namely, that roleplaying games are a useful area of study in terms of race and gender because the imaginary projections within the game mirror real-life attitudes. But because they are portraying fictional characters, “important” character traits are often exaggerated. 55

In addition to critical race theory and an understanding of gender, an academic lens for

deconstructing whiteness is essential when studying Dungeons & Dragons. It has taken the

mainstream academy (read: white academics) a long time to recognize how their own status as

“white” was a positive difference, rather than an unmarked “normal” from which other peoples

deviated. And like other racial categories, “whiteness” is highly contextual and difficult to define

universally. A colleague related to me once how she went on a journey to Africa to rediscover

her heritage and was introduced as “a white woman from America.” The colleague in question

was shocked, because she identified as (and had always been marked as) black within the

cultural context of the United States. When asked what whiteness means, almost every

undergraduate student I have ever taught (at a medium-sized midwestern university) believed that race referred purely to skin pigmentation.

As David R. Roediger points out in Working towards Whiteness, the creation of “white” as an unmarked category involved a great deal of marking. Forcing a racial binary on America did violence to many parties. Racializing people with African ancestry as “black” forced them into a position of subservience, an obviously demarcated slave-caste who could then be dehumanized and continually exploited for economic gain. At the same time, the creation of

“white” as a category served another violent purpose: collapsing existing ethnic identities into a single unified non-ethnic entity (Roediger 9-10). “Whiteness” was a category with many desirable traits: being white meant being hired for better jobs, opportunity for social mobility, and better futures for one’s children. But at the same time, being “white” and “American” often meant giving up or suppressing one’s original identity, or at least allowing one’s children to assimilate into mainstream American culture and driving a wedge between generations. 56

Race and whiteness have several important functions in this work. First, I ask my observation and interview subjects to provide me with their racial and ethnic identity as part of general demographic information. I am trying to identify how and where race appears important to my characters, and while I do not wish to profile my subjects, race is sometimes a factor in my considerations. There is a different meaning when a white American speaks of race than when a black American does so, for example, because a white American is never going to be pulled over for “driving while black.” A white person can still be harassed by the police, but it will not be because of their race. Understanding the way life experience changes based on race, and how those changes are perceived and played out at the gaming table is one of the primary purposes of this project.

Understanding the meaning of “whiteness” is also important for the literary analysis portion of this work. Many of the inspirations and sources from which D&D gets its material are grounded in race. Both Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft, for example, were deeply racist

(albeit in slightly different frameworks of racism), and the scientific racism of the 19th and early

20th centuries is not only present in the writings but in many cases a significant part of the story.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings are also racist on multiple levels. The point of this assertion is not to judge these authors as good or evil, but to understand why they divided up the world into the categories that they did. Understanding the different notions of whiteness in these authors is integral to understanding how those notions influenced D&D, and the players who participate in it.

These understandings are complicated by the fact that “whiteness” has shifted a great deal over time. Roediger notes that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the number of races estimated by scientific authorities could be anything from two to sixty-three (Roediger 11). The 57 process of creating whiteness was always intertwined with the process of creating race.

Moreover, while some high-minded academics tend to distinguish between “race” and

“ethnicity,” the concepts are not always well-demarcated in public thought and conversation.

People distinguish between different ethnic groups and make different judgements about them.

Whiteness versus otherness is rarely a simple binary: “white” and “not white” are, in practice, murky and ever-shifting.

That said “murky and ever-shifting” while accurate, is not a very useful definition. Since my project focuses centrally on American D&D players (and since D&D is produced primarily by Americans), I regard the American notions of whiteness as of primary importance.

Throughout this work, I try to take both race and whiteness as subjects to be continuously interrogated, rather than settling for one particular definition. For example, I will talk about what

“white” meant to authors like Howard, Lovecraft, and Tolkien in the appropriate literary chapter, and discuss how their ideas of race and whiteness have filtered into D&D. When presenting my findings on how my players view race I have tried, as much as possible to represent their explicit and implicit views as they appear during interviews and around the gaming table.

As for my own scholarly definition of race and whiteness, I don’t believe in a single solid definition, because it changes depending on context. In the context of the united states I understand whiteness to mean “being part of the dominant economic, political, and social group of the United States, which is most often identified with light skin and a culture descended from

Western European immigrants and colonialists.” In the “here and now,” I think this is a good functional definition for whiteness at its most basic level, but when the meaning of white deviates from this definition in the rest of the text, I will make this clear. 58

CHAPTER 2: LITERARY FOUNDATIONS

This chapter is a literary analysis of some of the most influential and significant sources

that form the background of Dungeons & Dragons. In this chapter, I will briefly describe each

source, but I will focus primarily on the portrayal of race and gender in each source, and how

those influences affect the way D&D is played.

Readers will note that I talk more about race in this chapter than I do about gender. Race

is more prominent and obvious in much of fantasy fiction than is gender. There are exceptions,

of course, Margret Atwood’s works being only one famous example. But in the kinds of stories

that D&D mimics, gender troubles tend to get swept under the rug, while conflict between

different races of sentient humanoids are highlighted. This is reflected in the way D&D instructs

players in creating characters. As stated earlier, race is a mechanically and thematically

important element of a character. Race influences not only the ability scores of the character

within the game, but the “fluff” or cultural background of a character. Fantasy races are bundles

of tropes as much as anything. If someone says they are playing a dwarf, many players will

expect them to be short, stout, and fond of ale. An elf is expected to be tall, attractive, and good

at archery and/or magic. There are exceptions to these tropes, but these are standard expectations.

Gender, on the other hand, is underplayed in D&D’s character creation, and gender roles are likewise de-emphasized. The Lord of the Rings series, one of the most widely read and influential fantasy series in history, demonstrates this clearly. Race is an important category that determines much about a character. “Race” has a major effect on appearance, culture, custom, etc. This happens because when Tolkien introduces a character, he often explains their lives in relation to their race. There’s even a whole appendix in Fellowship of the Ring called 59

“Concerning Hobbits” that explains how Hobbit life and culture works in a general sense

(Fellowship of the Ring 1). There’s certainly no equivalent section for “Gender roles in middle earth,” although there are a few comments in the appendix about how hobbit men and women are supposed to act.

The reason that fans give for this is simple: Imaginary races are a new construction, and one that many fantasy series spend a lot of time on because they are one of the elements that fantasy and sci-fi are built around exploring. As one of my informants put it,

When you play a race that is different from human, you don't really have a source for

realism to draw upon. I do, however, know many women. So it becomes a fine line for

keeping it realistic with how a woman would react compared to how I would if I were in

the same situation. (Interview 16)

This is just one fan’s viewpoint but based on other interviews I believe it represents at least one common way of thinking within roleplaying game culture. Many sci-fi and fantasy fictions are built around exploring a strange new world with interesting elements and exploring the culture of a different type of sentience is part of that exercise. Gender roles, on the other hand, only come up when they deviate from the expectations of the culture that the book was written in – a great deal of attention is paid to the drow’s matriarchy, for example, discussed later in this chapter. In other words, for the purposes of fantasy and science fiction, gender roles are often a subcategory of “things that can be played with to make a nonhuman culture different,” as opposed to being of equal importance with race.

The underlying assumption, however, is that fans have a “standard” expectation for how men and women will behave. This is important, because it reinforces the fact that fantasy worlds are not exempt from replicating real-world sexism and racism. In fact, fantasy and science fiction 60

settings depend on real world assumptions about race and gender to form the background against

which their fantastic settings are supposed to contrast and be compared. All fantasy settings are

some combination of distortion and reflection of perceived reality.

This is reinforced by the fact that most fantasy and sci-fi settings rely on gender binaries

and sexual dimorphism very similar to that of humans. While non-standard gender roles are

sometimes a feature of D&D races, the homogeneity of human sexual characteristics is one of

the things that makes many of D&D’s races more “human.” All of the standard races for players

in D&D have two sexes, with the females bearing children and generally possessing traditionally

feminine physical and sexual characteristics – breasts, more slender builds, less body hair, etc.17

Even fantasy races where the males are bestial or inhuman will sometimes have conventionally

attractive females. This trope is so universal that it is the subject of frequent mockery, including

the adult fantasy webcomic Oglaf, which asks “Why do females look the same in all species? No

one knows! But why don’t male humans look like anything?” (Oglaf Dimorphism) For example,

despite the vast array of cultures on display, women in D&D have traditionally been far more

likely to wear sexually revealing clothing that emphasizes their softness and reveals sexual

characteristics, whereas even the mostly-naked barbarians and male warriors are posed in attitudes that suggest strength and aggression rather than sexual availability.

This doesn’t mean that gender is unimportant in fantasy fiction or in D&D, it just means

that much of the fantasy canon uncritically reproduces traditional gender roles. In this chapter, I

write a great deal about how race impacts both the stories and the game they have influenced, but

the influence of gender is more subtle. Gender in fantasy novels is perceived as more basic and

17 You can technically play any race you want to in D&D, with DM approval, but some races are considered more acceptable than others. In general, the more powerful and unusual a race is, the less likely it is to be considered a good race for a player character. 61

elemental than race. In my view, this is one more element that supports the argument that fantasy

race is a mirror of real-life race. Most fantasy races have both two sexes and two genders, and

those sexes and genders are, respectively, male and female, men and women. While gender roles

may change in some fantasy cultures, there’s less variability than there is with race, because

“race” in fantasy literature is often a stand-in for “culture” or “ethnicity” in a real-world sense.

Races in fantasy settings are often “humans but…” with one or two significantly changed characteristics, or elements of culture that are exaggerated or magnified. Sex and gender remain the same because that’s one of the important things about being human, to the minds of the readers, and keeping gender roles similar (unless the theme of the race is changed gender roles) keeps the balance between invention and convention necessary for the reader to empathize with and understand the setting. Nevertheless, race and gender are both critical elements of the fantasy genre, and the comparison between the two is useful both for where they interact and where they contrast. Moreover, while they sometimes remain separate in the fiction, they inevitably intersect during actual play. This chapter puts into context the sharp difference in the way that race and gender are portrayed in the works that have influenced Dungeons & Dragons.

The way that race and gender are used in fantasy fiction does not excuse either the racism or the sexism prevalent in the genre. While modern D&D tends to downplay gender stereotypes, and the art has become significantly less sexist over time, there are still many problems in the ways that both race and gender are handled. Race and gender need to be scrutinized heavily in both D&D and the fantasy fiction that inspires it, because these forms of fiction represent and reproduce harmful attitudes about sex and gender in the real world.

There are many more potential sources for analysis than I could hope to summarize in this book, so I have narrowed down my potential sources using several criteria. First, I have 62 included a selection of sources that have obvious and direct contributions to D&D’s lore. These are the works that influenced the people who formulated the original D&D game or wrote its attendant fictional spin-off books. For example, the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien were chosen because he is commonly cited or acknowledged by both players and writers as one of the major influences on the series. Likewise, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft are closely profiled because their writings are directly referenced in several instructional texts. Second, I have chosen several literary series that started off as games of Dungeons & Dragons and were later novelized by their participants, as well as some texts that are officially licensed spin-offs and tie-ins from

Wizards of the Coast. I have selected these texts to demonstrate how concepts used in the game evolve over time and have reciprocal influence on larger literary culture. Finally, especially where I was unsure what the most influential sources were, I have selected sources that my informants have told me were important to them.

D&D is a game built on a circumscribed set of references. In part, this is due to the nature of subcultures. As outlined by Dick Hebdige, and those scholars who have followed him, subcultures thrive on insider knowledge and, more importantly, a shared understanding of a set of media. As Hebdige says, it is through media “that experience is organized, interpreted, and made to cohere in contradiction” (Hebdige 85). Whether one is talking about car nuts, rodeo aficionados, quilters, or any other subculture, much of that subculture’s frame of reference is created by a shared understanding of specific media. This takes many forms within nerd culture and gaming subculture. Sometimes it’s benign – casual reference to a well-known series, such as

“Lord of the Rings” that marks one out as a nerd and invites other nerds to identify themselves as well. Sometimes it is ugly and exclusionary. The most common example of this is when male 63

fans interrogate female fans on the minutiae of a hobby, such as video games or comic books,

trying to gatekeep the identity of “nerd” and prove that the female fans are not “really” fans.

But insider knowledge is not just a way to gatekeep a nerd identity or serve as a

shibboleth that identifies the initiated. The literary background of D&D is essential to

understanding the game, because it is that background that supplies the understanding of race

and gender central to D&D, and the tropes that the game runs on.

What makes D&D’s instructional texts different from most fictional settings is that there

is no one setting in which to play D&D. There are many published settings, some more popular

than others, and there is technically a “default” setting, namely Greyhawk, which is based on the campaigns of Gygax, Arneson, and company. But players are encouraged to come up with their own worlds, and even when they used pre-published settings, many people will customize it to their own tastes. The inventors of D&D were like magpies. They stole, begged, and borrowed concepts from numerous mythological and literary universes to populate their own, and the tradition of mixing and repurposing story tropes and concepts persists throughout D&D gaming culture.

Before I begin exploring specific authors and how they have affected D&D’s, there are a few key concepts present throughout Dungeons & Dragons that are important to keep in mind when evaluating the game’s portrayal of race and gender.

Alignment and the Moral Center of D&D

First and foremost is the concept of “alignment.” A character’s alignment is a brief descriptor of their moral and ethical outlook on life. The original incarnation of this system was, heavily influenced by the science fiction and fantasy stories of the 1960’s, 70’s, and 80’s, especially Poul Anderson’s Three Lions and Three Hearts and Michael Moorcock’s Elric of 64

Melnibone series (Gygax “On the influence…” ). These authors were interested in the conflict between the opposing concepts of Law and Chaos, and the original incarnations of D&D had three alignments: Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic (Gygax & Arneson Dungeons & Dragons 11).

These ethical alignments refer to the character’s attitude towards society. Lawful follows the rules, Chaotic ignores them or is antagonistic towards them, and neutral is a mixture between the two. The second edition of the game (Gygax & Arneson Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:

Player’s Handbook 64-69) added a moral component to the alignment system as well, so that players now described their characters as good, neutral, or evil. Thus, a character’s alignment in the newer incarnations of the game would be a two-word descriptor such as “Lawful Good,”

“Neutral Evil,” or even “True Neutral” (neutral on both axes). The system was briefly modified in 4th edition, but in the 5th and most recent edition of the game, the nine-alignment chart is once again the default option for describing characters’ moral and ethical outlooks.

This is one case where the execution of a concept in D&D has changed significantly from the source material. In Moorcock and Anderson’s writings, the lack of an ethical alignment introduced an intentional ambiguity to the stories. For example, in Moorcock’s Elric series, the

Lords of Chaos are often sinister and threatening, but they are also the main character’s allies.

The Lords of Order, while somewhat more interested in preserving the world than the destructive forces of Chaos, were not really the “good” in a traditional sense, being interested in cosmic stability rather than the welfare of mortals. Both Chaos and Order are concerned only with their war and seem to treat mortals as pawns at best. Elric, the main character, is a tortured protagonist who normally works for the Lords of Chaos, but is repeatedly shown to be their tool, and it is the larger conflict between order and chaos that ultimately kills him and all of the people he cares about (Moorcock “The Doomed Lord’s Passing”). Adding the good-evil axis to the alignment 65

system significantly changes this dynamic and makes D&D’s morality more absolutist than the

works of the original authors.

This is a highly simplified explanation of the alignment system. Character alignment and

what exactly it means is one of the most frequently debated and highly criticized mechanics in

Dungeons & Dragons. What constitutes a good or evil act is no more easily solved in D&D than it is in real life, and the fact that players engage in lengthy, passionate debates about character morality is one of the clearest indications that concepts from within the game and from the real world frequently bleed over into one another. People care about D&D because it is a place to reflect on and experiment with beliefs and ideas that they use in everyday life.

Wizards of the Coast recognizes the complexity of the question and published two supplements for the 3rd edition of the game focused on character morality and exploring different

options for “Good” and “Evil” in a game (Book of Exalted Deeds and Book of Vile Darkness

respectively). For the most part, the interpretations in these books break down to “relativistic

morality versus absolutist morality.” In these texts, Evil is usually defined as “being willing to

harm others for personal gain,” where “personal gain” includes everything from the evil

businessman willing to sacrifice peasant miners in poor working conditions in order to increase

his fortunes, to a literal demon who tortures people for the pleasure of it. “Good” is perhaps a bit

more straightforward, generally meaning “being willing to incur significant personal cost for the

benefit of something else.”

D&D’ moral structure is all about personal efficacy and the importance of the individual

act. While the instructional texts (sometimes) acknowledges that “good” and “evil” can be

relative terms, the game generally assumes that each individual’s morality is an internal and, to

some degree, intrinsic part of a creature. This is not surprising, given that the focus of the game 66

is generally on individual heroism or villainy, but it’s worth emphasizing: D&D’s moral system

focuses on the actions of the individual, rather than questions of systemic responsibility. This

focus on individualism is particularly clear because whenever a different race of sentient creature

is described in one of the instructional texts, its game statistics include its moral tendency. So the entry for “orc” in the monster manual might say, depending on the edition of the game “chaotic,”

“always chaotic evil” or “usually chaotic evil.” That means that, according to the game, orcs as a

species are predisposed towards a society of brutal regimes where the strongest rule, the weak

suffer, and the ruling ideology endorses this as a good thing.

A cynical observer might say the same of humanity and have some justification for doing

so. But according to D&D, humans have an alignment of “any.” Humans are the race of

versatility, as well as being the setting’s “default.” They are the moral tabula rasa of D&D, with no clear predisposition towards any one outlook. They can be anything and anyone. They are the unmarked default, in the same way what white males are the unmarked default in American popular culture.

This is not to say that D&D’s alignment system always endorses racial determinism. In fact, the popular Drizzt series is all about a good-aligned drow elf, a race that is usually chaotic

evil. But it is precisely because most of his race conforms to the stereotype that his departure

from their behavior is “heroic.” He is the exception that proves the rule. In fact, Drizzt’s

goodness is repeatedly marked as exceptional. The rest of his people take quite gleefully and

naturally to a life of cruelty (Salvatore 1). While this could be a powerful comment about the

ability of culture to shape thought and behavior, there’s little indication that any of the drow

want a change. Most of them are quite happy living in a culture of constant backstabbing,

treachery, and xenophobia. It doesn’t help that the culture in question is one of the few 67

matriarchies in printed D&D cultures, nor that the drow are dark-skinned and are known

colloquially as “dark elves” in a double reference to both their skin color and their inherent

evilness. I will discuss the drow in more detail later in the chapter and elaborate on these issues.

If someone wrote a story, set in the real world, about an individual with black skin who

overcame the heritage of his brutal, oppressively matriarchal people to become a champion of

goodness, it would seem an obvious product of racial prejudice. But because it’s a fantasy

scenario, fans often accept the idea of an evil race as simply an element of the game. And for most people, there are probably one or two real-life societies that have values totally inconsistent with one’s own. Almost everyone has some culture or cultural practices that they find as

abhorrent as characters in D&D’s fantasy world find those of drow society. European and

American audiences are often horrified by the idea of consuming dog meat, for example, while it

is a common practice in some parts of Asia and Africa. The key difference is that if one makes

an assumption in the real world that a particular national or ethnic group is inherently

predisposed towards violence, tyranny, or some other odious cultural habit, it is considered

inappropriate and racist or jingoist, outside extremist circles.18 But D&D has plenty of monsters

– and humanoid races – which are supposed to be thinking, feeling, sentient creatures, yet are

also automatically or almost always evil.

One interesting complication is that humans, while being “special” in the sense of being

capable of “any” alignment, are also one of the more malfeasant default player races, in that they

are not predisposed towards a “good” moral alignment, while elves, dwarves, and gnomes are. At

the same time, one might consider this another, subtler form of fantasy racism. Humans are the

18 I am referring to the fact that being overtly racist or jingoist is a violation of social norms in much of American and Western Europe. It is a basis for social censure and attack, even if treating an out-group poorly still happens all the time. 68

only creatures in D&D that are gifted with full moral faculties and no predetermined racial

morality.

Another complication is that morality in D&D has not just teeth, but wings, claws, and

fiery breath as well. Morality is not just a philosophical abstraction but is personified by

powerful creatures that the characters can interact with. There are gods of good and of evil, along

with a whole host of angels, demons, and devils. Moreover, in the default setting, there’s no clear

chain of command for Outsiders,19 in that while there are many gods of good, evil, law, chaos, etc., there’s no one ruling being. Good and evil are abstract concepts with a whole host of celestial and infernal beings arguing over their correct interpretations. It is left to the players to

decide whether this conflict is the source of mortal’s moral conflict, the result of it, or some

mixture of the two.

There are two important implications of this complicated moral situation: First, while

good and evil tend to be rigidly defined by the framework of the game (murder is evil, lying not

necessarily evil but often used for it, etcetera,) (Book of Vile Darkness 6-9) evil is, in some

settings, considered a “valid” alignment, just as good, law, and chaos are. It is not a threat to the

status quo or an unanswerable force operating outside the rules that the other alignments play by,

rather it is part of a larger philosophical and political system. There are entire cosmic realms

where evil is the law and every being dedicates themselves to expanding its influence. Evil is

often represented as having more vicious infighting and backstabbing, since one of the core

tenets of evil is “putting oneself above others,” but this varies considerably and many evil

creatures are just as capable of working together as good creatures are. Although it applies

throughout D&D, it is worth restating here that D&D is the work of many different authors, and

19 “Outsider” is a term that refers to any being from the “outer planes” – usually beings that personify some form of mortal belief or moral idea. 69 while the brand tries to maintain cohesion, there are some differences between the various books in defining exactly what constitutes evil behavior, and precisely how evil works.

The second implication, which follows from the first, is that the cosmology in D&D does not necessarily punish evil or reward good. One might say that this is one of the more realistic aspects of D&D. But it goes deeper than this. Unlike the real world, some people in a D&D setting can literally talk to their gods and summon their servants. They can visit the various heavens and hells and get a preview of the afterlife, if they’re powerful enough to cast the requisite spells. The afterlife for evil folks is generally quite unpleasant if you are a personification of the “banality of evil,” someone who commits harm or selfish actions on a small scale. Most evil souls are tortured until they lose all sense of identity, used as cannon fodder in the never-ending war among factions of good and evil, or used to power all sorts of evil devices. But if one is a particularly devout servant of an evil god, or if you make a deal with the right devil or demon, a person can skip the “helpless soul-larvae” part of the evil afterlife and move straight into higher position on the pecking order. In other words, the cosmology of D&D rewards extreme dedication and service to one’s alignment, not following one alignment over another.

It is the basic assumption of D&D that most games will focus on good or neutral characters (Renton et al. 123). Playing as an evil character is the exception, rather than the rule, although it is a popular enough option that several sourcebooks contain optional rules for playing evil characters.

Further complicating the situation is that the definition of some specific alignments has changed drastically from edition to edition. For example, in the second edition of the game,

“Chaotic Neutral” was interpreted as being effectively insane, placing “chaos and randomness” 70 above everything else (Gygax & Arneson AD&D Player’s Handbook 33). The idea was that a character with no solid moral core and a chaotic ethical one had no systematic plan for any action and was thus equally likely to save an orphanage or burn it to the ground. In the third edition of the game, this definition was revised significantly – Chaotic Neutral characters were now simply self-interested. They might have no inherent respect for laws or social norms, but they could understand them, have internal goals and plan their actions to achieve them (Cook et al 105).

But what’s the difference between a Chaotic Neutral character who is willing to rob a bank and a Chaotic Evil character with the same goal in mind? Generally, the Chaotic Neutral character won’t go out of their way to harm innocent bystanders. In recent editions, “neutral” morality has come to be written and understood as “doesn’t care one way or the other about strangers.” Characters of all alignments are capable of having friendships (even if evil characters are often perverse in the way they treat their friends and loved ones). Rather, a character’s moral outlook determines their default behavior towards people they don’t know, and their general outlook on whether people exist to be cared for, ruled, used, destroyed, etc.

D&D’s authors do acknowledge the moral complexity of the situations they present, at least at times. For example, in the Book of Vile Darkness, an instructional text that offers some possible definitions of evil in D&D, the authors talk about specific acts and why those acts fall under the definition of “evil.” These definitions tend to follow the modern Western definition of

“evil” (Cooke Book of Vile Darkness 7-9). For example, killing for revenge is frequently considered evil, even though revenge killing has been either explicitly or tacitly accepted in many cultures throughout the world, especially “cultures of honor,” such as the American South

(Cohen 408). Likewise, “theft” is considered an evil act, as is murder. Even more telling, fetishes 71 and addictions are part of the spectrum of evil behavior (Cooke Book of Vile Darkness 10-11)

Nested between behavioral deviances like bestiality and necrophilia are “masochism” and

“drug/alcohol addiction.” This fits in with the larger theme that evil is willing to do anything for personal pleasure, regardless of the cost to one’s self or others. But at the same time, it also reveals some deeply puritanical attitudes about drugs and sex. Deviant sexual behavior is linked with evil, just as the use of drugs and alcohol is. The implication is that indulgence and sensuality are dangerous. This is rather puzzling, given that this is also a genre where adventures frequently start in taverns. Quaffing ale and guzzling mead are practically required of a stereotypical adventurer, including the good ones, and even a Paladin with an oath of sobriety is as likely to be regarded as a stick-in-the-mud as an exemplar of virtue. “Drugs” are bad and dangerous, sexuality is suspect, but altering one’s consciousness with alcohol is just part of the genre. Even as D&D tries to create a moral system based on consequentialist logic, it reveals itself to be inherently biased towards modern American Judeo-Christian morality.

The definition of “goodness” reveals just as much about D&D’s underlying moral framework. The sourcebook for Good-aligned characters, the Book of Exalted Deeds, features for players to gain mechanical benefits for vows of poverty, chastity, and nonviolence. Despite the way that D&D embraces a plethora of mythological sources for its material, its ethical and moral compass is still vaguely but firmly Abrahamic, and rooted in the idea that personal wealth and physical experiences are, if not inherently evil, than at least corrupting and always a potential threat to one’s virtue. The mythological inspirations are often bent quite significantly in order to make them fit neatly on the good/evil axis. Zeus, for example, is listed as “Chaotic Good”

(Redman et al 101). Given that Zeus is a habitual rapist in Greek mythology, it is clear that the 72 authors were more concerned with creating a pantheon that “good” characters could comfortably worship, rather than maintaining accuracy and internally consistent morality.

There are no equivalents to Exalted Deeds and Vile Darkness for the law/chaos dichotomy. There’s still plenty of debate among players as to what “law” and “chaos” constitute, but these debates are less visceral and more technical. For example, one of the biggest questions is whether “Law” refers strictly to an external code, or if it can refer to an internal structure. For example, does the robber who defies the laws of society but rigidly adheres to his own personal code of conduct count as “lawful” or “chaotic?” The answer is not clear cut, because there is textual evidence that gives support for both. On one hand, Robin Hood-style characters are practically the textbook definition of “Chaotic Good.” But on the other hand, Wizards of the

Coast uses a character who is defined by her personal code of conduct as the example of Lawful

Neutral. Of course, the intention is that these labels are descriptive rather than prescriptive – you’re supposed to use the one that best fits the outlook of the character, not try and force the character’s behavior to fit whatever label has been chosen. As with most things, the arguments usually come up when a player either repeatedly violates their alignment for in-game benefit

(I.E., a character with a “good” or “lawful” alignment condoning harmful or illegal acts because they want to benefit from them). or when a character starts sacrificing one side of their alignment to feed the other. A common example of this latter are paladins, who are sworn to uphold the ideals of both good and law – but does that mean that they can, say, break the law to execute a villain planning to do something heinous? These are the kinds of questions and stories that the conflicts inherent in D&D’s moral system bring up.

All this examination of the texts still leaves the reader with an incomplete picture. Player characters often engage in behaviors which, except for their choice of targets, would be 73

considered evil. For example, “kick down the door, kill the monsters, and take their stuff” is a

staple of the genre. But orcs and goblins and dragons are all sentient, thinking, feeling creatures.

Killing them should be murder, except that D&D provides a loophole, a sort of morality-based hunting license. The assumption is that the monsters, being usually or always evil, are always going to be a threat, so killing them, even for personal gain, is at worst a neutral act. On one level, this makes sense. If you accept the proposition that (some breeds) of dragons are always evil, and are, by nature, going to kill and eat people, then killing them seems like a straightforward “them or us” situation.

Even with the seemingly straightforward “being eaten by a dragon” dilemma, the instructional texts are only a baseline, and every player interprets them a little differently. One informant described his outlook thus:

I think it’s important to consider in a setting like Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms20 are

places where good and evil are real. Hence there are places like The Seven Mounting Heavens of

Celestia where you can literally go and meet the incarnations of good, evil, law, etc. While there is some room for ‘people of my village think X is good or bad,” and you can still have morally complex characters, in a cosmic sense, good and evil are defined, and pretty rigidly so.

(Interview 44). Like this informant, many players accept the idea that fantasy morality is fundamentally different, because they believe, with some justification, that real-world moral and spiritual ambiguity when individuals can visit the afterlife on a whim. But at the same time, when asked where they thought the moral structure of the world came from, said that it “seemed like conventional modern morality without less ambiguity” and added “conventional for America

20 These are old and popular D&D settings, and are often considered exemplary of a sort of “classic high fantasy” setting, with lots of powerful gods and monsters as active participants. They were also pet projects and personal game-worlds of many of D&D’s long-time developers. 74

and Western Europe” when asked “conventional for who?” (Interview 44). Players understand

that meanings of “good” and “evil” in the fantasy setting correspond to what they’re familiar

with in their daily lives. As another informant put it, “I don’t think you could successfully run a

campaign where the morality of the setting was different from the player’s…. You can play an evil character, but you need a familiar definition of ‘evil.’” (Interview 50). But the concepts in fantasy seem so much more clear-cut and obvious that moral ambiguity, while still present, is changed. There is a constant tension in D&D between the desire to re-examine and play with fundamental concepts like morality, and the fact that it is impossible to step fully outside the player’s own frame of reference.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Godfather of Fantasy J.R.R Tolkien is the most obvious influence on Dungeons & Dragons. There are several salient points about the way that Tolkien constructed and deployed race that have established the default assumptions and conventions for fantasy settings, which I will briefly outline here. It is vital when reading Tolkien to remember that he was a man much in love with an idyllic vision of rural British life. Even his use of proverbial language serves to evoke a sense of loss, as his characters espouse the wisdom of what Tolkien saw as a world being eroded by modernizing impulses (Clinton 138). There is a thread of longing for a quasi-mythical Western European utopia that runs throughout Tolkien’s work, and which makes his racial viewpoint profoundly

Eurocentric. Middle Earth is not a “generic” fantasy setting, but one steeped in Tolkien’s own love of Western and Northern European culture.

Tolkien’s Middle-Earth is a world of racial segregation. The different peoples live in separate enclaves, with socialization and mixture between different peoples being the exception, rather than the rule. Elves live in their sylvan enclaves, dwarves in their mountain halls. Cultures 75

are presented as separate and relatively static. Journeys in Middle-Earth are long and perilous,

and even the friendly inhabitants of the Shire look at wanderers like Gandalf with suspicion.

Middle-Earth is a world where the outsider is viewed as potentially dangerous. In Fellowship of the Ring, for example, Tolkien states several times that both hobbits and humans tend to distrust anyone from outside their own localities (Tolkien Fellowship 13, 196).

Furthermore, Tolkien’s language has not aged well when it comes to political correctness.

The evil, shapeless wraiths known as Nazgul are repeatedly referred to as “Black Men” (Tolkien

Fellowship 219). Mordor, the domain of Sauron and the heart of evil on Middle-Earth is also known as the “Black Land.” Blackness and darkness are proverbially associated with evil in this world. While this doesn’t mean that Tolkien was prejudiced in and of itself, it does mean that he was perpetuating a form of language that directly links blackness with evil. It doesn’t matter how

nice a person one is, once the association between darkness or blackness and “evil” works into a

person’s consciousness, it will begin to affect them on some level.

There are some antagonists in the series who are associated with the color white, most importantly the traitorous wizard Saruman. But even in this case, it is an important metaphor that

Saruman has lost his whiteness and his metaphorical purity (Tolkien Fellowship 319), and must be replaced Gandalf the White, who restores the honor of the title. What’s even more important than this is that there are almost no non-white hero characters. Tolkien’s protagonists are almost exclusively of obvious Northern and Western European stock. Not only from their names, but from the descriptors of almost every protagonist as “fair.” Aragorn is one of the few exceptions – and his dark and weather-beaten appearance is the reason that the protagonists initially mistrust him (Tolkien Fellowship 213-217). 76

More importantly, no “black” or evil characters are ever really redeemed in this series.

Any character who falls into evil stays there, and characters who start out evil don’t get a second

chance. No orcs ever have a change of heart. Every orc portrayed enjoys murder and torture and has no loyalty but to themselves. Gollum, the most pitiable and also the most intimately repulsive character in the series, started out life as a hobbit, and intentionally mirrors the protagonists, showing what even good and humble folk can become under the influence of great evil or when given great power. Gandalf, the series’ moral center and font of wise advice, says that Gollum should be pitied and given a chance for redemption. But since Gollum refuses redemption, the message seems to be that good people will show themselves with good deeds,

while evil people will keep making the same bad choices. The attempts to redeem Gollum are

less for his benefit, and more to show us how good and kindly the protagonists are, to take pity

on such a loathsome wretch. Even if the reader is invited to pity and empathize with Gollum,

once he’s broken, he stays broken.

Who gets cast in the role of “irredeemably evil” is often drawn along species lines. For

example, when the men of Dunland are defeated in battle, they are pardoned on taking an oath

that they will not fight the protagonists anymore (Tolkien Two Towers 711). The underlying reasoning is that these people, being human, were mistaken in trusting Saruman but are ultimately redeemable. Saruman’s orcs, however, are all summarily killed (Tolkien Two Towers

711). Being orcs, they are irredeemable in the logic of the universe. Orcs are portrayed as sentient creatures, with emotions and desires, but no orc is ever shown with any positive feelings.

They are a race of monsters in the truest sense. Orc malfeasance is presence in their appearance, and even with the language they use, as orcs are prone to put unpleasant twists on familiar phrases, such as “where there’s a whip, there’s a way” (Clinton 145). If orcs were clearly 77

associated with any real-world ethnic group, the portrayal would be a racist caricature.

According to the latest player’s handbook, when comparing the “normal” player races to

monstrous humanoids like orcs, states:

The evil deities who created other races, though, made those races to serve them…. Most

orcs share the violent, savage nature of the orc god, Gruumsh, and are thus inclined

toward evil. Even if an orc chooses a good alignment, it struggles against its innate

tendencies for its entire life. (Crawford et al. 122).

The default setting of D&D shares much of Tolkien’s racial determinism. The proliferation of fantasy fiction, some of it associated with D&D, that questions whether orcs are evil, such as the Malazan Book of the Fallen series shows that fantasy readers and gamers don’t necessarily agree.

The most profound effect of the association between blackness and evil is how far it has spread from Lord of the Rings. Although Tolkien certainly did not invent the association in

English-speaking culture between darkness and evil, his pervasive and very noticeable use of it thereafter became a fundamental part of the fantasy landscape, especially when added to the more overtly racist contributions of authors like Lovecraft and Howard. “The Dark Lord,” the title of Sauron, has become a standard term for the generic fantasy protagonist. More recent fantasy epics like Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time (1990) series directly draw from Tolkien’s influence with their own “Dark Lords” (Jordan 17). Black or dark magic is always the province of evil characters, and even series that complicate what “darkness” means are usually responding to this archetype. Tolkien’s work is the reason that the “dark as evil” axiom is the elephant in the room that almost every fantasy series must address at some point. And while Tolkien’s use of the 78 word “dark” is more directly related to religious binaries, the association of darkness and blackness with evil is still a problematic and divisive trope in the fantasy genre.

The same assumption runs throughout Dungeons & Dragons, although with some caveats. Different settings make slightly different assumptions about race. Take, for example,

Toril, the world of the highly popular Forgotten Realms series of sourcebooks. While Forgotten

Realms is not the default setting of the game, it is more-or-less the flagship setting for D&D.21

In Toril, the default assumption is that different kingdoms are dominated by one fantasy race.

Being an unusually well-developed D&D setting, Toril also has regional variations among races.

For example, a human from Rashamen, a pseudo-Russian country, is very different from one from the Sword Coast, a generic Western European section of the setting (Baker et al. 10-18).

Tolkien also codified several of the iconic humanoid races that are now staples of D&D, including orcs, elves, and dwarves. While dwarves and elves are not his original creations, his versions are certainly iconic and trope-defining for the fantasy genre. The stereotypes he established for these races also carry directly into D&D. For example, Tolkien’s dwarves, based on the svartalves of Norse mythology, are stout, bearded masters of metalworking, live in mountains, and hold long grudges against ancestral enemies for any slight. These have become standard fantasy tropes, including and especially in D&D (TvTropes “Our Dwarves Are All The

Same”). Moreover, even the distinct spelling, “dwarves,” rather than “dwarfs,” now a common

21 The default setting for the game, Greyhawk, is the one featured in the three core books for the last several editions of the game. But since the three core books are mostly about the rules of the game and are fairly light on actual setting details, the only details that players get about the setting are a few example deities for their players to worship, and a sprinkling of spell names with famous wizards from the setting featured, such as “Tasha’s Hideous Laughter” or “Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion.” Forgotten Realms, on the other hand, has received the greatest number of supplements, and has been the setting for the vast majority of licensed D&D-based video games, not to mention being the setting for the most commercially successful novels, including R.A. Salvatore’s seeming Drizzt Do’urden novels, which I discuss later. 79

fantasy convention, is Tolkien’s “private piece of bad grammar” (Carter and Tolkien 17).

Appropriately for a philologist, Tolkien crafted the very language of modern fantasy.

Time and culture have modified these tropes a bit. For example, it’s common for dwarves

to have Scottish, Irish, or northern European accents (World of Warcraft or the Lord of the Rings

films, for example.) , while Tolkien’s dwarven language bears a strong resemblance to Hebrew,

and Tolkien explicitly compared the dwarves to Jews (Gerrolt).22 Dwarves have also acquired a

love of strong drink, which Tolkien may have hinted at but never made explicit. Elves are

significantly more variable, often coming in a cornucopia of flavors. Toril, for example, has

seven different subraces of elves (Boyd et al. 26-45), each one with its own theme. There are the

“evil” (and unfortunately black-skinned) drow, the winged avariel, the ocean-dwelling aquatic

elves, etc. Even this variability reflects Tolkien’s original fiction, however, which included

distinct groups of elves with their own habits. But even with the complexity and detai added by

later authors, some of the racial distinctions in D&D, such as the difference between “High” and

“Wood” elves, are directly traceable to Tolkien, with Elrond being one of the original sober and sagacious “High Elves,” while Legolas is the prototypical “Wood Elf,” loving trees and being a superb archer.

Tolkien’s influence is responsible for many of D&D’s tropes, and unfortunately it is also a major influence behind the racial essentialism that runs throughout the game. The evilness of

the Orcs is perhaps the best example of the trope. Orcs are never presented in the Lord of the

Rings Trilogy or the Hobbit as anything other than villains. They have no redeeming features and

are uniformly presented as an entire species of murderous cannibals. It is significant that Tolkien,

22 Probably a positive thing in Tolkien’s view. While many features of Tolkien’s world are racist, he spoke highly of Jewish intellectuals. One of his letters to a Nazi-era German literary agent asking if he had any Jewish heritage can be summed up as “No, but I would be quite happy if I did.” (Humphrey and Tolkien 30) 80

a linguist, went out of his way to mark their language as rough and crude. In the Silmarillion, it is

revealed that Orcs were originally Elves, twisted and tortured by Morgoth, Tolkien’s Satan

figure, into their present shape (Tolkien The Silmarillion 40). This seems more intended to

inspire disgust than pity, however. Orcs are consistently compared to animals, especially insects.

Orcs swarm and crawl and creep, and every action of theirs is described in ways that dehumanize

them (Tolkien Return of the King 1069). This leads to a major fan debate that runs through both

fantasy and science fiction: are these constructed species racist, in the common modern usage of

the word? Is it limited and parochial to assume that a non-human sapient species would adhere to

human standards of morality? After all, we are not talking about humans here. Is it unfair to

assume the same range of behavior and expression in other species as in humans?

Part of the problem with this argument is that it relies on a sort of nuanced and morally

relativistic thinking which is not present on Tolkien’s work. Middle-Earth explicitly has a single

divine creator, Illuvatar, who stands in for the Christian God as both the divine source of all

existence and the definer of good. Similarly, it has Morgoth, the rebellious lieutenant of Illuvatar

who introduced discord into the harmonious work of the creator out of pride (Tolkien The

Silmarillion “Ainulindalë”). But more importantly, The Lord of the Rings is a fundamentally

conservative work. Tolkien’s world is a one in which change is always linked to corruption and disruption of the status quo, and changes are usually for the worse.

The way that The Shire (a stand-in for rural England) deals with immigrants also has some uncomfortable overtones to a modern reader. In short, the Shire is depicted as an idyllic and pastoral place which is ruined by the intrusion of “swarthy, squint-eyed foreigners.” Replace their orcishness with real-life nationality, and the parts of Fellowship of the Ring and Return of the King that focus on the Shire and its environs read like ultra-nationalist propaganda. A bunch 81

of farmers have their land disrupted by a migrant population fleeing war, but it turns out that the

“refugees” are evil, take over the land of the innocent farmers. But, with the help of the returning heroes, the evil refugees are ultimately driven out by the land’s proper, native inhabitants

(Tolkien Return “Scouring of the Shire”).

I am not arguing that Tolkien was intentionally creating a racist allegory or writing nationalist propaganda. Tolkien’s own introduction to the series, during which he addresses claims “As for any inner meaning or ‘message’, it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical” (Tolkien Fellowship xxvii). Tolkien created a fairy-tale; and that the divisions between good and evil that he was representing in Middle-Earth do not really exist in our own world. The villains and the heroes are never so easily distinguishable (at least, not without the benefit of hindsight) and the politics are intentionally simplified. Tolkien claimed that his stories were not allegorical, but applicable, but the line between the two remains a subject of debate among scholars. This case, two words for the same thing. The key point is that

Tolkien’s stories were clearly about something – about the meaning of home, of hope, and courage, of the cost of doing “the right thing” and what “the right thing” was. Whether or not

Tolkien was prejudiced is not nearly as important as the impact of what he wrote. Tolkien’s writing tends to cast the outsider and the foreigner as a threat to the way of life of the native.

There is a nihilism implied by Middle-Earth’s “everything gets worse” outlook, though the lesson that sometimes the small and the brave must stand against the great and terrible leans in the other direction. But everyone claims to be one of the small and the brave. The black-and- white, them-versus-us morality endorsed by Tolkien is problematic, no matter how well- intentioned. 82

Tolkien’s representation of gender is just as fraught, if not in the same ways. Describing one collection of Tolkien scholarship, Nancy Enright noted that:

The range of these critical responses goes from some who feel there is no problem with

gender in the Inklings' writings to Fredrick's and McBride's own suggestion that gender

bias is a very serious failing in these works. (Enright 93).

On one hand, there are several important female characters who make important contributions to the plot, and in several cases women succeed through qualities that the male characters around them lack. As Enright puts it, “Tolkien's female characters epitomize his critique of traditional, masculine and worldly power, offering an alternative that can be summed up as the choice of love over pride” (Enright 93). Galadriel, for example, refuses the temptation of the ring through her deep wisdom and love for her land. She sees the temptation of power and knows that even her desire to do good and defeat evil would be corrupted by the absolute power of the ring (Tolkien Fellowship 476). Her success mirrors the failure of Boromir, the epitome of manly virtue, who faces the same temptation, to take the ring and use it against its creator. But whereas Galadriel acknowledges her own limits and knows what she would become, Boromir can see only the chance to win glory and defend his home. His masculine confidence in both his own ability and the strength and wisdom of Gondor are his undoing (Tolkien Fellowship 519).

Pulp Fiction: Lovecraft, Howard, & D&D

The work of H.P. Lovecraft has a prominent place in the D&D pantheon – figuratively and literally. The game has always included a streak of otherworldly horror, and there’s even a whole class of creatures the Aberrations, who are an homage to the cosmic horror writings of

Lovecraft. Many of Lovecraft’s deities were included in the original printing of Deities &

Demigods (Ward and Kuntz 43) in the second edition of the game, but lawsuits by RPG rival 83

Chaosium eventually forced Wizards of the Coast to insert obvious placeholders instead. Still,

Aberrations draw on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, and several other D&D texts that deal with

horror or aberrant creatures directly reference him. (Baker et al. Lords of Madness 28).

On the surface of it, the combination of D&D and Lovecraft is an odd one. D&D is

stereotypically about heroic fantasy – tales of grand adventure in which the main characters are

pivotal, powerful actors with the ability to meaningfully impact the direction of the narrative.

Lovecraft’s stories are soaked in a sense of futility. The protagonists are put in situations where

they are not only powerless, but where they realize that all human life and civilization is but a

mote of dust in an infinite and uncaring cosmos. As scholar Vivian Rackliss summarizes,

In death, our finite, individual being ceases to be, yet we can find comfort in our

awareness that our cultural heritage is of value and that the community we leave behind

will survive us. Lovecraft's characters cannot find solace in these thoughts, since the

horror they face is an index of the meaninglessness of the human condition. (Rackliss

297)

But while the powerlessness experienced by Lovecraft’s characters seems at odds with the heroic power fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons, D&D has a strong tradition of horror stories.

The Ravenloft campaign setting (Nesmith and Hayday), for example, is a pastiche of gothic horror narratives. The premise of the setting is that each part of a patchwork European landscape is the personal prison of one special villain. Some players like scary stories, and some players like stories where their characters are ultimately doomed. D&D has always catered to those tastes, too. Alternately, part of the pleasure of D&D is in the power fantasy of taking down seemingly invincible creatures. It is an old adage among roleplayers that “if it has stats, we can kill it,” and the fantasy of defeating creatures that symbolize futility can be a powerful draw. 84

Lovecraft’s work contains a number of major themes, but two that often show up in D&D

can be summarized as “people are small” and “difference is dangerous.” The first is reflected in

Lovecraft’s pantheon of unpronounceable deities, who are both inhuman and unknowable. The

basic premise of Lovecraft’s “cosmic indifferentialism” is that humans are tiny specks in a vast

cosmos that does not care about them at all. When this shows up in D&D, however, it’s more

often presented as a challenge. In Lovecraft’s stories, humans realizing how tiny and powerless

they are is an invitation to despair and madness. When this mood is invoked in a game of

Dungeons & Dragons, it might be an invitation to experience existential dread – or the players

may decide to conquer the cosmic horror instead. Horror is a difficult mood to evoke in writing, and even more so in roleplaying games. Maintaining the tension and attention necessary to properly evoke horror is difficult, because it requires concentration – the mental atmosphere must be maintained. But since D&D often involves constantly switching between performance and socializing, it is particularly easy to break the tension of fear.

Based on my research and experience, it seems to me that people do not play horror games for the same reasons that they read horror stories. Or, at least, that most people do not get the same sort of pleasurable fear that they might get from a horror movie when playing a game of

D&D. Rather, because the stories of HPL are a major part of geek culture, these monsters are included as an homage to something that the authors like, rather than as an evocation of the exact same thing. It is a form of cultural signaling that occurs frequently in roleplaying games. Put more simply, geeks and nerds love references to other things in their cultural milieu, and D&D is a giant sandbox in which one can smash all the action figures together.

But while many geeks enjoy defeating Lovecraftian monsters, Lovecraft is one of the most virulent examples of Weheliye’s description of alien racism – the idea that whiteness is the 85

default, and that some people (and things) are inherently alien to whiteness, and that fear and

revulsion are the natural reactions to that difference. A particularly good example of where

Lovecraft enacts alienating racism is the story “The Horror at Red Hook” (Lovecraft “The

Horror at Red Hook.”), which revolves explicitly on the perceived threat of non-whites and non-

Protestants. In that story, a man of Dutch descent in New York becomes involved with a group of Yezidis, joining with their religious traditions and gaining unnatural powers through the practice of black magic. The Dutch main character in New York (once New Amsterdam) becomes corrupted by non-white influences, even as Lovecraft describes how dangerous and dirty the Red Hook neighborhood becomes under the influence of foreign people. The implication is that contact with the non-white and the foreign is dangerous, and that their magical traditions are anathematic and corrosive to sensible, scientific and white-coded ways of thinking and being. Moreover, several of his stories contain overt fears of miscegenation. In The Shadow

Over Innsmouth, a New England port town is taken over by a cult that worships and interbreeds with inhuman fish-men, a practice imported by a greedy trader who traffics with South Sea islanders (Lovecraft Shadows Over Innsmouth). The monstrous, alien threats that Lovecraft proposes are almost always anchored in a fear of non-white humans. Non-white characters in his

book are, at best, loyal servants, and are far more often agents of the dark powers he portrays.

The racial other in Lovecraft’s stories is not merely dangerous, but a corrupting influence.

While Lovecraft’s explicit loathing of non-white, Western European humans may not

have infiltrated D&D, the idea of “the other” as dangerous most certainly did. All of the

monsters inspired by Lovecraft’s writings, the so-called “aberrations,” are not only alien, but inimical (Baker et al. Lords of Madness 5-12). Most of them see humans and humanoids as potential slaves, potential food, and sometimes the target. Not coincidentally, they are also some 86

of the least human-seeming creatures. They resemble creatures like giant fish, squid-headed humanoids. In other words, the inspiration provided by Lovecraft reinforces the idea that difference equals dangerous. It means that monsters in D&D often follow a simple formula: the more inhuman-looking or different a creature seems, the more likely it is to be a threat.

Lovecraft’s mythos and themes of cosmic horror remain today, but content creators have made some efforts to distance themselves from Lovecraft’s virulent racism. Many authors who write Lovecraftian fiction have chosen to directly confront the racism inherent in the stories, while the rest generally try to avoid replicating it. Lovecraft-themed roleplaying and board games feature characters of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, feature women (in contrast to

Lovecraft’s own stories in heroes are typically white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and always white males).23 Fans like replicating Lovecraft’s concepts of alien gods and strange cults, but blatant

racism and sexism is no longer acceptable in mainstream consumer content. This general pattern

extends to D&D as well; where racism exists, it is somewhat more subtle, taking the form of

poor or stereotypical representations of non-white cultures. But it’s impossible to get away from

the fact that H.P. Lovecraft is a major influence on D&D, and that the themes of his writing are

demonstrably based on racist thoughts and beliefs.

Lovecraft’s friend and fellow pulp fiction writer Robert E. Howard is another deeply

influential author in D&D. In particular, he created many of the tropes that fill both fantasy

literature and fantasy art. The virile, ultra-masculine hero who takes on both wilderness and civilization single-handedly is personified by Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, and characters like

Kull of Atlantis and Bran Mak Morn fill similar roles, with the more subdued Solomon Kane providing a stoic and less lusty counterpoint to some of the others. Howard, a shy and retiring

23 For example, the large Arkham Horror line of products produced by Fantasy Flight games (Fantasy Flight). 87

young man with a deeply troubled relationship with his mother, tapped into a vein of fantasy that

stressed the idea that civilization made men weak, and that purity and strength were found in a

rugged life in the wilderness.24 He combined Romantic ideals of the purity of nature and the

noble savage with stories of adventure and dark magic. And, most importantly for D&D, he

created an entire fantasy archetype: the mighty barbarian, dark haired and sullen-eyed, who has

been happily crushing jeweled thrones beneath sandaled feet ever since.

Like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard comes out of the pulp fiction tradition of the early 20th

century. And like Lovecraft, Howard was deeply prejudiced, particularly by modern standards.

Both authors were deeply influenced by the scientific racism of the 19th century. Lovecraft and

Howard both saw racial categories as scientific absolutes, verified by the best minds of their day.

To them, the different races of human were naturally inclined to conflict and compete, according to a popular but deeply flawed understanding ideology of social Darwinism. To Lovecraft and

Howard, different races were like different species competing for the same ecological niche. And they believed that the self-evident success of certain Western and Northern European ethnic groups made them the apex of the human racial pyramid. Moreover, as “The Horror At Red

Hook” illustrates, Lovecraft saw nonwhite people as both naturally repellent and an existential threat to the peaceful existence of white people.

But there are significant differences in how each author viewed and represented race.

Lovecraft’s stories assume that non-White, non-Western European individuals are automatically suspect and probably in the service of evil powers. Howard’s stories, on the other hand, tend to focus on white heroes adventuring in “exotic” lands, and almost all of his characters invoke

24 I’m not a Freudian and I don’t normally psychoanalyze my subjects, but in this case, I believe it’s warranted, because Howard’s relationship with his mother seems to inform or at least to deeply contrast with the attitudes towards women displayed in his stories. Howard’s Conan, especially, is both comfortable with and irresistible to women, while Howard killed himself shortly after the death of his mother. 88

racial and national stereotypes. This is mixed with a sense of racial competition, but this

competition is not always a bad thing. Howard’s notion of racial competition is just as intractable

as Lovecraft’s, but Howard saw racial competition as simply a force, like natural selection. His

characters might hate each other based on race, but even that hatred was tinged with respect for

adversaries in something more complicated than Lovecraft’s abject loathing of nonwhite peoples.

Howard’s racism also clearly shows the influence of his East Texas raising and the prejudices of

the American south. For example, in one story, “Black Canaan,” a white settlement deep in the

American back country is threatened by an uprising of former slaves, and the hero of the story

must hurry home to fight the trouble. During the story he encounters a number of stock racist

characters including an evil witch doctor, said Witch Doctor’s jezebel

wife/daughter/lover/assistant, and a foolish, frightened black man who begs the white folks to

save him from the evil voodoo cult. (Howard “Black Canaan”). Almost every negative

stereotype ever deployed by white Americans against black folks is on display in Howard’s

writings – almost universally, they are either villains, cowards, or servile, childlike ingenues.

There is one notable exception to Howard’s general dismissive attitude towards black people, an African shaman named N’Longa. In one of Howard’s Solomon Kane stories, the

African medicine man is treated by the puritan adventurer Solomon Kane as something like an equal. N’Longa, even gets a long soliloquy about how his magic is neither good nor evil, only a force. More, during this story, Howard explicitly compares N’Longa to an Old Testament prophet – for this one individual, at least, Howard can see a spark of shared humanity and takes the imaginative leap of seeing a black man not only as equal to a white man, but puts that black man in a place of mystical, almost reverential awe. 89

This mixed attitude towards people of color is, I suspect, familiar to folks who have spent much time in the American South. Howard could see individual black folks as people, but he always regarded them, as a group, as inferior to white folks. The black characters who are regarded positively in Howard’s stories are the exceptions, rather than the rule. They fall into a familiar pattern of racist logic: “Well, I know group X behaves this way. Individual A does not behave this way, yet is a member of group X. Therefore, A must be different from the rest of his kind.” N’longa is a wizard, and therefore set somewhat apart from the rest of his people. He is far more complicated than most of Howard’s characters, black or white. For example, he speaks in a broken patois or pidgin language, and Howard explicitly notes that he does so because he enjoys it (Howard “The Hills of the Dead” Chapter IV). In other words, N’longa chooses to present a certain picture of himself to the world, playing the “ignorant savage” stereotype even though he’s capable of telepathy. Perhaps he’s learned that it is better not to reveal too much of himself to white folks. There is at least empathy for the character in Howard’s writing – N’longa gets a long and thoughtful speech on why Solomon Kane can’t understand his magic, and why his puritan understanding of magic as “always evil” is grossly oversimplified. Interestingly, many of N’longa’s points could form a criticism of Howard’s own racial classification as well.

N’longa is, ultimately, forwarding the idea that life and human experience are defined by what a person has seen and done and learned, not destiny embedded in the flesh.

But N’longa is exceptional in Howard’s writing. He is the only black character who gets treated with real respect, rather than condescending pity. Even non-villainous black characters in other stories are treated with, at best, patronizing concern or genial contempt. They are either cowardly but loyal servants (Howard, “Wolfshead”) or good-natured, child-like brutes (Howard,

“The Portrait of Tom Molyneaux). But this isn’t just about Howard’s upbringing in the rural 90

South. Howard uses racial stereotypes constantly in his writing. For Howard, “race” and “nation”

are strongly linked, and he uses both of them as shorthand for his readers. For example, when he

talks about the “Nordheimers” or the “Aesir,” in his Hyborean stories, he’s clearly referring to

stereotypical Vikings (inaccurate horned helms and all) who he also clearly identifies as a

consistent racial type with a set of common physical and behavioral traits – tall, blue eyes,

blonde hair, warrior dispositions, etc. (Howard “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”). It is easy to see

why a pulp writer would do this. If your audience is already familiar with certain stereotypes,

you can invoke them to create stock characters and be comfortable knowing that your audience

understands you. Stereotypes serve as ways to quickly invoke a theme or idea in a story format where the author has a limited amount of space to convey the story.

The obvious problem, however, is that stereotypes also promote essentialist thinking. It

reduces characters, and people, to faceless exemplars of a type. There’s some equity in Howard’s

writing, in that everyone gets stereotyped. He uses Vikings and Romans as stock characters as

readily as he uses stereotyped African characters. But the most damaging stereotypes are

reserved for non-white, non-European characters. African characters are stereotyped as greedy,

corrupt, and cowardly (Howard “The Servants of Bit-Yakin”), Semitic characters as racially

greedy (Howard “Queen of the Black Coast”). Howard’s racism was less virulent than Lovecraft,

and he seems to have had sympathy and even respect for some individual black characters, but

by and large he relied on stereotypical thinking about race to get his points across.

Just as lingering and unhelpful are Howard’s portrayal of women. Viewed in the kindest

possible light, Howard’s writing is romantic in a chivalrous and very dated way. From a feminist

perspective, it is patronizing and misogynistic. Women in Howard’s stories follow the same

pattern as women in James Bond films: They are either damsels in distress, subordinate partners, 91 evil seductresses, or some combination of the three. While he occasionally portrays competent female characters, as in “Red Nails” and “Queen of the Black Coast,” their competence is always overshadowed by that of Conan. Moreover, all of these female characters inevitably fall for

Conan’s virile, lusty masculinity, and they inevitably require rescuing by the titular hero at some point in the story. Even the few competent females in Conan stories are ultimately objects to be saved and conquered. Conan stories are the source of countless Luis Royo and Boris Vallejo paintings of scantily-clad women clinging to the muscular legs of barbarian heroes, and the attitudes towards women of Howard’s stories is pretty much what you would expect from the paintings they inspired: Women are portrayed as weak and helpless, except where they are evil and out to enslave or kill the protagonist.

The art inspired by Conan has had one of the most lasting effects on Dungeons &

Dragons and its surrounding culture. Art by the likes of Boris Vallejo and Luis Royo, heavily inspired by Robert E. Howard, serves as the inspiration for the “Chainmail Bikini” trope, women warriors dressed in scanty and absurdly impractical armor – the archetype called by one scholar the “fighting fucktoy.” (Newsom) Wherever a woman is competent or valorous in a Conan story, it only serves to make her that much more alluring as an object to be conquered. More, these visual modes of representation directly inspired by Conan portray women as objects. There’s no escaping the fact that D&D’s literary origins. While Conan himself is chivalrous rather than sexually violent, his attitudes towards women are dismissive, paternal, and possessive. However much he may protect women from more obvious and overt threats, he still treats and sees them as sexual objects for conquest, reinforcing the dynamic of women as something to be attained, weak creatures who can’t defend themselves and who can’t make intelligent decisions about their own desires without a strong man around. 92

And on the subject of “strong Men,” Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories of idealized

white masculinity. Howard was a quiet, bookish man, and it is easy to read Conan as an idealized

alter ego for his author. Of his own inspiration for the character, Howard wrote:

He is simply a combination of a number of men I have known, and I think that's why he

seemed to step full-grown into my consciousness when I wrote the first yarn of the series.

Some mechanism in my subconsciousness took the dominant characteristics of various

prize-fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I

had come in contact with, and combining them all, produced the amalgamation I call

Conan the Cimmerian. (Howard, Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 22, 1935)

Conan is a pastiche of virile white masculine archetypes, rough men working in Texas

boomtowns. He embodies raw, swaggering white masculinity, and an implicit critique of how

civilization had “softened” white men in Howard’s eyes. Howard constantly compares him to

large predatory animals, emphasizing the fact that, even when Conan is among dangerous men,

he is always that much more dangerous. He is a wolf among dogs, or a tiger among wolves. Yet

Conan is also thoughtful hero, a man who is aware of how fleeting life is and how grim and

dangerous the world can be. Conan is brilliant, in his own way, allowing readers who value their intellect to project themselves onto hypermasculine ideal. At times he will express a certain philosophical turmoil, but it never lasts too long. Although aware of the inevitability of death and darkness, Conan uses the very brevity and dangers of life as reasons to celebrate more fiercely.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Conan has endured as a fictional character is that he is an unusually complete power fantasy. He offers the image of the intellectual barbarian who can set aside the pitfalls of intellectualism, such as a tendency towards melancholy and unpleasant revelation. But Howard’s suicide also suggests that achieving Conan’s easy dismissal of 93

depressing reality is never quite as easy as the stories make it seem. And perhaps Howard, knowing himself to be a product of the softening, civilizing influence he saw as decadent, was never quite at home behind Conan’s burning blue eyes. The Conan fantasy is all the more alluring because it is paradoxical, because to be the self-aware barbarian is to already have lost the enviable certainty that made the fantasy attractive in the first place. But in the end, it is still an untenable and at times dangerous image of what a man can and should be.

Jack Vance is another important (and problematic) name in D&D, although less well- known than some of the other authors above. Vance created a setting called the “Dying Earth,” a far future where the sun has burned down to red and is slowly going out. In this far future, both magic and technology litter the world, and people have largely forgotten how either works, except for a few strange sages. It takes the central conceits of a “dark ages Europe” fantasy setting and accelerates them into the far future, with the added elements of aliens, mutants, and robots. The concept was successful enough that it spawned a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid subgenre.

Jack Vance’s world is one in which racism doesn’t seem terrible prevalent (in the generic fantasy sense that everyone seems basically white and European-descended). But gender roles are less-than progressive. The story of Cugel, set in Vance’s dying earth, is a case study for some of the more unpleasant expressions of gender roles in fantasy fiction.

Cugel’s story is a picaresque one. The eponymous Cugel is a rogue and a chancer, a man who makes his living by his wits, by theft, and by trickery. Vance’s stories follow him across the dying earth as he tries to lie, steal, and cheat his way through the world, facing many difficulties and perils, most of them Cugel’s own fault. One of the more troubling incidents is when Cugel steals a ship and kidnaps the wife of the ship’s master and his two comely daughters. The incident is presented as a fairly lighthearted one – the two daughters convince Cugel that they 94

have been seduced by him, or at least that they are willing to put up with his advances, while

they and their mother set about changing the ship’s direction every time he falls asleep, not to

mention spitting and relieving themselves in his food (Vance Cugel’s Saga).

Behind this charming façade is a fairly ugly truth. Cugel kidnaps three women and, after

having taken them away from their family and livelihood, he forces two of them into sexual

encounters. Though the presentation is such that the readers are aware that the women are

tricking him, Cugel still puts them in a situation where the women are presumably afraid for their

lives and safety and have to bargain sexual favors for a chance to escape. It is still inarguably,

sexual assault, and the lighthearted presentation only makes it more disturbing. After all, Cugel’s

tale plays into all the old tropes about women using sexuality as a weapon, reinforcing many of

the most problematic aspects of rape culture, like the idea that a woman has to wield her

sexuality as a weapon in order to control, ward off, or work around men. And, just as with the

toxic aspects of Howard, Lovecraft, and other authors, we can see this attitude lurking around the

edges in D&D. Monsters like the nymph and the succubus both of which are standard in D&D

represent the inherent danger of female sexuality. D&D, like most fantasy fiction (including

Vance’s), is rooted in older stories where women with sexual agency are dangerous, and D&D

continues to perpetuate some of those myths, however faintly – and Vance’s writings are one of

the reasons.

The most uncomfortable aspect of Cugel’s story from a feminist perspective is that he is a

rapist. Threats of sexual violence and miscegenation are well-represented in fantasy fiction.

Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft both wrote frequently about the implicit or explicit threat of sexual violence, and as mentioned above, both of those authors mixed elements that modern readers would consider both misogynistic and racist. In the attitudes spread by pulp writers like 95

Howard and Lovecraft, women were the special property of “the race,” and the idea of someone

or “something” of another race contaminating a white woman was regarded as especially

horrible. Stories like Howard’s “The Children of the Night” (Howard “Children of the Night”) or

Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” (Lovecraft “The Dunwich Horror”) either implicitly or

explicitly rely on the fear and revulsion triggered by white women being impregnated by non-

white others. Laying a veneer of fantasy over the story blurs the outline but does not change the

nature of the cultural antipathy towards outsiders that such stories draw on.

But sexual violence is often represented very differently when the perpetrator is a white

male or seems intended to be read as such. Rape in fantasy fiction is less well-documented in a

critical sense than rape in other genres, although scholars are making inroads towards exploring

it more thoroughly (Prater 148). As Lenise Prater points out in her article “Monstrous Fantasies,”

fantasy texts often “depoliticize the patriarchal structures featured in the fantasy world,” and that

uncovering this requires further investigation. Rape by a protagonist, usually a male main

character, is a prevalent and troubling trope in fantasy fiction. The trope naturalizes the idea of

rape culture by projecting it into a fantasy world. The message is that rape and sexual violence

are a natural part of the human condition.

Rape is, in fact, built into D&D. Because Orcs are typically Chaotic Evil and have always

been portrayed as savage raiders, there’s a persistent understanding among many fans that Half-

Orcs are frequently the product of rape (1d4chan “Half-Orcs”), although not every character.

Half-orcs are one of only two “interracial” player races, the other being half-elves. Half-orcs are also frequently the target of racial prejudice. The upshot is that in D&D, half-orcs have often represented a ham-fisted attempt to tackle racism in a fantasy setting by portraying half-orcs as 96 the long-suffering victims of bigotry, while at the same time relying on the idea that orcs were biologically and culturally programmed to be rapists, a claim with worrying real-world parallels.

Fan reaction to this aspect of half-orcs has been mixed. Many modern fans roll their eyes at it. Many find the idea of rape-as-backstory to be intentionally edgy and overly dramatic, an excuse for a “dark” character who lacks any real depth (1d4chan “Half-Orcs”). Embedded in this attitude is a contempt for writers who try to use the act of rape to create a sense of drama without being able to handle it well or create actual empathy with the character. On one level, fans seem to be rejecting the misuse of rape as a trite storytelling device.

Unfortunately, some parts of role-playing fandom are rife with deeply entrenched misogyny. The fan wiki “1d4chan” cited above, for example, rather gleefully defines “rape” by using the examples of tabletop scenarios, in the sense of one player beating another in an overwhelming fashion. (1d4chan “rape”). The equivocation of victory with sexual violence is a disturbingly prevalent trend in both video games and tabletop gaming, especially miniatures gaming. This, in turn, ties into larger issues and divisions within fandom. Tabletop roleplaying gamers are part of a large and overlapping spectrum of game types: board games, miniature games, and roleplaying games, and card games, each with their own subcategories.

Many people play some combination of these different game types, some move from one to the other throughout their lifetimes, and some prefer to stick to one or more types. Each type of game also has stereotypes associated with it, and role-playing gamers I have interviewed have tended to point at miniatures gaming as the segment most hostile to non-white, non-male gamers.

As one informant put it, “I think women avoid miniatures gaming for a lot of reasons but the type of guys who usually play those games are a big one” (Interview 16). Traditionally, these games have had very little representation of female characters in any but the most stereotyped 97

and often sexually provocative roles. And, as my informant alluded to, enough of the players have problematic attitudes towards women that miniature gaming spaces are often hostile or unfriendly to women.

As a group, my informants regarded roleplaying as one of the more progressive elements

of the tabletop gaming hobby. They pointed out that “things were getting better” in the sense that

D&D has become more explicitly supportive of gender equality and nonbinary gender identities,

especially in the Fifth edition of the game. This edition offers some support for playing

nonbinary characters, especially with regards to elves, who have become more racially

androgynous rather than racially feminine, which was the case previously. Furthermore, the art in

D&D has generally made female outfits and armor less sexually explicit and more practical,

moving away from the “chainmail bikini” style.

I do not know whether my informants represent the majority of D&D players in their

attitudes towards race and gender. And there are many people who participate in the hobby who

are also misogynist and racist. If the past few years have proved anything, it is that fandom

contains toxic elements of white masculinity, But D&D as a cultural product is changing, and

many of my informants see that as a business decision. In fact, every informant who talked about

changes in D&D’s representation talked about the economic incentives to change the way the

game is perceived. Some of them pointed out that diversity is a hot selling point right now

(interviews 8, 16, 3, 5), and others noted that the games’ publisher, Wizards of the Coast, has

begun to realize that they need to expand their fan base if they want to survive. Perhaps the most

compelling evidence is the way that the game has shifted its approach towards sex and gender

over the past three editions, to the point where there is even some consideration of nonbinary

genders in the latest iteration of D&D’s elves. 98

Emergent Properties: Texts About D&D

R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden novels, mentioned above, are one of the most popular

examples of a series that directly emerges from D&D. Unlike the previous examples, which are

all stories and authors who the creators of D&D read, and who inspired the instructional texts,

Salvatore’s novels are about D&D. Salvatore’s novels are set in the Forgotten Realms, a

Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, and are published by Wizards of the Coast, the company

that publishes D&D. These novels are tie-ins, products meant both to create a profit and to generate interest in the wider range of D&D products, and they reflect some of the more problematic aspects of D&D relationship to race and gender.

There are some obvious problems with dark elf society as popularized by Salvatore. First,

the elves are both “dark” as in “dark skinned,” and “dark” as in “evil.” A race of elves long ago

driven underground for their evil ways the drow are loosely based on the svartalves of Norse

mythology. It is interesting that the authors chose to take the term “black elves” literally. Given

that they live below the earth, the blackness could just as easily have been metaphorical. Yet

D&D’s creators chose to make blackness something biological, and to link it explicitly to the

people’s fall from grace Given how many players make the link between blackness as an

American racial concept and the blackness of the Drow, I think this decision on the part of the

game’s designers highlights the importance of race and especially skin color as an identifying

marker in American culture more than it reflects the mythic origins of the drow.

These “evil” elves are not only dark skinned, they are also explicitly matriarchal.

Women in drow society occupy the highest, priestly caste, while men are considered their socially inferior subordinates. Men still have some power and gravitate either towards fighting or magic as routes to power (with some also serving as consorts to powerful women). While many 99

fantasy settings have queens, there are not many societies in D&D where women occupying most leadership positions is the norm. The drow are a reversal of the usually expected normative skin tones and gender roles, and both elements are linked explicitly with their evil.

One of the major reasons that people educated in the humanities and fans see things differently is a matter of tropes and expectations. For many fantasy fans, the idea that an entire race is predisposed towards evil is something expected in the genre. When interpreting fictional worlds, they often expect entire classes of people to be bad, much as you can tell a “bad guy” in a western by a black cowboy hat. And fans vary widely in terms of how much transparency they see between the real world and fantasy settings. Most of them, educated in relatively progressive

Westernized societies where explicit racism is often socially unacceptable, will say that of course this does not resemble real life, and that “evil races” are different because they’re imaginary alien cultures which are fundamentally different from humans in many important ways.

The problem with this argument is that these imaginary characters occupy a tenuous

space of reality and not-reality. For example, we might understand that these magical elves are

nonexistent creatures. Yet, we are asked to empathize with some of them. Some of these

imaginary characters, like the protagonist Drizzt, are fully realized and articulated characters

with motivations and feelings the reader is supposed to understand just as they would a human

character. Some of them are nameless minions there to be cut down. In this way, the stories

themselves resemble a game of D&D: Some characters are more real than others, and we’re

invited to empathize with some and not with the rest.

Another interpretation is that the Drow are a sort of Aesop about the evils of a society in

which one gender rules. And the character of Drizzt sometimes muses that the Drow might be

able to be better people, if they weren’t ruled by the Priestesses of Llolth. While “good drow” are 100

in the minority, the character archetype has caught on in many quarters of D&D fandom,

showing that the fans themselves actually like the idea of a character who comes from a

dangerous and threatening people who betters himself by rebelling against oppressive, toxic

cultural norms. The drow as a matriarchal culture might be a stealth critique of patriarchal

culture as well.

Another related argument for the drow as a culture is that they represent a critique of

gender-based roles and stereotypes, played in the opposite of the real-world usual. By demonstrating how bad things get when corrupt women run the show, D&D’s authors are actually demonstrating that any sort of gender segregation and power differential is a bad thing.

This argument would make the drow culture into a sort of social satire, showing the evils of patriarchy through the cruelty of a matriarchy.

The problem with this argument is that the flaws of drow females as rulers are not the flaws of real-world male rulers. Even when put in positions of power, the problematic behavior demonstrated by drow females reinforce rather than question gender stereotypes. drow females are pervasively defined by their sexuality. Even as figures of power, they constantly put themselves on sexual display, although why they would need to seduce males who are already under their temporal power is something of a mystery, especially since some sources state that female drow are typically bigger and stronger than males. Art for drow females typically shows them in something dark and tight-fitting, and their penchant for spider webs, whips, and chains gives their entire culture a peculiar BDSM motif. Additionally, some of the fiction mentions that same-sex liaisons between female drow are so common as to be unremarkable (Baker

Condemnation 37). One could argue that this replicates some other ancient societies, such as

Ancient Rome, but since drow culture demonstrates few other significant connections to Roman 101 culture, this is cherry-picking comparisons at best. drow culture, despite the appearance of a matriarchy, has a constant undercurrent of breathy adolescent male sexual fantasy: A bunch of dark-skinned bondage queens maliciously making out with each other while plotting how to advance their political careers and keep all the men under the table. Put this way the culture sounds fetishistic, if not pornographic.

More, the nature of female drow as manipulative authority figures perverts “normal” family structures. The Drow are organized into powerful clans, which are ruled by a biological family, matron mother and her children. Mothers use their children as pawns, constantly balanced between the need for strong support and the fear of betrayal from within (Salvatore

Homeland 1-22). Drow culture is interesting (or anxiety-provoking) because it presents a vision of a world where mothers are not caretakers, but instead use and abuse their children for their own personal gain, constantly straining to keep their children under control for fear of usurpation. Female empowerment is thus tied directly to a dangerous perversion traditional female role. Women who seek power are demonized as a threat to both the “natural” female role of motherhood, and to the integrity and morality of civilization.

More revealing still are the arguments fans deploy against criticism of the racism or sexism inherent in D&D. One blog post I found while searching for literature contains some typical arguments. After the original author forwarded some of the arguments, I have advanced above, the reaction was mixed and often vitriolic. Some respondents were indignant, accusing the author of being unfair to Salvatore and looking for sexism that wasn’t there. Others relied on the old chestnut of “it’s only a fantasy, shut up and enjoy it.” The most thorough attempts at cogent criticism usually relied on the idea that the setting justified itself, arguing that the attitudes made sense in the setting, since the drow were a race worshipping an evil goddess, with 102 an all-female priesthood, so of course the female drow were evil! This seems to point at a basic difference between types of readers: some see the fantasy world as one which is internally consistent and separate from the “real world,” one which should be judged by its own rules.

Others, like myself, see the fantasy world as one which is deliberately constructed and always related to real experience. In advancement of this argument, I would emphasize the following: every word in every book about D&D ever published was deliberately placed there.

Fantasy worlds are constructed, piece by piece, by human minds reflecting their own ideas about how the reality works, and how an imaginary world might work under different circumstances.

How would people act if gods acted in obvious, tangible ways? How would magic change the way the world works? But at the same time, these authors are using concepts from our shared reality. There’s a reason that most fantasy races still have two genders, and that those genders generally follow similar patterns of race and gender as in the real world. Most fantasy races experience a set of emotions and cognitive states that map on to human existence, with relatively minor modifications.

In my experience, fan reactions to criticism tend to follow the pattern laid out by

Alexander Weheliye in that “an insistence on transcending limited notions of the subject or identity leads to the neglect of race as a critical category.” Fans often claim that fantasy settings are something transcendent, and that in these imaginary worlds, real-world observations about race (or gender, for that matter) are irrelevant, because the fantasy world has its own internally consistent logic. After all, the drow are dark-skinned because “They consciously chose the shadows over light, and Corellon decreed that such treachery would forever show upon their faces. It is for this reason that the skin of the drow is dark” (McComb 6-7).25 But such arguments

25 Corellon is the chief elven god of the default D&D pantheon. 103

for transcendence begin to break down when one compares the above story to the historical

arguments that black folks had been turned black as a result of the sin of Ham, son of Noah, an

argument which was used to justify slavery (Haynes 63-64). And beyond that, the fact that black

skin requires justification, that black cannot be the default, is more evidence that these fantasy

worlds are not as distant from reality as some fans would like to believe.

Some of the stereotypes invoked are much more obviously linked to real-life stereotyping than dark-skinned elves. For example, the popular Ravenloft setting has a race of Romani stereotypes called the Vistani, who are introduced as a group of strange, nomadic people with great mystical power, especially in the areas of curses and prophecy (Guide to the Vistani 9).

They are, naturally, gypsy stereotypes. In the world of Ravenloft, a setting based primarily in

Gothic horror and full of werewolves, vampires and dark Transylvanian magics, with a liberal sprinkling of banshees, zombies, and stranger things that lurk in the omnipresent Mists.

Ravenloft is a land divided up by magical mists, petty micro-kingdoms each serving as both the domain of and the prison for a shifting menagerie of unpleasant characters. The setting drips macabre melodrama and deeply sinister forces hiding just behind the trees.

The problem is that the Vistani seem to partake of that inhuman aspect. They have some control over or relationship with the Mists. Moreover, “All Vistani practice fortune-telling to some extent.” And “possess the power to curse people in the most terrible ways.” (Wise 13)

These stereotypes exactly match the stereotypes of Romani people across Europe. Invoking traditional gypsy stereotypes is especially problematic given that Romani are treated abominably across Europe, regularly facing discrimination, deportation, destruction of property and the threat of state-sponsored violence. 104

The treatment of the Vistani is a particularly clear example of something that often happens in D&D: “fantasy” stereotypes that just happen to directly correlate to harmful real-

world stereotypes. The first editions of D&D were written by white folks from Wisconsin who

did not have much experience with diversity, did not live in a place where it was valued, and

were coming from a culture of science fiction, fantasy, and medieval hobby enthusiasm which

was extremely white. The pioneers of D&D were not overtly malicious bigots like H.P.

Lovecraft, but they were certainly products of a widely read but practically limited cultural

background, a monocultural legacy which D&D has struggled to overcome for more than forty years.

Out of the Game and Onto the Page: D&D-Based Series

D&D isn’t just a repository of tropes. As the section on Salvatore shows, D&D influences the people who play it. Concepts created for the game leak out onto the page, creating a perfectly

Bakhtinian model of popular culture wherein players and authors are in conversation over game

and story concepts. Players read about fantasy conventions in their favorite novels or in D&D’s

instructional texts, they play them out in a game, and sometimes those games become novels,

webcomics, or other works of fiction. Fans read these new texts, themselves shaped by the game,

and then go on to play games inspired by those tests, propagating the cycle.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen exemplifies this process. Starting as a game of D&D in a

homebrew setting, the players later switched to another roleplaying game, Generic Universal

RolePlaying System (GURPS) for increased flexibility, but the tropes of D&D stuck with the

game and showed up again in meaningful ways.26

26 I apologize to the reader for the number of unfamiliar terms in the upcoming pages. I have tried to define them as clearly as possible, but the novels are extremely dense with neologisms, even for fantasy fiction. I have decided to use in-universe terms rather than more generic ones, because I want to be as accurate and specific as possible, and because many of the neologisms are used intentionally to mark a break with older fantasy tropes. I have tried to 105

The setting takes several steps to undercut some of D&D’s most racist tropes. For one, the automatic assumption of “such and such a race are evil” is turned on its head. In the first book, the reader is introduced to an undead Jaghut tyrant named Raest (Erikson Gardens of the

Moon). Despite the different name, Jaghut are the local equivalent of orcs. They are big, powerful, have green skin and tusks, and fans typically identify them as orcs (TVTropes “Our

Orcs are Different”). But unlike the usual Orc model of “ravening hordes led by powerful warriors,” the Jaghut are a peaceful race, with only a few power-hungry and destructive individuals. But those few evil Jaghut enslaved a race of Neanderthal-like humans, the Imass, which in turn lead to the Imass swearing a racial death-oath against the Imass, binding them to the status of undead killing machines until they complete a campaign of genocide against the

Jaghut.

The novels are massive, and there are many side-stories and ancillary pieces of fiction.

Imass-Jaghut conflict is only one of many that runs throughout the series. But the overall tone is one of pathos and all sides are shown to have both reprehensible villains and sympathetic characters. And even many of the villainous characters are sympathetic at some points. The series shows a great deal of sophistication and is clearly aware of its origins in heroic fantasy. At one point in the series, one of the characters even parodies the whole notion of heroic fantasy, telling a story of traditional adventure from the point of view of a supposedly “evil” race, and pointing out a number of inconvenient facts, such as how even a bunch of evil underground dwellers would need supplies and trade – weapons, drippy candles, instruments of torture, that sort of thing ( Erikson Reaper’s Gale) The whole point of the section is to point out the fact that any heroic tale that makes one side seem entirely evil is probably a self-serving lie on the part of

explain which specific terms are equivalent to which generic fantasy terms, and to provide some explanation of how fantasy fans typically read certain racial codes and descriptors. 106

the teller, and that even civilizations of “pure evil” require the basic necessities of life,

suggesting a deep sense of commonality and connection between different forms of sentient life.

Instead of assuming that some people are evil and depraved, and others are noble and good, the

series proposes that heroes and villains can come from any people, and, moreover, that heroism

and villainy are matters of perspective.

The series also features a more inclusive attitude towards gender. The Malazan Book of

the Fallen is notable for including many female characters in traditionally male roles. The feel of

the series’ attitude towards gender is similar to modern D&D. The Malazan Empire, whose

soldiers are some of the main viewpoint characters, has a distinctly egalitarian feel. Not only is

the ruler a woman (and a master assassin,) but many of the front-line soldiers in the military are women as well, including female heavy infantry. Gender roles exist in the setting, and gender roles and stereotypes are occasionally discussed by the characters, but the series rejects easy answers and absolutes based on sex or gender.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen also provides a case study in how sexual violence is depicted in fantasy fiction. The series’ presentation of sex varies between “realistic” and

“gruesome,” depending on the reader’s perspective. The series includes several incidents of rape perpetrated against main characters (Erikson Memories of Ice, Midnight Tides), one main character commits several acts of rape (Erikson, Midnight Tides) and rape as an abstract concept that happens to thousands of people is frequently mentioned as simply another fact of life in an often-violent world. The series focuses on war and conflicts both overt and covert, a global struggle with many different interested parties, most of them with mutually incompatible goals.

War is depicted as brutal, and there’s very little glory. And as Janet Radway described in

Reading the Romance, “By picturing the heroine in relative positions of weakness, romances are 107

not necessarily endorsing her situation, but examining an all-too-common state of affairs in order

to display possible strategies for coping with it” (Radway 75). Depicting sexual violence alone is

not enough to condemn a work. And in Erikson’s case, the inclusion of sexual violence does not

seem designed to glorify it, and in most cases more time and effort is spent considering the

consequences of the act than describing the act itself. Erikson is not focusing on coping strategies

so much as meditating on the concept of violence and trying to show how and why cycles of

violence and abuse perpetuate themselves. At the same time, the series’ most impressive

characters are those who are the best at violence, and the series is filled with a bevy of characters

who excel at doing harm to others.

Sexual violence reveals some significant gender dichotomies in the Malazan Book of the

Fallen. For example, there are several examples of women raping men, but when it is portrayed,

it has reproduction as a primary purpose. The third book, Memories of Ice, depicts a depraved

cult called the “Women of the Dead Seed.” They are themselves victims, much-abused peasants driven to madness and cannibalism by a theocratic emperor.27 In their insanity they copulate with

dying men for the explicit purpose of “stealing their seed” and producing eerie, unnatural

children (Memories of Ice). Even though the Malazan book of the fallen defies many fantasy

gender tropes, deviant sexuality among females is more often linked explicitly to reproductive

desire than it is with male sexual violence.

In the same book, Stonny Manakis, a female friend of one of the viewpoint characters, is

raped by a male soldier of the same evil empire. In this case, the motivation is portrayed as

explicitly motivated by sexual desire, and the desire to dominate, humiliate, and abuse. In both

27 Just to drive home the point that monsters are made, not born, the tyrant in question is also a victim. He was a Jaghut child fleeing the Imass pogrom against his people, accidentally condemned by his would-be rescuers to thousands of years of torture by a malfunctioning portal, driving him insane. 108

cases, the perpetrators are products of the same malignant culture that teaches that inflicting

horror in the name of the “one true religion” is not just acceptable, but positively praiseworthy.

Yet women apparently exercise power and domination through reproductive action, while men

enact it by pure physical force. This suggests that while the Erikson’s world reaches for gender

equality, it still presents men and women as different on fundamental levels.

Similarly, in Midnight Tides, a male slave of the “shadow elves” the Tiste Edur, is raped

by one of their goddesses, a warrior-sorceress named Menandor.28 Again, the rape is motivated

not by lust, but because Udinaas has been possessed and inhabited by another spirit, whose

power Menandor wishes to steal and pass on to her child, a son whom she intends to use as a

pawn in her schemes for power. Again, violence perpetrated by females against males is

motivated by reproductive desires. Power may still be the central issue, but Erikson still clearly

represents male sexual desire as fundamentally different from female sexual desire, even across

species and among immortals.

Seren Peddoc, a woman from the Letherii Empire, is another viewpoint character who is

the victim of rape. She is arguably the most complicated portrayal of sexual violence in the entire

series. Much of her character arc during her appearances is her trying to deal with the trauma

inflicted on her, and it portrays how her trauma produces feelings of growing worthlessness,

apathy, and a desire to self-harm in the days and weeks after the incident (Erikson Midnight

Tides). She is helped by a sympathetic band of renegade soldiers, who try to help her with the

emotional burden. This includes a magic-user who teaches her to master her latent powers of

mental magic.

28 As with the Jaghut, the different Tiste races are not explicitly called elves, but they retain most of the stereotypical characteristics – tall, elegant, immortal, beautiful, pointy-eared, etc. There are significant cultural differences from Tolkein’s elves, but they clearly invoke many of the tropes for fantasy elves. 109

This leads to a further complication. In the second book wherein she appears, Seren

travels with Udinaas, the above-mentioned (ex-) slave. The group they are part of is filled with

betrayal and suspicion, and when Seren Peddoc wants some information she suspects that

Udinaas has, she forcibly invades his mind and tries to take it. Udinaas, feeling deeply betrayed,

tells her that he is “done with rape,” directly comparing her mental violation to the rape he suffered in the first book (Erikson Reaper’s Gale). And it shows that it’s possible for someone to be both victim and victimizer. More, it demonstrates how the first leads to the second, since she began honing her magical powers as a result of her trauma, the very power she uses to inflict violation is indirectly a result of her own. Seren remains a sympathetic character, but she immediately regrets her actions and it remains a burden she has to bear that she was willing to hurt someone else for her own gain.

While sexual violence is never glorified in the series, more than one of the main characters commits rape. While the example of Seren Peddoc presents many nuances of both victimhood and victimization, the case of Karsa Orlong is probably the series’ most troubling example of sexual violence.

Karsa Orlong is a parody of the “Barbarian Hero,” archetype, a dark version of Conan the

Barbarian. His journey starts in a simple village, in a community where respect is earned by deeds of prowess, mostly defeating or killing non-tribe members. Karsa’s people are literal giants, bigger than twice the height of a human. Even among his physically formidable people, he is a prodigy, a master of combat and a cunning tactician. In all these respects, he resembles

Conan and other classic examples of the archetype. The difference is that, rather than treating his violent prowess as something to be idolized, the story of Karsa Orlong shows how a society where physical strength and skill at violence produces people who see violence as an end in 110

itself, and how such a society naturally produces horrific brutality. There is no pseudo-chivalric

code for Karsa, and the portrayal of him rejects the “noble savage” archetype. He leads his two

companions on a raid to attack a nearby human community. During the story arc, Karsa and his

companions sexually assault many women, members of a different tribe of their own people.

Karsa also commits rape while trying to escape the village of humans who attempt to capture and

enslave him.

Simply including the act of rape does not constitute an endorsement or an excuse for the

act. Most readers who read “Lolita” do not argue that Nabokov was endorsing pedophilia, even

though Humbert Humbert is an engaging and even sympathetic character. And Erikson seems to

be going out of his way to show that rape isn’t just the act of aberrant individuals, but of sick

cultures. Erikson does not, for example, “accept the axiom common in their sexist and patriarchal culture that all women must control their sexuality if they do not wish to be raped”

(Radway 142). There is no sense that the victims are supposed to blame themselves, nor are the

actions of the rapists excused. Even the main characters who commit these acts are not forgiven,

and unlike the romances that Radway studied, there is no attempt to excuse the actions of the

rapist or make them seem acceptable in context. Most of the characters who commit rape in the

Malazan series come from cultures which are depicted as diseased and dehumanizing in many

other ways. The Panion Domin is a culture that normalizes not just rape, but all forms of atrocity,

and it is a culture that is deliberate evil, because it was created by an abused victim who wanted

the entire world to feel his pain (Memories of Ice). The Letherii empire is repeatedly criticized by

numerous characters because it represents the worst excesses of capitalism. It is a society where wealth and the acquisition of wealth are the only goods, and where a rich enough person can literally buy their way out of any offense save high treason (Erikson Midnight Tides). It is a 111

society that treats people as objects, where a rapacious, self-important central civilization intentionally corrupts and destroys tribal peoples for the gain of a wealthy elite, all the while ruthlessly grinding underfoot a vast underclass. And Karsa Orlong’s tribal culture is one where rape is considered acceptable and even encouraged, since it ensures that the strongest members of the race will pass on their gifts. The intent, in each of these examples, is to show how cultures that promote dehumanizing ideals lead to individuals perpetrating dehumanizing acts, including acts of rape.

Karsa Orlong comes to change his perspective, to regret the violent acts that his culture considered normal. and eventually has an encounter with the daughters he forced onto his victims. But while there is no forgiveness given to him, nor any sense that his actions were good or acceptable, Karsa never makes amends for his sexual violence, either. He admits that he is no

longer the person he was and seems to acknowledge a need to make things right, but as of yet,

Erikson has left his story unfinished, with only the suggestion of a future spin-off series.

Erikson himself has an explanation for why Karsa, in particular, is such an uncomfortable and divisive character. According to the author,

I wanted to address the fantasy trope of the ‘barbarian’ (from the north, no less, and isn’t

it curious how so many heroic barbarians come down from the north?), but do so in

recognition of demonstrable truths about warrior-based societies, as expressed in that

intractable sense of superiority and its arrogant expression; and in recognizing the

implicit ‘invitation’ to the reader (into a civilization-rejecting, civilization-hating

barbarian ‘hero’), I wanted to, via a very close and therefore truncated point of view,

make it damned uncomfortable in its ‘reality’ (Erikson “The Problem of Karsa Orlong”).

As a reader, I am inclined to sympathize with Erikson’s motivations. The point of Karsa 112

Orlong is not to glorify or revel in his acts. Orlong is an attempt to depict, with a sense “realism,” the results of a “warrior culture” that focuses on personal honor and prowess above all. It is a deconstruction of the sort of white, male savior power fantasy that Conan inspires. In Conan, the sexually aggressive barbarian is shown as being the only honest, decent man in an otherwise dishonest world, a man of strict principles set against the corrupting influence of civilization.

Karsa Orlong undermines this. He shows us that a world of naked barbarism is no more clean or honest or morally upright than civilization, and that the exercise of naked power can be just as ugly when perpetrated by a “barbarian hero” as by a civilized villain. Conan the Barbarian implied that white men were better off as barbarians, and that their elemental racial purity had been stolen by the decadence of western civilization. It’s no coincidence that Conan the

Barbarian was contemporaneous with Tarzan stories, which implied a similar fantasy of the

“mighty white man,” the concept that white men freed of the chains of civilization returned to a natural state of super humanity. The brutal ugliness of Karsa Orlong’s actions is intended to parody and undermine the white male power fantasy that is the barbarian hero.

This facet of the Malazan book of the fallen also makes it clear how important it is to read this literature not just as individual works, but as meditations on generic tropes. Absent

Conan the Barbarian, or another example of the romanticized fantasy barbarian, Karsa Orlong loses much of his impact as a critique of genre tropes.

Still, even considering that Erikson is trying to make the reader uncomfortable with his depictions of rape and the naked ugliness that lies behind the barbarian power fantasy, the way sexual violence is used in the case of Karsa Orlong is problematic because it focuses on the perpetrator, not the victim. Karsa Orlong’s victims are not well-developed characters. Only two of them even have names. In a very real sense, they exist only to be raped, to serve as object 113

lessons in the brutality of war. Erikson’s goal of pointing out toxic cultural norms is laudable.

But still, the narrative lingers lovingly on Karsa’s warrior prowess, and some of the bite is taken out of Erikson’s satire simply because Karsa’s brutal, violent approach to problem solving, and

to the world in general, is often very successful. He may regret the sexual violence he

perpetrates, but Karsa continues to use violence to solve most of his other problems. If Karsa is

supposed to be a condemnation of violent warrior cultures, that message is undercut not only by

his phenomenal effectiveness, but by the awe and respect that it earns him from almost every

other character he meets during the series.

Despite its problematic depiction of violence, The Malazan Book of the Fallen represents

a fundamental change in the moral narrative of fantasy series. Compared to, say, Lord of the

Rings or Dragonlance, where characters sometimes literally have “good” and “evil” written in

their physical bodies, the Erikson’s novels contain a profound moral ambivalence. Almost every

character, even the out-and-out bastards, are given moments of sympathy, allowing the audience

to see the forces that made them monstrous, if not endorse their monstrousness.

And “monstrousness” is more complex. The Jaghut, often monstrous looking by human

standards, are usually some of the more humane people in the series, albeit in a deeply cynical

and bitter way. Erikson eschews the old standards of physical beauty. Even in a novel like

Salvatore’s Drizzt series, where Drizzt is both coded as a racial other and as a protagonist, he’s

still portrayed as very attractive, his otherness turned into a sort of exotic beauty. But the

Malazan book of the fallen has ugly, even inhuman-looking creatures that turn out to be better

people than most of the attractive individuals. Perhaps most importantly, Erikson’s universe

embraces the idea that culture, not species, makes the difference between a people. The series

takes pains to make it clear that cultural norms create toxic viewpoints, because important main 114 characters are constantly philosophizing to other characters on that very subject. The Malazan universe is a post-Milgram, post-Zimbardo one, a universe that runs on the premise that tyranny and misrule and abuse tend to perpetuate themselves, and that people tend to do to the world what was done to them.

This is not to say that every reader picks up on or analyzes these complexities. While reading Erikson’s blog and searching fan forums to get a rough idea of audience to the portrayal of sexual violence in the series, one person said that they’d never thought about Karsa as a controversial character (Erikson The Problem of Karsa Orlong). On the other hand, there are

Reddit discussion board threads with titles like “Why does everyone like Karsa Orlong?”

(Hummingbird24) which demonstrates both that a significant portion of the audience like him and that some of the rest wonder why. To me, this speaks to deeper divisions within geek culture.

There exists a whole spectrum of opinions about what kind of content is acceptable and what kind of heroes the reader should be rooting for. There is also significant debate about whether writing a character like Karsa constitutes an endorsement of the kind of behavior he engages in.

At the heart of it, though, I suspect that there is a plaintive tone in the question “why does everyone like Karsa Orlong?” It’s one part of fandom desperately trying to figure out why another part thinks something like Karsa that could be acceptable. To some fans, I suspect, he comes across as the fantasy version of the college football star who gets off with a slap on the wrist for sexual assault charges. This deep rift in fantasy fandom comes down to a question of standards, of acceptable behavior, and of how readers interpret characters as examples of out-of- character morality.

Both the fiction that inspired D&D and that has been inspired by it have complicated relationships with race and gender. Some of this fiction, particularly the older works, are outright 115 racist or sexist. And as the example of drow shows, some of that racism and sexism is exhibited in the tropes used by the authors of D&D. But these tropes do not occur in a vacuum. The racism and sexism present in D&D’s foundational texts are part of a larger cultural milieu, and changes in that milieu are reflected in the changing attitudes simply saying “These tropes are racist/sexist” is not especially useful, either in trying to convince recalcitrant fans or in trying to fix the problems caused by troubling tropes. What is far more interesting is the constant

Bahktinian conversation that gamers as content creators participate in. Erikson, for all that he uses problematic tropes, is still an example of how gamers try to change the conversation by questioning the value of traditional fantasy adventure tropes like the barbarian hero. As the next chapter demonstrates, many players are well aware of the problems in fantasy fiction, and they use numerous creative outlets in order to voice that criticism, creating works that, like D&D itself, can both reaffirm and question the values present in fantasy tropes.

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CHAPTER 3: REPRESENTING D&D

Since 1982 when D&D was casually featured in the film E.T. (Spielberg), it has been a constant presence in American popular culture, not just as a game, but as a symbol of all things nerdy. Previous chapters have focused on introducing game concepts, scholarly framework, and the fantasy fiction that informs Dungeons & Dragons as a game and as a hobby. This chapter focuses on the way that D&D, both as a practice and as a symbol, is represented in popular culture. These representations include how fandom represents itself, how people who aren’t fans represent people who are, and how “geek and nerd” fandoms and fandom identities have gone from outsider identities to part of mainstream American culture. But in doing so, it also reveals how both mainstream American culture and nerd culture are still dominated by white males as the “default” setting for a character, even as there is increasing pressure for diversity of representation.

The difference between “texts from” D&D and “texts about D&D” is a subtle one. The most basic definition I am using is that a “text from” D&D is something based directly on D&D and takes the world “seriously” For example, the Malazan Book of the Fallen, as mentioned in

Chapter 3, has an entire section where the characters spend their time making fun of the conventions of heroic fantasy. The text is talking “about” the genre, in that it’s a metacritical reflection nested within the larger story. But at the same time, the Malazan Book of the Fallen still lives within the fantasy genre and obeys many of the conventions even as it makes fun of them. Karsa Orlong may deconstruct many of the tropes of the barbarian hero, but he also embodies them. The characters take the world seriously, and there’s no. The texts I focus on in this chapter acknowledge the ludic structure of D&D, as opposed to replicating the conventions of literary fantasy. These texts are defined by acknowledging specifically within themselves that 117

they are fictional, or by clearly calling out the conventions on which it lives. Many of the texts I

refer to in this chapter are comedies, since mockery, criticism, and reflection are frequently

associated, and comedic works often have more freedom to explicitly point out story conventions

or acknowledge that they are, in fact, telling a story.

The other vital difference between the focus of chapters three and four is the intent with

which I am reading the texts. I am primarily reading the following texts as commentaries from

fans and non-fans about how they react to the tropes and conventions of D&D. In other words,

how they react to D&D as a whole, as opposed to the influence of particular elements of

literature on specific tropes of D&D.

In previous chapters, I have tried to analyze the origins of D&D, and where the game’s

creators got their ideas about race and gender. In this chapter, I am primarily interested in how

fans and content creators react to those tropes as they appear in the game and, most especially,

the difference between how tropes are represented in texts, and how people think about them. I

believe that in creative work, there is always a gap between intent and execution. Part of the

function of this chapter is to describe the way that fans talk and think about themselves. The way

fans self-reflect and self-imagine shows a range of possibilities in D&D for thinking about race,

gender, sex, and sexuality. D&D’s culture is diverse, and some of these representations show

parts of fandom that are still dominated by white male culture, while other representations

demonstrate more inclusive ways of thinking and acting.

On the Small Screen: D&D in Mainstream Television

The Big Bang Theory’s representation of the game shows a mainly white and male version of D&D culture, while reinforcing the image of those white male nerds as social outsiders. This is a show where the jokes rely on the idea that “nerds are funny and different.” 118

And while these nerds are empathetic and the main characters, they are also there to be laughed

at. The laugh-track plays when the characters say in-game terms, as if merely playing the game was comical in itself as opposed to the situations that arise around and within it. The male characters playing D&D is itself a punchline. As the female characters travel to Las Vegas, the audience is shown the male characters gathering, saying things like “The ladies are away, the guys will play,” “anything could happen” and “things are gonna get crazy!” immediately followed by Sheldon announcing “Dungeons & Dragons!” (Lorre). Nerd hobbies are presented as inherently strange and humorous to the audience, and the whole setup of the joke is “these characters think D&D is exciting, and that’s funny.” Shows like Big Bang Theory are not actively hostile towards nerds (and D&D) in the way that something like Mazes and Monsters

(see below) is, but the point of view of the audience stands outside looking in, and the show’s

representation of the game reinforces the vision of nerd-dom as something where only males are

the “legitimate” nerds, and other players have to be inducted by them to be a part of the game.

Community, on the other hand, has produced some well-received representations of

Dungeons & Dragons that make fun of D&D but also look at the game with far more empathy

than The Big Bang Theory. In contrast The Big Bang Theory, Community’s D&D episode starts

with all the main characters as outsiders to the game. The main cast members of the show

initially know nothing about it, and are only playing the game because their acquaintance, Fat

Neil, has been showing signs of depression, and is implied to be potentially suicidal because he

feels isolated and unwanted.29 The central friend-group of the show rally around him, volunteering to place a game of Dungeons & Dragons to “make him feel like a winner.”

29 The derogatory nickname was given to him by Jeff, one of the main characters, a fact which drives Jeff to convince the rest of the group to play the game in the first place. 119

This setup seems designed to reinforce negative stereotypes of D&D players. Fat Neil is a

sad nerd who only feels empowered in the context of D&D, and the rest of the group are trying

to humor him in a way that’s well-intentioned yet pitying. But as the episode progresses, the

group becomes absorbed in the game, in no small part because Pierce Hawthorne, a mean,

unlikable member of the main cast appears to antagonize the group. The main group decided not

to invite him because they did not want him being cruel to Fat Neil during his time of crisis but

Pierce, feeling left out, shows up to the game and proceeds to try to run it off the rails by stealing

items from Fat Neil’s character, killing another member of the party, and ultimately researching

the adventure module the group is playing to try and exploit out-of-character knowledge to “win” at the game by ruining everyone else’s fun (Russo).

Because the rest of the players are emotionally committed to foiling Pierce’s plan and making Fat Neil feel better, the group becomes invested in the game. The show subtly peels back the layers of motivation and shows the players enjoying the game, not necessarily because of the fantasy tropes involved. (Jeff notably still refers to how “everything in this world is silly”.) The impression conveyed to the audience is that the game is less about the fantasy world and more about coming together to solve a problem, and to have a shared experience that unites a group of people. This is a representation of “D&D as hanging out,” as discussed in the introduction, where the importance of the shared social experience is prioritized over the gameplay. While the episode pokes fun at fantasy tropes, most of the humor comes from the character’s personalities and interactions, rather than simply making fun of the game or its players for being different.

Community also pokes fun at the racism inherent within the game. One player, Ken

Chang, shows up in costume as a “drow Elf,” a costume which consists of fake ears and coal-

black makeup on his face and hands. The effect is close enough to blackface for Shirley Bennet, 120

a black character, to ask if the group is “just going to ignore this hate crime.” This could be read as a subtle take-that at either the racism inherent in the text (why are the black elves the evil ones?) or a nod at the fact that many of the tropes players’ use when playing non-human races

are influenced by real-world racism. Likewise, Britta asks at one point that perhaps the attacking

goblins are defending their ancestral lands and that they should talk to them. Later, she tries to

befriend a gnome who is clearly oppressed because of his race, saying that a “gnome is three

species classes worse than a human” (Guest et al).

While the idea of “species classes” that are formally ranked isn’t a game concept, there

are monster types, broad categories like “humanoid” or “giant” or “dragon” that identify monsters with shared themes and powers. And there certainly is an informal hierarchy among them, based on the relative strength of each categories. A dragon-type monster is likely to be more fearsome than an animal-type monster, for example, except in unusual circumstances.

Valuing creatures based on their potential threat, and the potential reward of killing them is an integral part of D&D, as is distrusting some creatures (like monstrous humanoids) based on their appearance. On one level, the show is playing to Britta’s usual characterization as someone who practices self-aggrandizement through exaggerated gestures at social justice, but it’s also making a joke about how D&D teaches players to think in terms of racial categories. The rest of the group doesn’t bat an eye at either slaughtering the goblins or the gnome’s death and find Britta’s attempts at reasonable dialog to be obnoxious.

As discussed in earlier chapters, a casual acceptance of racially-based violence (when targeted against “evil” races) and a fundamentally racist outlook within the fantasy setting are common tropes in D&D, and Community is clearly referencing this, while also poking fun at

Britta’s tendency to portray herself as a socially enlightened individual. But despite these critical 121

moments, the overall impression of the game is one of a positive social experience, where even

the villain, Pierce, is ultimately helpful, because his aggressive “dickishness” gives the group

something to unite against, and Neil even thanks him for “the best game of D&D I ever played.”

It is not surprising that Community looks on D&D with an affectionate eye. Former show

runner Dan Harmon is a D&D player and has created an entire show based on celebrities playing

D&D called HarmonQuest. This series stands out because while it’s still a staged and managed

representation of D&D, the show is about the game and the stories it tells, rather than a story

about fictionalized characters playing the game.

HarmonQuest is effectively a more polished and professionally developed version of the

many Twitch streams and podcasts about D&D (although the game that the group actually plays

is Pathfinder, a variant of D&D which is now independently developed) and is both a

representation of playing the game and a sarcastic, self-deprecating celebration of nerd culture.

The show explicitly ties the playing of the game to the lonely, social awkward gamer stereotype,

saying that “Since the dawn of the 1970’s, fantasy roleplaying games have provided men and

women with an escape from their awkward lives,” (HarmonQuest Season 1, Episode 1). The show is split between a live-action portion showing the players around a table, on a stage, in front of a studio audience, and animated portions that depict the in-game adventures of the player’s characters. Both the live action portion and the animated portion revel in representing gamer stereotypes (meaning both stereotypes of and by gamers). The studio table where the game is played is covered in cans of off-brand soda, popcorn, and cheese snacks, all stereotypical gaming foods. The intent is to invoke the primordial suburban basement, a nod at the white, working- and middle-class environment which created D&D. 122

The animated portions are equally revealing, because unlike many works, the audio of the players around the table (including audience reactions) plays over the game, creating a constant, blurring of the line between the action within the game and the conversation around the table, although the show becomes live-action again during most extended out-of-character digressions.

This makes HarmonQuest similar to Community’s D&D-focused episodes, because the interplay of the audio tracks in HarmonQuest and the fact that the in-game events are never shown in

Community both remind the audience that not only is everything taking place in the players’ heads, the players are aware of that. These works both represent gamers as a very self-aware group of people who know that what they are doing probably seems ridiculous to a lot of people, but who play these games anyway and have a sense of humor about it. It also has a lot to say about both race and gender.

The show’s representation of the main female player character, Beor O’Shift, looks fetishistic, but her actions fetishize violence more than sex. She is animated as wearing a chainmail bikini, and while some of the other characters also have ridiculous outfits, none of the male characters dress in a sexually explicit or suggestive fashion. At the same time, her character is also catastrophically violent to the point of parody, and despite the way the character is animated, there’s nothing about the dialog or the way the player characterizes Beor that seems sexually provocative. The animated segments of the show might make her look vaguely like a

Red Sonja character, but the art is so blobby that the character registers as much as a parody of the chainmail bikini stereotype as an example of it. And Erin McGathy, Beor’s player, is introduced as one of the “expert roleplayers.” Of course, the fact that one woman out of a cast of four regulars is exceptional underscores how male-dominated roleplaying gaming has been as a hobby. 123

If the main cast of HarmonQuest is dominated by men, it is even more dominated by whiteness. The only nonwhite players are special guests, and they are almost always nonexpert players. These are not criticisms of the show as an individual piece of media, though, because at least HarmonQuest makes an effort to invite strangers in and welcome them to roleplaying and makes it okay for nonexperts to participate. The point of the show is that playing a game of D&D is not actually about winning the game. Again, the most positive representations of D&D are consistently those that emphasize the “hanging out” aspect of D&D. HarmonQuest encourages a spirit of tolerance and sharing, albeit with a great deal of sarcasm, cynicism and irreverent humor. The player’s race or gender is never treated as a reason why they should not be included in the game.

One of the biggest problems in gaming, identified by nearly all of my informants, is a small but obnoxiously vocal segment of the gaming community that wants to keep gaming as a white, male-dominated space. Any effort to make something more inclusive, or to point out examples of racism and/or sexism in gaming of all types is met with hostility by these elements of the gaming population. And as is all too common in American culture, this disproportionate vocal minority attracts much of the attention, and while they are seriously problematic, they also serve as a convenient scapegoat for larger, systemic problems. Avoiding obvious racism and misogyny is a good start, but it is also necessary to question fantasy conventions that perpetuate systemic racism.

The fanbase, Wizards of the Coast, and American culture in general, all show this same trend of stepping back from obvious problems while continuing systems that more subtly reinforce problematic concepts of race and gender. For example, D&D’s artwork has become much more inclusive and less focused on “chainmail bikini” stereotypes. The artwork has also 124

become markedly more diverse, incorporating both non-white humans and women as serious

frontline warriors in realistic armor (or, at least unrealistic in the same ways that male armor is,

fantasy artists being fond of impractical flourishes in character design). At the same time, the

game still uses race as a central aspect of a character’s makeup.

There are also some positive steps, such as making elves more fluid in both sex and

gender. One of the more recent and interesting developments in D&D, the creators have, as part

of a larger campaign to reduce the presence of the gender binary in D&D, created rules for a

special set of elves who are able to change their sex between male, female, and “neither”

according to their feelings. This also comes after significant changes to the way gender was

presented at the launch of the fifth edition, language that made it clear that “gender” does not

have to be restrictive or define one’s entire character (Crawford et al 13-15).

Of course, players could always present their characters however they wanted around their own table, because D&D is a game of pretend. What is at stake in this change is the definition of “normal” within the context of the game. By introducing this change, WoTC is eroding both the idea of gender and sexual binaries, and the connection between the two. While elves are not human, they are a player race, and the player is meant to be able to use the character as a vehicle for exploring another way of being.

The tropes of D&D today are different than the ones that older players make jokes about.

While chainmail bikinis are an important part of the history of fantasy, they are being phased out of most mainstream fantasy fiction. From comments that several of my informants made, many of the sexually exploitative tropes of fantasy are still alive and well in the thriving area of nerd- centered pornography, but that is, perhaps, another book. The important point is that many of the mainstream representations of D&D are based on older versions of the game. They are still 125 relevant, because those iterations of the game still shaped the people now producing those pieces of culture, but at the same time it is important to use these “texts about” D&D as examples of how D&D has shaped culture. That does not mean that modern incarnations of D&D will have the same effect on the audience.

HarmonQuest offers a much more inclusive vision than that. It doesn’t precisely address the history of racism in tabletop gaming, but it at least makes a space at the table for people who are not white men. At worst, it represents the current demographic situation in which women and people of color still aren’t fully represented in and catered to by fantasy roleplaying games and their manufacturers. At best, HarmonQuest shows that nerds and nerd culture are not only becoming more mainstream, but nerd hobbies are something to be publicized, celebrated, and shared. The emphasis on D&D as “hanging out,” as a social space whose value comes from transient moments of shared humanity, shows how D&D can be a positive and inclusive experience.

Even the irreverent children’s cartoon Teen Titans Go! Pays homage to D&D in one episode. The episode focuses on Robin, the leader of the group, trying to get them to play the game according to his strict interpretation of the rules, while the rest of the group focuses on telling an entertaining story. This story simultaneously mocks players who take the rules too seriously and celebrates the experience of shared imagination (Friedle). When everything from sitcoms to children’s cartoons have episodes where the characters gather around and play D&D, it is a clear indication that the experience of playing D&D is one that sticks with content creators, and an experience that is relatable enough to appeal to many different audiences.

Futurama, though, is perhaps the best example of how nerd culture has infiltrated mainstream culture. While Futurama was a hybrid of comedy and science fiction less focused on 126

normal-esque life than Matt Groening’s other project, The Simpsons, Futurama was still very

much a show that ran on crude sexual and scatological humor, and which originally aired on a

major network. It was not a show about nerds, with the main cast of dumb slacker, competent-

but-lonely female, and criminal best friend. Yet it was clearly written by nerds, to the point that

Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D, was invited to be a guest voice on the program, and later

(Cohen, David X.), one of the show’s movies was based entirely on a game of D&D (Carey-

Hill), of the “players enter the game world” subgenre.30 Gygax seemed thrilled and delighted,

but so were the people writing the show. This wasn’t a major network sitcom with nerds being

made fun of, this was a major network sitcom where nerds were running it. People who grew up

loving D&D were (and are) occupying the seats of creative decision.

This is why D&D matters in the broader scheme of American culture: it shows up in the

remembrances of the people who produce culture. It shapes the way people think as they grow

and has far-reaching effects on the culture they produce. Representations of race and gender in

the game becomes representations of race and gender in larger culture, which in turn shape the

views and opinions of people who’ve never picked up and oddly shaped die.

Moral Panic, and the Mockery Thereof

The idea that D&D is something strange, aberrant, and even dangerous is not new.

During the “Satanic Panic” of the eighties, many people believed that the United States was

inundated with satanic cults. Dungeons & Dragons, because it mentions magic, was seen by

30 The “players enter the game world” is also a popular trope in Japanese animation and is in fact a genre or subgenre all its own. Many of these shows are also directly influenced by D&D to the point where some of them look and feel like fictionalized versions of someone’s D&D campaign. Because adding another national cultural context would have unduly complicated this work, I have not discussed these pieces of media in more depth, but Overlord (2015) is an excellent example. The show’s magic system, in particular, is clearly a nod to Dungeons & Dragons, even replicating many of the spell names, as well as having a pseudo-Vancian spell-level system. 127

some as an occult text. The infamous Australian religious cartoonist Jack Chick drew a comic in

which young people learned functional magic from Dungeons & Dragons, and people died over

the fate of their D&D characters (Chick). Chick’s cartoons are religious propaganda, intended to

be given out to young people to warn them of the dangerous influence of Satan in modern

society. These “Chick tracts,” which seem to earnestly believe that D&D will teach the players to

perform actual, efficacious magic, are popular fodder for D&D players to make fun of, to the

point that a semi-satirical short film was made based off of them in 2014 (Gonda).

Similarly, 1982 furnished a made-for-television movie called “Mazes & Monsters,” in which a young Tom Hanks plays a character who goes insane while playing a thinly-veiled reference to Dungeons & Dragons, driven mad by the addictive escape into a fantasy world, causing him to try to kill himself because he thinks of himself as his character, and that his suicidal act will be part of a spell. The general impression conveyed by works like Chick tracts and Mazes & Monsters was that D&D was a game that either contained instructions in real-world black magic, drove impressionable young people insane through massive persuasive power, or possibly both.

Such attitudes were patently ridiculous and unfounded in any real evidence, but that did not stop some people in believing in them. Several of my older informants reported that they had been affected by religiously motivated fear of D&D (Interviews 16, 17, 8). All of the informants involved were men who had been in their mid-to-early teens, around 1982-1984. In each case, their parents were talked to by a relative or friend who had some concern that the game might be an evil influence on the child. None of my informants were prevented from playing the game, as the parents in all cases decided that the game did more good than harm. In the words of one of 128 my informants “My parents didn’t want to take away one of the few things I had that helped me connect with other people.” (Interview 16)

Dungeons & Dragons serving as a person’s first or primary social outlet is a common trope in both the stories I collected, and in media representations of the show. Many of my informants alluded to the fact that, while they often identified with the idea of the “lonely nerd,”

D&D allowed them to foster social connections and have some of their first real friends. This is not a universal experience, and many of my other informants reported having plenty of friends and activities outside D&D. As one informant put it, “It would be hard to play D&D if you really had no friends, because you need other people to play with” (Interview 25). but the fact that the game helps many socially awkward young people form friend groups is one of the reasons that the game is so pervasive in popular culture: content creators have strong, emotion-laden memories of the game, and they like to tell stories about playing D&D.

In the end, though, the moral panic over Dungeons & Dragons has mostly become a target for ridicule and a source of in-jokes among gamers. The Satanic Panic is viewed with various levels of eye-rolling and amusement by modern D&D players, giving people an excuse to be snarky about religious ultra-conservatives. There might have been more anger if the panic had led to anything, but in the end, the hobby hasn’t suffered much damage, except in the minds of people on the religious fringes of society. At the same time, fear of a real moral panic might have bred some caution into the authors. They have been quite a bit more careful in recent decades to make it clear that they don’t endorse evil acts, and to try to convey, in a vague but extant way, that D&D is emphatically a game about being the good guys.31 Still, though, D&D

31 As represented by the fact that the only book that even admits to the existence of rape as a concept was sold in shrink wrap and marked “adults only.” Except for a few provocative drawings, later editions of D&D have tried to be very careful about things that might be considered unfriendly to “traditional family values.” 129 releases plenty of content with creatures that look demonic and diabolic (usually as the antagonists) so the game’s creators clearly don’t see a problem with visual reputations of

“occult-“ seeming subjects. But other than pushing Wizards of the Coast to be a bit more circumspect in their ways, there were no serious problems for gamers stemming from the brief, damp spark of moral outrage. In other words, it does not inconvenience D&D player, and so it is now a joke.

One of the most widely repeated bits of D&D lore is a joke about religious panic over

D&D. The Dead Ale Wives, a 1990’s comedy sketch troupe that included Dan Harmon, creator of HarmonQuest, performed a skit titled “Dungeons & Dragons” that mocks the entire concept of D&D as evil, introducing itself as a shocking expose of “Satan’s Game,” then proceeds with nine minutes of shrill-voiced nerds yelling at each other about ogres, knives, Cheetos, and

Mountain Dew (Dead Ale Wives). The skit is so popular that it is considered passé and even somewhat annoying to start quoting it, but all the same the skit was quoted during seven different game sessions that I personally observed (even Monty Python and the Holy Grail, another perennial favorite, only got three). As far as I have been able to determine, the skit is popular for two reasons: nerd culture is frequently self-mocking and examples like this skit and the Teen

Titans episode detailed above, where the “serious” D&D player is ludicrously uptight, are prime examples of this self-mocking trend. And two, the skit makes it clear that, at its worst, D&D is no darker or more occult than a bunch of socially awkward and mildly irritating sitting around making bad jokes.

Convergence Culture and Fan-Made Products

The line between “texts from” and “texts about” Dungeons & Dragons is a thin one, because D&D is a form of what Henry Jenkins calls “convergence culture.” A convergence 130

culture is one defined by the breakdown of boundaries between different works and forms of

media (Jenkins), meaning that “D&D” refers not just to the game, but to the ideas people have

about the game, different ways of playing the game, and the cross-media aspects of the game

such as artworks, texts, digital assistants, dice, etc. As the preceding chapters show, D&D is an

amalgamation of tropes and ideas from science fiction, fantasy, classical mythology, and other

eclectic sources. In fact, D&D was creating convergence culture long before Henry Jenkins

wrote about it in 2006. Jenkins says in reference to franchises like Harry Potter, “Storytellers

now think about storytelling in terms of creating openings for consumer participation.” (Jenkins

169) Whether they are Disney-owned superhero franchises with a massive array of branded

products for sale, or the new Disney-owned Star Wars franchise with an even more massive

marketing presence, or even some titanic marketing campaigns that don’t involve Disney (yet),

modern media empires are built on a cross-platform strategies that offer consumers, especially younger ones, a plethora of ways to interact with and become emotionally bonded to both brands and product lines.

This is not intended to set up a dichotomy between the plucky, devoted fans of D&D and the evil, cynical marketing practices of other major cultural icons. D&D is owned by Wizards of the Coast, and Wizards of the Coast has long been producing Magic: The Gathering, whose business model involves some practices that border on gambling.32 Wizards of the Coast is, in

turn, owned by Hasbro, a major toy company, and toy companies are notorious for creating

entire media empires just to sell toys. Witness the glut of toy-line based 80’s cartoons, and the

modern attempts to milk the nostalgia for the money of 30-somethings and their children. Yet

32 Magic: The Gathering trading cards are sold in a variety of forms, but one of the most common is in “booster packs”. These packs contain a number of semi-randomized cards, with more valuable cards being (mostly) rarer. While many players simply purchase the cards they want from a physical or online store, the chance of getting a lucky is a key component of the game’s business model. 131

while it is now the most famous tabletop roleplaying game in the world, D&D started out as a

fan-made product itself. It might be that D&D helped inspire the trend of making cultural products more interactive, because D&D is one of the first modern forms of media where audience participation in making the story wasn’t just invited but required.

D&D has always been about convergence culture, because what the authors of D&D sell

is a system for letting people take part in the fantasies of the collective nerd imagination. D&D is

a toolkit for playing out the stories that nerds have read and loved and letting them imagine

themselves as the heroes (or villains) of those stories. Many protagonists in books or television

or film are created so that the consumer can project themselves onto that character. But only in

D&D do you get the make the choices. Players do not just watch the character on the screen do

something, they get to decide what the character does. They can rewrite old stories and create

new ones out of existing tropes, and even play with those tropes or create their own.

The official and semi-official D&D products made by nerds are often sold among

themselves in fan economies or published for free on the internet. just as important, in their way,

as more mainstream work. These works are more intimate to nerd’s understanding of themselves,

in that they show fans speaking a common language. A show like Big Bang Theory is on the

outside looking in, with nerds at least somewhat the object of ridicule – and there’s a divide

among self-identified nerds about the show’s representation of nerd culture, which reflects this

ambiguous representation. Shows like Community or even HarmonQuest still address themselves

to non-nerd audiences and often simplify or explain around game concepts in ways that most

people will not notice, but which are evident to the die-hard fan. For example, in the Community

episode Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the dungeon master rolls all the dice, including those

of the players. This may not seem like a big deal to non-players, but most D&D players far prefer 132

to roll their own dice. It’s part of the fun of the game, and some players even consider a die to be

cursed if the DM so much as touches it.

Fan-centered media, like D&D-based webcomics, are made by and for fans are fundamentally different from the television shows described above. They generally either explain game concepts more fully and accurately, or it’s assumed that readers will either know what the

terms mean or figure it out from other fans. Some of these webcomics also serve as the bases for

interactions among fans that go far beyond the subjects of the comic. The forum for the popular

and long-running D&D webcomic Order of the Stick, for example, has a fan community with a

large and very active LGBTQIA++ subcomponent. As with many fan communities, people are

drawn in because of the D&D-related media, and a shared love of the game leads to shared

conversations about related and non-related subjects. The shared connection of D&D can even

create a space for critical discussion, although some communities regulate what kinds of

discussion can happen on their board to avoid contentious topics, or those inappropriate for

minors.

Webcomics about D&D are popular and have been around since the pioneering days of

the internet. Penny Arcade, a webcomic whose community is a major influence in the world of

gaming, often features D&D. But there is a far greater number of small, less financially

successful webcomics that continue publication. By examining these stories, many of which

poke fun at or deconstruct tropes of the genre, scholars can understand how gamers think about

the way their hobby portrays race and gender, and how they talk about the hobby when

unburdened by the need to make the final product appeal to a broader audience.

Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic (YAFGC) exemplifies the way that D&D can be the

basis for thoughtful storytelling about sex, race, and gender. This series a long-running “slice-of- 133

life” comic that’s been ongoing on a several-times-weekly basis for over ten years. It focuses on the lives of the evil inhabitants of the Black Mountain, a sort of super-dungeon that holds many different kingdoms and lairs of evil creatures. The comic has a generally light tone and makes fun of some of the grimmer subject matter of the genre, such as torture (in a way slightly reminiscent of newspaper comic Wizard of Id).

The name of the comic is important, as it indicates that when it was started, fantasy gamer webcomics were already prolific. This isn’t surprising, considering that many of the people who adopted the internet early were also people who played Dungeons & Dragons. Early internet denizens liked talking about their hobbies. They liked creating transformative works about the hobby. And despite the name, the comic is not about generic fantasy settings but about

D&D in particular. Some of the game’s signature monsters, are part of the main cast, like beholders (giant floating eyeballs) and mind flayers (squid-headed humanoids). These are creatures that are specific to D&D and are technically the trademarked property of Wizards of the Coast. The author even recognized this and has begun to phase out some of the trademarked monsters to avoid antagonizing WoTC (Interview 18). The game is a “generic” D&D setting, but it relies heavily on the conventions of the genre.

As an example of how certain tropes are specific to fantasy gaming as opposed to fantasy as a literary genre, the concepts of “adventuring” and “going on quests” are meaningfully different in gaming versus literature. In classic high fantasy literature, an “adventure” is something undertaken because of a terrible exigency. Frodo takes the ring to Mount Doom because Sauron is about to take over the world. Adventures, even exciting ones, are dangerous things that someone has to do because there is a looming disaster. The idea of “Adventuring” as a profession has different meaning in fantasy gaming. “Adventuring” in the fantasy game context 134

means getting together a small group of specialists and traveling to haunted, infested, or

forgotten ruins, fighting a variety of monsters, and most importantly, taking their stuff. How self-

aware people within the world are about this “adventuring as a job” attitude varies, and the level

of self-awareness often sets the tone for the game. Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic is quite

self-aware, and the way it invokes and plays with tropes reveals complicated attitudes towards gender, sex, and race.

On one level, the comic seems to embrace the simple, deterministic views about race that

I have discussed previously. When explaining their behavior, characters will literally invoke their racial alignments, saying things like “goblins are evil” to explain their behavior (YAFGC 348:

Sauce for the Goblin). But this is not exactly an invocation of Aesop’s “Scorpion and the Frog.”

While characters use their alignment as a justification for doing nasty things to others, even the evil characters will show moral conflict. In the above comic, for example, another character responds to “Goblins are evil” by saying “…lawful” (YAFGC 348). The point being that the character is uncomfortable with her actions because on one hand she wants to be self-interested,

and, on the other hand, she’s violating a rule of her culture, and her lawful nature makes her

uncomfortable about it.

But while characters within the strip often explain their actions with reference to their

racial culture or their identity as “evil” or “good,” there’s considerable flexibility in what those

terms mean. For example, Evil Orc Maula Bloodhand and (presumably) Good Human Owen

Grayfort fall in love and have a child together. After being estranged for many years, the pair and

their child reunite and share an amicable relationship, even spending an unnamed winter holiday together in a very congenial fashion. (YAFGC 101-155, 576). There’s a certain sense to the comic that Good and Evil can be both serious ethical outlook (many of the evil creatures take 135

outright glee in acts of torture and malice, albeit comically-depicted) and also political

affiliations (the protagonists of the comic are all part of an affiliation of the Black Mountain

monsters, and their allegiance to “team evil” is part of that pseudo-political association).

The comic’s attitude towards sex and gender is similarly complicated. Even the monstrous races use humanoid standards of beauty. Not only do all the monstrous races seem to find humanoids attractive, a standard trope of both fantasy and science fiction, but races like hobgoblins will explicitly call themselves “ugly” as compared to humans (YAFGC 911). And when I say “humanoid standards of beauty,” I mean usual American standards of beauty – young women with hourglass figures and muscular, athletic men whose shoulders and hips form a downward-pointing triangle. In this fantasy universe, the recognized standards for beauty are those recognized by mainstream American media.

At the same time, the comic breaks significantly from D&D’s instructional texts by bringing character’s sexuality into the equation at all. By default, D&D has approached sexuality from an oblique angle. Where sexuality appears at all, it’s almost exclusively the domain of the wicked and perverse, as in the examples from Chapter 3. Romance is fine, but characters who are interested specifically in sex are usually suspect, or at best comic relief. But while most of the evil characters in YAFGC are certainly sexual beings, so are the good characters. Healthy sex lives (and a few unhealthy ones) are much of the spice of the comic. Promiscuity seems to be a major component of the lives of the evil (many of them in definitively non-monogamous relationships), but while that seems to be a “perk” of being evil, the non-traditional relationships themselves aren’t portrayed as evil. If anything, it is the evil character’s willingness to reject

“good” standards of behavior that open them up to more personally satisfying relationships.

Some creatures which are genderless or hermaphroditic in D&D’s instructional texts, like 136

beholders and mind flayers, are given genders in the comics, largely in order to make these

creatures which are otherwise monstrous seem more human. For example, it sets up the situation

where Bob the Beholder and Gren the Goblin both have to convince their parents to accept their

interspecies relationship. This leads to a rather bizarre situation where a creature that is

essentially a floating sack of eyeballs is made more “human” by the arbitrary addition of a large

set of lips, or a moustache.

According to the author, the text’s approach to sexuality is a direct reflection of his own

inner conflict between his current beliefs about sexuality and his “white, male, moderately

Christian upbringing” (Interview 18). The author explained that introducing two gay men into his

comic was a major step for him in coming to terms with his more liberal adult views about

sexuality and gender identity and exorcising prejudices inflicted on him by his raising. He also

noted that he specifically used existing characters for this role because he wanted to use characters who already felt “real,” and that he specifically wanted to use male characters because the author was, at that point, felt that introducing lesbian characters would run the risk of being

too fetishy, and also would not properly confront his issues with sexual fluidity and gender roles.

This is an important example of two things about roleplaying games: first, it is very hard

to draw a line between roleplaying games and other media. The above example is a webcomic, a

much more traditional form of media in that it has a single author who generates the content. At

the same time, it is a webcomic whose humor relies on knowledge of larger fantasy and

roleplaying game conventions if you do not know RPG’s, you miss a lot of the jokes. One cannot

draw a hard line and say “this is a comic, that is a roleplaying game,” because in this case, they

cannot exist without another. Fandom is creeping and pervasive and expands across media. 137

The second important thing is that no matter how outlandish or unrealistic the characters

and settings seem, the stories portrayed in roleplaying games are important to the people telling

them. These stories reflect the values of their participants, and, often, their search for identity.

Not every roleplaying game story is a serious journey of personal discovery, but some are, and it

is difficult to tell from the outset which stories will be important and which are just a fun way of

passing the time. In this case, the story in question had serious consequences, and not just for the

author. Rich reports that he generally receives compliments from his viewership on how he

handles sexuality and non-straight folks in his comics. The stories these games tell matter to the

players and readers, because they are ways of exploring aspects of the people involved. Not

always in serious or direfully important ways, but personal exploration, nonetheless.

While YAGFC generally deals with racial tropes in a light-hearted and playful way, The webcomic Goblins demonstrates how fan-created media can fundamentally question the racial tropes endemic to D&D. Goblins is about a tribe of goblins in a typical fantasy game setting.

What makes this a text “about” D&D is that the characters know they live in a world that operates by game rules.33 They refer openly to “taking levels” and refer to their character class.

The goblins know that adventurers consider them monsters, and the adventurers, at least at the

start of the comic, operate on very traditional gaming reasoning: goblins are evil, and are

therefore acceptable targets for violence carried out for the purposes of gaining gold and

experience points. Like the goblins, the player characters are aware that they live in a game

world. While the audience never sees the “real world,” the party cleric literally worships the

Dungeon Master as a god, complete with sarcastic prayers that reference to said DM’s poor

33 “Characters who know they’re in a game is a fairly popular subgenre. The convention is useful, among other reasons, because it cuts through awkward abstractions and makes it easy to play with game concepts on a narrative level. 138 personal hygiene and dismal social skills (Stephens, “Fiery Pit”). Another character is a warrior named Min-Max, who has taken a huge number of optional penalties to his intellectual and social skills in order to be as efficient as possible at combat, to the point where he’s functionally incompetent in everything not related to combat or brute force (Stephens “The Adventurer’s

Introduction). He exists as both an example and parody of a type of character created by players who are interested in D&D primarily as a combat simulator and are not particularly concerned with story, plot, or even having a coherent reason for anything their character does, beyond “to gain more loot and power.” The humor here is self-reflexive. It is aimed at an audience that plays

D&D, and is a way that fans laugh at themselves and at each other, as well as a critique of more

“gamerish” roleplaying practices. It also shows that fans are very much aware of the stereotypes about them, as when the cleric character invokes many of the “lonely gamer” stereotypes when sarcastically praying to the Dungeon Master. Yes, the stereotypes are broad, but at the same time most gamers know at least one person who fulfills some of them, and many gamers identify as being socially awkward or make references to seeing themselves as such.

Much of the humor of Goblins is aimed at sexism and racism in fantasy story tropes. The entire comic is premised around undercutting one of the basic racist assumptions of many fantasy works, namely that certain races are “evil” and inimical to humans and other “good” races. But the comic also makes fun of some of the more obvious sexist tropes. Much like the fan film

Gamers: Dorkness Rising, the trope of “male players playing sexist female characters.” In this case, there are a set of players who incarnate as several different parties of adventurers within the comic. One of the players always plays hypersexualized female characters. It represents the familiar presence of “that guy” in a gaming group, a stereotype that is replicated because it is a mirror real-world experience, and so that the audience can say that while they may be gamers, at 139 least they’re not that bad, a combination of laughing at and with one’s fellow gamers. But on a less jocular note, it also points to the prevalence of casual misogyny within gaming culture.

While many gamers might look down on sexist stereotypes in gaming, the fact remains that sexist tropes and ideas are still extant within many parts of the subculture.

Despite being aware that they are in a game, the player characters start the story simply seeing the goblins as enemies to be slaughtered. The readers, on the other hand, are introduced to the intimate relationships between the goblins, their personal quirks, and the fact that they are, in the broader and more meaningful senses of the word, human. The goblin main characters, during an attack by the player characters, break one of the sacred rules of their tribe and “level up,” acquiring the powers of player characters, both symbolically and literally breaking out of their typecast roles. Furthermore, one of the goblins becomes a Paladin, one of the most classically

“heroic” archetypes, demonstrating that not only can goblins be powerful, they can also be

“good,” according to the mix of narrative and gameplay logic employed by the comic.

The comic builds on this basic premise with the character development of the adventurers. Min-Max, for example, is wounded in the adventurers’ first battle with the goblins, and develops a special hatred for one of them, born out of anger that an inferior creature like a goblin could hurt or almost kill a combat specialist like himself. Over the course of the comic, however Min-Max slowly begins to realize that non-humanoids aren’t always evil, even developing a somewhat one-sided romantic attraction to a non-humanoid female. And when he finds out that a fellow adventurer has been keeping a monstrous humanoid as a sex-slave, he nearly beats the other adventurer to death (Stephens “Forgath, Min-Max, and Goblinslayer”), a plot development that demonstrates both his personal realization monsters can be people too, as 140

well as giving the audience an opportunity to root for Min-Max, who until that point had been boorish and antagonistic towards the more sympathetic main characters

Taking violent, obvious revenge against the perpetrators of sexual crimes is a favorite way to make a character more sympathetic, of course, and it also plays into the oft-deployed fantasy tropes of the muscular hero who chivalrously rescues women, although the way the tropes are presented in Min-Max are slightly more nuanced. It’s a distinct departure from, say,

Robert E. Howard, where the protection of a woman’s sexual virtue was only important if she were white. And in some stories, such as Beyond the Black River, Howard explicitly invokes the

“Jezebel” trope, just to reinforce this racial-sexual hierarchy. Min-Max, while looking like a typical barbarian hero, is a refutation of this part of the genre’s history, which fits in with the larger theme of the comic: deconstructing the racial and gendered tropes in D&D and showing that, in some places, fans have begun to demand and produce D&D-related products that reflect changing social mores and an increased respect for diversity.

Whether the representation is a big-budget television series or a small fan-made webcomic, representations of gaming in general and D&D in particular show up in a wide variety of media. As a general rule, I have found that fan-made and fan-directed media are those most likely to criticize and question racist and sexist tropes, for the simple reason that understanding much of the sexism and racism in D&D’s tropes requires some intimate in-game knowledge, but this is not universal. It is not hard for a non-fan to understand the problems with the “chainmail bikini” stereotype, for example, and as Community shows, a non-fan seeing someone portraying a drow elf by might be more horrified than someone who understood the reference. 141

It is no surprise that references to D&D pop up so pervasively throughout American

popular culture. After all, D&D is a game about telling stories, and telling stories is a

fundamental part of the human experience. Less generally, it is also a marker of cultural unity

among nerds, and one of the cornerstones of nerd culture. D&D shows up often because

familiarity with it is a shibboleth, a proof of being a “real” nerd, and terms from the D&D

lexicon like “roll to save” or “critical hit” are now ubiquitous parts of the pop culture lexicon.

The examples in this chapter have all touched on how players perceive the game, or at

least how they talk about it, and how the game is talked about in the larger context of American

media. They show that D&D is something that can be laughed at, remembered fondly, joked

about, prodded, dissected, and used as the basis for both serious stories and light-hearted in- jokes, even within the same narrative (or the same scene). And, vitally, D&D’s tropes and the way it is represented are changing as player understandings of race and gender shift. The next chapter, however, cuts to the heart of the matter, as I discuss my observations of play, both in person and broadcast on the internet, and how the tropes of race and gender discussed throughout this work manifest in that play. This is Dungeons & Dragons in the wild.

Some of D&D’s “classic” humor highlights the problematic aspects of D&D’s culture.

The frequently circulated “list of the things Mr. Welch Can No Longer Do in an RPG” (for a sample of the list, see Appendix A), is a tongue-in-cheek list of actions supposedly committed by the eponymous Mr. Welch in various RPG’s. While the list is full of exaggerations and in-jokes that mostly revolve around players cheerful attempts to cleverly derail and destroy a DM’s plans, often with inventive and excessive violence, there’s also an undercurrent of chauvinism and sexual harassment (or at least crude sexual humor) running through the list. Some entries are the usual “good ol’ boy” –style jokes, such as “28. The Goddess' of Marriage chosen weapon is not 142 the whip,” or “81. A picture of my ex-wife is not an acceptable backup weapon.” The implication being that Mr. Welch had tried to do these actions and been banned. Now, the list makes it clear that Welch is a bit of a lunatic, but the audience is still meant to laugh at his antics, and it’s hard to tell whether some of the things are really as funny as they seem. … While humor should not always be “safe,” it is important to ask who is being laughed at and why. For example, “161. I will not nail every single female party member except for the elf chick played by that creepy guy.” Given some of the stories that female players have told me about being sexually harassed through their characters, it is not as funny when the character getting “nailed” is a woman who feels herself socially pressured into accepting it. And if the assumption is that the group is all male, that simply begs the question of why women are not in the assumed audience.

Other rules are even more direct. For example, “264. I cannot use the time machine to go to Ancient Greece where all the women were leather clad, oiled down with big bosoms” or “301.

"Well Hung" is not a physical, social or mental trait.” And while the point is to laugh at the sort of player who acts this way, the list is an acknowledgement that players who use the game primarily to live out fantasies, including sexual fantasies that degrade women, are a common part of the nerd landscape, as they are of the American cultural landscape in general. Similarly, the list points out some of the casual racism endemic in gaming culture with “321. The monk's official title is Brother of the Lotus Path. Not the Slap Happy Jappy,” or “997. I can't beat on the drow until he admits his name is Toby.” This second one also highlights the way a lot of players link real-world and game-world race; there are frequent references to drow as if they were black or African American, despite the fact that canonical drow history and culture have nothing to do with Black or African-American culture. The link between skin color and race is so deeply 143

embedded in the consciousness of some American players that referring to drow as if they were

African-Americans is a source of often-uncomfortable racial humor, and I have heard several stories from players independently reporting the same sort of jokes being made. D&D is a game about fantasy tropes, but it also a space where real-life anxieties about racial difference are projected onto fantastic settings.

It is important to remember that some of this humor is intentionally transgressive. The

RPG gaming table is sometimes a place where it is okay to indulge in power fantasies and to talk about atrocious things without ill intent towards any real people. As long as everyone at the table is comfortable with the level of material on offer and the jokes are not aimed to wound. Humor that touches on “offensive” subjects is only a bad thing when it causes someone harm, or when it encourages attitudes and ways of thinking that do so. The kind of jokes made above are supposed to be funny because everyone D&D player knows someone who goes too far. But while humor about stereotypes can be critical and reflective, there are players who push things too far, and nerd culture, like American culture as a whole is bad at holding people, especially white males in dominant social positions, accountable for their disruptive and damaging behavior. Negotiating problematic content is always tenuous and requires a continually refreshed understanding of exactly where the line is, and what values the group holds.

The problems with D&D mirror, in some ways, the problems of American culture with sex and consent: A culture where young people are not trained well in how to ask for and give consent. Based on the stories offered by my informants, some gaming tables are places where young women are put in sexually coercive and threatening situations. The reader is probably meant to be horrified, but also to see a specter of players they know. And these players are 144 specifically white and male and casually oppressive towards people who are not. The problem here is not that jokes are being made. It is that they aren’t always jokes.

Just as important as the casual racism and sexism are the attitudes that are not represented. The sexually aggressive jokes that are gendered specify a female target. These jokes demonstrate a culture where sexual aggression targeted at women is commonplace, if not acceptable. And there’s certainly no outlet for sexual aggression towards men (except as part of a ritual of male-on-male status jockeying). Likewise, there are several jokes that either play with racial stereotypes, make reference to racist tropes, or simply demonstrate Eurocentric attitudes.

Why can’t player names contain clicks? Presumably because the only reason the player would do it was to be annoying, and not because they legitimately wanted to roleplay such a character. At the same time, these jokes are explicitly about things one is not supposed to do. They are as much making fun of the bad habits and attitudes of some gamers as anything else. And as the next chapter shows, both the problematic attitudes alluded to in these jokes and the will to mock, criticize, and undermine them are present at the gaming table, and in the minds of the people who play D&D. 145

CHAPTER 4: D&D AT THE GAMING TABLE

This chapter dissects D&D as a game, using both my personal observations documented

in-person with the gamers, and Twitch streams of people playing games. Twitch, for readers unfamiliar with the platform, is a service that allows users to create “channels” and share video content, most of which focuses on people playing various sorts of games. Content be streamed live or viewed in recorded form, and the close, constant interaction between content creators and consumers is a major selling point of the platform. I initially started using Twitch streams to supplement my in-person observations after an informant suggested that I use his group’s Twitch stream as an alternative to an in-person interview. I have since found Twitch to be an extremely

useful resource, and because it is recorded live and in real-time, it maintains much of the

character of a “classic” D&D game. This is in contrast to asynchronous ways of playing D&D

online, such as play-by-post games described by Csenge Zalka, which have a more literary feel

to them. The fact that players in the Twitch streams speak to dictate their actions, as opposed to

typing narrative prose, also has much to do with that feel of authenticity. Some games are more

heavily produced, but most feel like listening to people play D&D, which is fundamentally

different from the fictionalized examples in chapter three.

There are important differences between observing in real-time and watching on Twitch. while players in the Twitch stream know they are being observed, there is a qualitative difference to the observation, namely the observer is not sitting in the room with them while they play the game. Based on player behavior in my observations, this makes a difference.

While most of my informants seemed to acclimate quickly to my presence in their gaming space, there were moments where players said that they either chose not to say something because I was there, or regretted saying something because they realized that there 146

was a record, albeit a confidential one, of something they had said. There was one occasion

where I was asked not to include something a player had said in my completed dissertation,

although the player did not object to me keeping the transcript intact. In a Twitch stream, players

edit themselves, either before or after the fact.

I chose not to review any Twitch streams that are part of a subscription service. I have

tried to keep this chapter as close to “real” D&D as possible, and I wanted to keep explicitly

commercial ventures like HarmonQuest separate from fan-made works. The line between

“commercial” and “non-commercial” is increasingly slippery. Twitch is a vehicle both to share content among fans and to monetize that content: fans selling to fans through an intermediary. I have tried to select twitch streams which are as free from commercialization as possible and use examples which represent a game of D&D played between friends. While all games of D&D are a form of performance, I felt that having the game as a paid service changes the dynamic between players and the expectations of the audience. Though ultimately there is no escaping the demands of capitalism, I have tried to keep it a few keystrokes away in this chapter.

I observed a total of twenty sessions, thirteen of which were in-person, with the remaining seven being either twitch streams or live observations of games played via the internet. I observed a total of 86 players and conducted individual interviews with 51 of them. I gathered some ethnographic data from the players I did not have individual interviews with, as represented below.

Player Demographics

The following tables give some notion of the player’s demographic breakdown. I chose to allow my informants to select as many racial categories as they felt applied to them and count each instance of a person professing that category, rather than limiting one person to each 147

category. In designing and asking my questions, I focused on determining how the players

understood race and gender, and what was their lived experience with these intersecting

categories.

Table 1

Player Race & Ethnicity

Race/Ethnicity Number of Players (Percentage of Players) (86 Total) White 71 East Asian 4 Pacific Islander 1 Black 5 Hispanic/Latinx 4 Inuit 1 Source: Research Notes (Clements 2019)

Table 2

Player Gender Identity

Gender Number of Players (Percentage of Players) (86 Total) Male 65 (75.6%) Female 16 (18.6%) Trans 1 Queer/Nonbinary 2 Preferred not to identify 1 Source: Research Notes (Clements 2019)

The list above is not a comprehensive list of all possible gender identities. When asking

my subjects for demographic information, I asked them to write in their own gender identity,

with the option not to identify if they preferred. I have listed all the identities claimed by at least

one participant.

D&D is an iconic part of gaming culture, but not everyone who plays D&D participates in other gaming hobbies or goes to game stores. But based on my research and personal 148

experience, as well as observation of demographics at large fan events (conventions), this is a fairly accurate representation of what the audience for D&D in the Midwestern United States looks like. Whiteness and maleness predominate within the hobby, but the makeup of an individual group can vary widely. And the overwhelming representation of the hobby as a white, male space helps keep people who are not white cisgendered males out of gaming spaces.

This explains or at least reinforces the importance of one of the trends I have already observed: Better representation of women and non-binary individuals is slowly increasing in

D&D, while some of the embedded issues of race within the game remain relatively static. I am not the only one who has noticed this dichotomy– one panel I observed at the 2018 Popular

Culture Scholars national convention had several scholars making similar comments, and one suggested that the more sensitive and nuanced treatment of gender was an example for a better representation of race within the game. At the same time, the treatment of race in D&D, especially the way that race is integrally linked with ability and alignment, is a fundamental part of the game, and reconstructing or changing it would prove challenging at best and potentially ruinous at worst. And while the participation of women in larger gaming culture is growing in visibility and public support, there remains a strong element of misogyny within gaming culture that gamers have yet to address, an element reflected in many of the stories I have collected. As one of my (male) informants said, “There’s sex in D&D because it’s a fantasy game, and everybody fantasizes about sex.” (Interview 15) When asked why he thought that the fantasies featured were aimed at straight men, he said, in the manner of one stating the obvious, that

“that’s who made D&D.”

The overall socioeconomic status of my players is somewhat more difficult to assess than race or gender identity. Sixty-three reported being “middle class,” but I did not have the time or 149

means to verify everyone’s economic status, and in my experience, most Americans think of

themselves as “middle class.” Many of the players were or are college students. All of my

informants were over eighteen, and most were in their 20’s and 30’s. The majority of players in

most of the groups I observed lived independently of their parents. The experiences and

environments I describe might be typical of adult D&D players, but teens and kids will have a

different experience, as they often play within more heavily prescribed places and times.

The Gaming Environment

The games I observed were all played indoors. It is possible, but usually unwise to play

D&D outside (it is very easy to lose dice and other pieces that way, not to mention the threat of

wind taking all the papers,) and the outdoors are usually reserved for live-action roleplay

(LARP), a related but distinctly separate hobby. Of the twenty games I observed, seventeen were

in someone’s home, with two being played at game stores and one meeting at a coffee shop.

While some groups are comfortable playing in public, most games still take place in private

spaces. Even games stores are not exactly “in public,” because they are spaces specifically set

aside for gaming. This meant that each group had at least one person with a home or apartment

that could comfortably seat five or six people.

That said, while there are entry costs for playing D&D, they can be defrayed or shared among the group. Not every player has to have a set of books, for example, and many groups have one or two people who own the majority of the material and share it with the rest of the players. This was the case in at least twelve of the games I observed, and in the rest of the sessions I could not tell who owned the books. D&D is a leisure activity, and it is certainly possible to spend a great deal of money on gaming accoutrements, but the basic costs of entry are low. For the 3rd and 5th editions of the game, the basic rules are also available online for free. 150

When I asked my informants about the ease of getting access, no one reported money as a reason

not to play. Sharing and pirating books is wide-spread, and anyone who wants to play D&D

without paying can do so, given access to the internet and some basic search skills.

Nine of the games took place in basements. The idea of “basement-dwelling gamers” is an old stereotype, but one founded on truth and common experience. Basements are often “spare space,” and can be used as an informal gathering place for a group of close friends who are not overly concerned with aesthetics. In this case, however, most of the basements I played in were comfortable and finished. This may also be a result of my selection process. It is entirely possible that most of the people who were comfortable inviting a stranger into their home to observe the game were also ones who had a space that was appealing enough that they would not be embarrassed by having a stranger see it. I have personally played in enough damp and dusty basements to know that not every space where D&D is played is pristine.

The other eleven games were played either in public spaces, living rooms, or kitchens.

While D&D technically does not require a mat or combat grid, most players in my experience, and all the groups I observed and interviewed, preferred to have some form of visual representation for maneuvering during combat encounters, and while exploring dungeons.34 This

means games usually require a decently sized flat surface with enough room not only for the mat itself, but books, laptops, dice, character sheets, and other game elements.

This gives D&D games an air of intimacy. By “intimacy,” I mean that the players need

to have a sense of trust for each other, and need to be comfortable letting their guard down in

front of the people they play with, especially if they wanted to engage in “serious” roleplay, i.e.,

34 As a reminder, “dungeon” in D&D refers colloquially to all sorts of spaces where monsters live and treasure can be found. They are often underground, but not universally, and they are not always prisons (and when they are, the prisoners are usually more exotic than simple criminals.) 151 portraying characters with depth of emotion and feeling. But even games with lighter tones feel intimate. When people play D&D, they are sharing fantasies of people who they would like to be. Or, sometimes, they share uncomfortable sides of themselves. Many characters are shallow power fantasies, but even those can be revelatory. People let their guard down while they play

D&D. Casual consumption of drink or drug while playing D&D is not unheard of, and in four of the games I observed, players consumed intoxicating substances. Like any other social gathering, each group has its own standards. Not every group takes the gameplay seriously, and one informant told me that her college D&D group existed “basically as an excuse to get together, drink, and roll dice” (Interview 21). Again, we see that some players value D&D more for the

“hanging out” aspect than the gameplay, and it is perfectly possible for people with different preferences to coexist happily in the group. As one informant put it, “It can be nice to have people with different tastes in your group, it encourages you to try new playstyles. And if everyone is the type of person who wants to be the main character, that’s more disruptive than a bunch of people who like slightly different experiences.” (Interview 37)

This socially intimate aspect draws a boundary between the group and other people. Even when played in a public space, there is a feeling of separation to a game of D&D. An outsider approaching a game will usually cause a pause in the action as everyone looks up until they go away. This is the outermost layer of D&D, the bubble around the private imaginative world in which the group isolates itself during play. The formation of this private, inner world also results in group dynamics which can be both positive and toxic. Some people become insufferable while playing, some people become more interesting, and some don’t seem to change at all. But these permutations of the self are special and shared within the group (even if sometimes the group 152

wishes they were not.) All of the best and worst stories shared by my informants were marked by

the intimacy shared by a gaming group.

Not every game of D&D develops this intimacy immediately. Some campaigns are light-

hearted and silly, and some groups never engage in serious roleplay. But a D&D campaign can

last for years, and the longer it goes on, the more effort and creative energy is poured into them.

How the game develops depends on what the players put into it, and what they want to get out of it. As one informant put it, “D&D is sort of like dating: you might mess around a lot when you first start but a lot of people want something more serious as they get older” (Interview 19). This comparison was a bit tongue-in-cheek, but it points to a pattern that holds true in my observation and personal experience. Players tend to get more selective about who they game with as they get older, and they tend to lose tolerance for toxic players (at least, when they become aware of the toxicity). An oft-repeated aphorism is “no D&D is better than bad D&D,” meaning that it is not worth putting up with irritating or unpleasant people merely to play a game. As gamers age, they tend to either drop out of the hobby if they do not find good groups to game with, or they hold off on playing until they find a stable group of people who share the same values and desires and who want the same kind of experience that they do. The intimacy of a D&D game is the intimacy of human relationships. This is further complicated by the fact that D&D involves putting one’s fantasies out in the open, which requires a great deal of trust if it is to be done well.

Players also have to trust each other to handle sensitive topics like sex, race, and gender in ways that will be acceptable to everyone in the group.

In some cases, roleplayers have developed formal systems for determining what sort of content they want in their games. This is especially common for games set online, where games

have many more applicants and it is much more common to encounter strangers whose personal 153 preferences and comfort zones one does not know. One example of such a system is the RPG

Rating System (RPGR) described by Csenge Zalka in Collaborative Storytelling 2.0.:

The RPGR system consists of three numbers, all of them ranging from 0 to 3, with 0

being “None allowed at all,” and 3 standing for “No (or few) limitations.” The first

number corresponds to Language, the second to Sex, and the third one to Violence. The

rating of a site, therefore would look something like this: L2 / S1 / V3 – meaning that

strong language is generally permitted (barring extreme examples), only the lightest

sexual themes are allowed, and violence can be described with no limitations. (Zalka

102).

This system is a more formal version of the process that all groups, digital and real-life, go through as they learn how to game with each other. The categories indicated in the RPGR are also good indicators of the areas that commonly cause conflict – language, violence, and sexual situations. The prevalence of these rating systems and the types of content they regulate shows the variability of what content players are comfortable with. As Zalka observes, “sexual content is usually the lowest number of the three categories” (Zalka 103). While there is no rating system for real-life games, since most people in real-life groups don’t advertise their games to large groups of strangers, my experience confirms that players tend to be far more comfortable with violence than with sexual content. The game is built around violence, after all, while sexual content is a less certain and less comfortable addition. But whether online or face-to-face, he success or failure of negotiating shared standards is one of the factors that determines whether a group will last or not.

154

The Impact of Observation

My presence influenced the intimacy of the sessions I observed, although it is impossible

to say how much of an effect. I did not go out of my way to participate in the group’s

conversations, and my informants knew I was present to observe. At the same time, I let my

informants dictate the amount of interaction they had with me during play. Some people wanted

to talk to me or include me in the conversation, and in these cases I would engage in

conversation, while trying to avoid being intrusive or distracting from the game. My informants

knew I was a gamer, and many were interested in the nature of the research. When relevant

topics emerged organically, I sometimes asked questions. For example, if the group began

talking about story tropes that related to sex or gender, I occasionally asked a question relevant

to my research on those topics. Some groups I asked multiple questions of, others few or none

because some groups engage in a lot of meta-game and out-of-game conversation, and others do

not. Above all, I tried to avoid disrupting the group’s dynamics any more than I needed to in

order to perform this research.

The biggest impact that I noticed was in things that were not said. I sometimes noticed

pauses and the occasional glance or deliberate non-glance in my direction which I felt indicated someone thinking something and deciding to self-censor their words or actions because I was present. In the cases where I later asked whether these players had been uncomfortable with my presence, some indicated that they were thinking of comments they decided either “weren’t funny” or were inappropriate, some indicated that they had simply decided not to say whatever they were going to say, and many indicated they did not remember the incidents I mentioned at all. It is also possible that, at least in some cases, I was overly sensitive to the potential reactions to my presence. 155

Race in Play

Despite my interference as an outside observer, the games I was invited to observe

retained the sense of intimacy mentioned previously. This is important, because it is that sense of

friendship and understanding that makes D&D a place of real connection, where people can

make uncomfortable jokes and use the space of play to deal with things forbidden, taboo, or

merely unusual, some of which have significant implications for the way player’s view race and gender. When played with a group that knows and trusts each other, D&D can be a space to play out uncomfortable situations in a safe way, and to experiment with unfamiliar or troubling concepts. A roleplaying game can be a place to explore alternate ways of being, although a wise roleplayer remembers that telling a story about these things is not the same as actually living

them. What follows is an example from a session I observed that demonstrates the mix of play

and seriousness that marks many discussions of serious topics like race in the context of D&D.

Jake: So how do the people in the local region look at the orcs?

Abdul: Doesn’t sound too positive based on context.

Jake: When do people like having Orcs as neighbors?

Gerry: I haven’t written that part out fully yet, but the local orcs around Mithrain, where your characters are, are basically mercenaries.

Abdul: Like, organized mercenaries?

Gerry: No, it’s more like, uh, “hey, go beat up those guys and we’ll give you fifty goats” kind of thing. The orcs don’t have much use for money. They mostly want tools and trade goods.

Jake (In deliberately crude Orc accent): Orc no like trappings of decadent civilization. Orc prefer modern primitivist style of living. (normal accent) Holy shit, orcs are hipsters.

[The conversation then veers off to a digression about hipster orcs for about 8 minutes]

Gerry: Okay, but seriously [for the 3rd time] If you want to know more you can make a Knowledge (Local) or Knowledge (World) check.

156

[The players make the appropriate checks]

Gerry: So, basically, the orcs have a tribal leadership that has a bunch of taboos on buying goods from the cities and even on the concept of buying goods, because the leaders don’t want to be dependent. The orc elders are afraid of having their kids get addicted to soft living.

Abdul: Do they lose a lot of kids to the big city?

Gerry: Yeah, there’s a small but significant Orc minority in the cities that comes in that way. They are often mercenaries, guides, trackers, that kind of thing. They’re generally considered skilled but not necessarily trustworthy.

In this conversation, players perform on several different levels. The players are self-

aware of some racial tropes, while taking others for granted. In the “for granted” category, the

players have an implicit assumption that racial divisions are also political divisions. The orcs are

not only a racial constituency, but a social and political one as well. This is a larger fantasy trope

that goes back at least to Tolkien, where all the races in Middle Earth lived in separate enclaves

with limited interaction. While newer fantasy settings have far more cosmopolitan elements, the

idea that different fantasy races are naturally hostile and competitive is a pervasive one.

Ethnically based warfare is de rigeur in fantasy settings, to the point that in many editions

of the game, dwarves get bonuses to fighting orcs, goblins, and/or giants, because the antagonism

between those races is so deep all dwarves are assumed to specialize in fighting those races.

None of the players question the idea that orc tribes co-exist uneasily with more “civilized”

humanoids. Hostility between races, especially between “good” and “evil” humanoids is such a

standard fantasy trope that it causes surprise only in its absence.

On the other hand, the players and the dungeon master are not just treating the orcs as a

complete racial other. The stereotype of “savage orc versus civilized city-states” is not just a formula to be re-enacted, but a dynamic to be played with. In this case, the orcs are not the

inherently hostile and incomprehensible “other.” They have a different society but are 157

recognized as fellow sentients. They are a complicated people, part of an uneasy and ethically

questionable political dynamic that is more “them versus us” than “good versus evil.” And far

from being stereotypical brutes, the orcs are canny politicians resisting colonial forces. The

player’s attitudes towards the orcs shifts even within the conversation. The players start out with

the assumption that the orcs are going to be hostile to some degree, but through the discussion it

becomes clear that there’s at least some potential for sympathy there. The idea of orcs “losing

their kids to the big city” suggests the sadness that surrounds loss of identity and cultural

assimilation in the real world. The players also demonstrate anthropological curiosity towards the orcs, and a desire to understand, not just destroy. The players do not see orcs as just an obstacle to be eliminated, but as a people who have motives and reasons for their actions.

Such ambivalence is reflected in stories like Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen

(1999), where many nomadic and tribal peoples face encroachment and destruction from the forces of “civilization.” This segment of dialog is representative of complicated dialogs about race that take place throughout gaming culture. This ambivalence is reflected throughout the individual interviews as well, with many of my informants reflecting on the ambivalence towards race and racial stereotypes throughout the fantasy genre. Some informants alleged that race was effectively interchangeable with nationality and other forms of “us versus them” thinking

(Interviews 7, 2, 3). One informant summed it up by saying “You get zealots and hatemongers for everything… You have Communists who hate religion, and religious people who hate gay people… it doesn’t matter, it’s just an excuse.” (Interview 2). Informants who responded this way espoused the idea that all forms of hate are equal and stem from the malice of bad actors.

Different informants offered different reasons for the bad actors, everything from “I think it’s 158

mostly poverty and ignorance” (Interview 3) to “some people are just jerks. I mean, whatever the

reason is, they’re just jerks” (Interview 7).

It was always a little ambiguous whether these conversations were about gaming and

story tropes, real life, or both. Some of these informants thought that fantasy race and race in real

life are distinct concepts. As one informant said “It makes complete sense to exterminate the

Orcs in Lord of the Rings. The reader never sees them as anything other than evil, and it’s

outright stated over and over again that they can’t be anything other than that. You just can’t

compare it with race in real life, because that’s way more complex.” (Interview 3)

Other informants commented on the specific use of racial tropes, both in the game and in

derivative works like the many fantasy novels of R.A. Salvatore. Several informants mentioned

Salvatore as an example of how they see race as being generally portrayed in D&D: When race

is made the focus of attention, it is usually in the form of somewhat trite stories about how

prejudice is bad, but which do not deal with the complexities of real-life race. (Interviews 4, 7,

21)

Unsurprisingly, people do not always play out the kind of fantasies they are “supposed

to.” Even informants who said that they believed fantasy racism did reflect real-life racism were willing to engage in problematic behavior in-game. “they were of an evil race” is frequently a justification for violence, and this is considered acceptable by most if not all players.

“Sometimes you just want to kick in the door and blast everything you see with your unlimited

power!35 Not everyone plays D&D to think critically. Many players just want to relax and

indulge in easily-justified fantasy violence. “Stories run on conflict. You gotta have a bad guy,

and bad-ugly guys are easier enemies than pretty-nice guys.” (Interview 51). Racial absolutism is

35 This line was said in imitation of Ian McDiarmid’s rather dramatic performance in Star Wars: Episode III (2005). 159

the basic assumption that D&D was built on. It is not the only viewpoint on race that D&D

players offer, and sometimes it is an idea that they outright reject. But the idea that race is a

source of conflict is built into the game, and the players know it.

When I talked to the informants in the above example in post-game interviews, they indicated that most of their ideas about how fantasy races operate come from reading other fantasy sources (Only 7 informants said that D&D was their primary source of information on fantasy tropes). Race as a point of social division is a pervasive fantasy and sci-fi trope, as much as any stereotype about elves or dwarves. The idea that races are in competition with each other is built into the fantasy genre, stemming from the scientific racism that inspired D&D’s foundational texts. And D&D writers who create race-specific source material tend to focus on how amazing the race they are describing is, often by contrasting them against other races, meaning the dynamic of racial comparison and competition is also written into the game by the instructional texts.

While fantasy race is theoretically different from real-world race, my observations show that players use the tropes, metaphors, and language of real-world race to understand and talk about race in a fantasy setting. Fantasy races are far more different from each other than real- world races, but the ways of thinking about and intuiting what race “means” are virtually unchanged from real life, though fantasy tropes often serve to justify and make safe racist modes of thinking. But even as in the above example, where there is a nuanced discussion about race that includes some hints of post-colonial thinking in the recognition that the destruction of tribal cultures through assimilation is something worth avoiding, the narratives about race in D&D are reflections of stories about race in real life. 160

But narratives of political and biological division are only one element of the way race

plays out in the game. What we would consider outright racism in real life is often recast as

tongue-in-cheek commentary or black comedy during a game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Presented below is a selection of quotes. It is important to note that these are taken out of context, but that is part of the point – these are casual, tossed-off comments that have little to do

with the specific situations they are taken from and everything to do with casually skirting the

bounds of what is socially appropriate to say about race and gender.

A Selection of Fantasy Racism

Julio (DM): “The hall is very full, and divided up based on gender – men on one side, women and elves on the other…” (Game 12)

Eli (Player): “Goblins aren’t people” (Game 7)

Crystal (Player): “Let’s genocide the hell out of some green people!” (Game 7)

Jeff (Player): “Well you would say that, being non-elf and therefore inferior.” (Game 3)

Steve (Player): “Everyone knows Jews can’t be paladins.”36 (Game 11)

Omar (DM:) “The ancient legends of the elves revolve around the idea that the elves were the first and most perfect of the gods’ creations.” (Game 15)

Casual fantasy racism is endemic in D&D, and this shows up around the table as well as in the game. Part of this is players directing racial aggression against “evil races.” As discussed previously, genocide for fun and profit against acceptable targets is a core trope of fantasy roleplaying games. But racial antagonism between player races is a common trope as well. It is incredibly common for players to take swipes at the races of other characters. The motivation for this is partially a sort of team spirit, with some players being loyal to particular races, while

36 For context, this is a reference to South Park, and the player making the comment was Jewish. 161 others are more flexible in their preferences. Some instances of fantasy racial antagonism are deliberate exaggerations of real-world racist attitudes. When I asked informants what motivated people to act out fantastic racism, most responded with some variation of “as a joke.” (Games

19, 12). Some people added air-quotes at “joke” during interviews, and one informant responded,

“so they can be sort of racist and say it’s a joke if anyone gets mad” (Interview 25). Portraying fantasy racism as zealous, over-the-top, and violent mirrors real-world jokes that turn every

American racist into a cross-burning Klansman with a strong southern accent. On one hand, it is a type of humor that, in theory at least, makes racism seem like a bad thing, but it also reinforces the misconception that the most problematic acts of racism are the overt and violent acts of

“bad” individuals, rather than its grinding and systemic evils..

It is easy to see why players take to this attitude, as it is built into the foundations of the fantasy genre. As one of my informants said when discussing the popularity of fantasy tropes,

“everybody has elves and dwarves, unless the setting is humans only… I can’t think of a setting where they were friendly” (Interview 33). At least as far back as Tolkien, there is a strong tradition of dwarves and elves disliking each other, with dwarves stereotyping elves as weak, effeminate, and cowardly, and elves stereotyping dwarves as greedy, grasping, insensitive and dull. These stereotypes are so popular that they are embedded in the popular consciousness of

D&D, and teasing characters with racial stereotypes is a common practice around the table.

Many players choose specific races because they like the tropes associated with that race (tough and skillful dwarves, mysterious, mystical elves, etc.). Making fun of other races is also a way to highlight the strengths of one’s own choice of race.

But while many players engage in race-baiting humor in a semi-serious fashion, tropes about racism are also common fodder for stories in D&D. Within the context of the game, racism 162

between players and NPC’s often plays out more like fictionalized encounters with prejudice,

with one party being the obviously evil racist and the other an oppressed minority, unless the

prejudiced behavior is justified within the story (say, by having all members of that race be

objectively and demonstrably evil). On other occasions, stories will revolve around monsters or

monstrous humanoids who have united under a genocidal warlord. The story of one campaign I

observed featured such a villain, and the villain explicitly pointed out that he was no more

genocidal than the player’s side (Game 7). While this acknowledges the moral complexity of

racial conflict, the frequent use of these “species versus species” tropes also shows how the idea

of racial friction and conflict are integral to D&D. Beyond species politics, engaging in fantastic

racism is sometimes a form of serious roleplay, an attempt to get into the headspace of a

nonhuman species or to portray racism as a serious problem. R.A. Salvatore’s “Drizzt” novels

focus extensively on depictions of “serious” racism, and confronting racists (sometimes with

cathartic violence), and this is also a frequent trope in games of D&D. The game is by nature a

power fantasy, and it is easy and tempting to solve frustrating real-world problems with fantastic

force. And sometimes, that is exactly what players come for.

Some racial antagonism is also based in the way race and class reflect preferred roles in

the game. During my observations, many players, especially those playing more “macho” races

like half-orcs, dwarves, and human barbarians, would make frequent comments about the

perceived weakness or softness of other characters, especially elves, halflings, and magic casters

of all types. These stereotypes are reinforced by the game itself. As discussed in the examination

of D&D’s rules, dwarves and half-orcs really are tougher and stronger, while both magic-users and elves tend to be “squishier” because their stats make them significantly less able to take damage. The rules reflect existing fantasy tropes, but it also makes it more tempting for players 163

to lean into them. And, according to one of my informants, “I pick a race from my character

concept. If I don’t have a strong preference, I pick whichever race will make that character most

effective” (Interview 39). In other words, you see more half-orcs as violent brutes because if someone wants to make a violent brute and does not have a strong preference for one race over another, they will likely gravitate towards the race that stereotypically performs that role. D&D’s view of race is structured around the idea that different races have fundamentally different abilities, outlooks, and values. But more than that, races in fantasy fiction and games exists to provide a pre-packaged set of tropes. And many of the tropes train players to react to racial difference with both active and passive violence.

But while there are racist tropes and ideas embedded in D&D, a more pressing question is

“In what ways does in-character racism correlate to out-of-character or real-life racism?” As tvtropes.com puts it, fantastic racism exists because “most people wouldn't believe in a world where elves, dwarves, aliens, etc got along with perfect harmony, because their own experiences of different groups' interactions don't bear that out.” (TVtropes, Fantastic Racism). And as one of

my informants put it, “You still expect trolls and dwarves and elves and stuff to act like people”

(Interview 23). Whether a game of D&D uses racism because it reflects the way groups interact

in real life, or whether the narrative the game offers tries to justify racism depends on the game,

the group, and who is doing the reading.

Many of the jokes made and tropes invoked above are clearly brought forth to criticize

racist modes of thought, sarcastically pointing out the racist tropes in D&D, perhaps as a way of

defusing them and making it clear that the players understand the difference between fantasy and

reality. While satire and humor are always open to interpretation, both I and the players

understood some of these comments as being critical of racist modes of thought. However, much 164

of the humor also comes from simply invoking racist stereotypes and replacing real-world examples with fantasy icons. This is humor that would be considered, at best, off-color comedy in the real world. Saying that something “is a joke” is a common defense made by people who want to say shocking or racist things and then avoid criticism for their actions. I myself witnessed a number of incidents that involved racially charged references. For example, the following exchange between player and DM:

Alice (DM): What are your characters going to do over the next couple of days?

Chris (Player): Is there, like, a hospital or sanitarium or something nearby?

Alice (DM): (After a moment of thought and with some apparent trepidation) Sure…

Chris (Player): (Grinning) Cool, okay. Where do they get rid of their used blankets?

Dan (Player): We are not giving them smallpox blankets, Chris (Game 8)

This was in the context of the characters looking to solve a conflict between a local city-

state and a tribal government. One of the player’s first thoughts was to half-jokingly suggest the same tactic used against Native Americans by European and American authorities. Joking about or even doing things in-game that would be considered war crimes in real life is not uncommon

in D&D, however, and no one at the table was particularly surprised or offended by the player’s

suggestion.

The text, tropes, and gameplay of D&D tend to support racial antagonism. A common

criticism of fantasy fiction is that authors will create entire species that serve as embodiments of

the author’s social, political, or moral ideals, and if this is not handled well, it can come off as

grating to readers not as enamored with the author’s creation. This tendency extends to

roleplaying games as well, to the point where some players still refer to AD&D’s “Complete

Guide to Elves” as the “Complete Guide to the Master Race” (with tongue firmly in cheek). The 165

joke is in reference to the fact that the text is written not just to describe elves, but to make them

sound like the best and “coolest” race to play. There are many sourcebooks that focus on

particular races in this way, and they tend to give each one the same “our race is the best”

treatment, just another element of the inherent competition between races in the game’s

narrative. My informants explained this tendency in several ways. “Money. Making a race better,

or sound better, makes the books sell” (Interview 17), according to one, while another said that

“People who write an entire book about dwarfs probably have a lot to say about them.”

(Interview 51). Even in a largely fan-driven hobby, consumers are always somewhat cynical of producer’s motives.

Outright racial supremacism is also a common trope in fantasy especially among elves and. Elves are frequently portrayed as snobbish and superior, considering themselves more refined, cultured, and overall treating themselves as a true “master race,” while dwarves usually

claim to be superior at “important” things such as producing beer, skillful ‘craftdwarfship,’

distributing beer, patience, diligence, and drinking beer. As these traits suggest, Dwarves, like

Conan before them, tend to embody an extreme vision of masculinity so their racial masculinity

is often contrasted against elves, who are feminized in some of the same ways that people of

Asian descent often are in Western media. Clannish and gendered notions of race are

fundamental parts of both gaming culture and the story tropes that make up D&D.

Unsurprisingly, given how much fans like to discuss and reflect on the tropes of the

game, many of the players know that D&D is racist. Out of the 86 subjects I interviewed, 74

acknowledged that D&D had some basic racist tendencies, citing various examples of tropes

mentioned above. The remaining twelve said that while there were plenty of racist tropes extant,

they were not the responsibility of D&D but rather the opinions of individual players. Four 166

initially said that race did not come up much during their games, but when I asked follow-up questions, each of them admitted that race actually came up frequently, but that they had not considered fantasy race as actual race. When asked whether D&D was racist, one of my informants summed up her feelings by saying “I don’t think a game can be racist, but race is very important” (Interview 11). This highlights both that players understand that racial tropes are prevalent in the game, and that many players understand “racism” as consisting of individual

prejudice and see the racial antagonism within the game as natural and inevitable. What’s more

significant is that this means that 82 out of my 86 informants knew without being prompted that

race in the real world and race in the game are at least tangentially linked. While twelve of my

respondents did argue, independently, that racist tropes only come up if a player brings them up,

I do not find this to be a persuasive argument. Much as some white folks will say that race isn’t

an issue until someone makes it an issue, claiming this is the case and D&D is simply a way of

ignoring or obfuscating the racial meaning that is and has always been there. Racial antagonism

is not merely a facet of the real world brought into the game by individual players, it is

something that the tropes of D&D replicate and reinforce, at least within its fantasy setting. As

the above examples show, players do not simply bring racial antagonism with them, it is built

into the tropes of fantasy literature in general and D&D in particular.

At least some of the jokes and comments are intentional and self-aware, and it is

sometimes difficult to tell whether a joke or comment is racist in and of itself or is poking fun at

racism. Trying to decide whose humor is “appropriate” is, in my opinion, a futile task, and so I

tried in my observation to determine whether player comments seemed to be poking fun at the

racist tropes themselves (as many fan works like Goblins do), or whether the humor was coming

from simply invoking racist tropes. To me, this is the key difference, because criticism and 167

reflection are, if not always comfortable to an outside reader, at least indicative of the players

thinking about and questioning racist tropes, instead of just accepting them.

When most D&D players portray racism in a way in a “realistic” way, it is usually clear that “racism is bad,” even if this message is conveyed in oversimplified and unsubtle terms. In

D&D’s instructional materials, for example, only the evil races, like the drow, actively advocate

for racial supremacy and enslaving or exterminating other races. The racial supremacist elements

of the “good” races are cloaked in more gentle terms like “ancestral pride.” At least some of the

“racist” humor deployed by players is an intentional mockery of the racist undertones present in

D&D’s main body of text. Making jokes about how one’s elf is a racial supremacist in an out-of-

character fashion might be considered a form of reflective criticism. On the other hand, it also be

considered a cheap laugh at the expense of people who have suffered from systems of racial

oppression. More broadly, it also plays into the tendency of mainstream media to portray racism

only in its most obvious and brutal forms, without addressing subtle, systemic racism. This is

reinforced by the power-fantasy element of D&D. Most of the stories I have observed or read

that involve race include scenarios like “free a bunch of slaves” or “overthrow the evil overlord

who has been cruelly oppressing a subject race.” “Spend ten years creating a college fund for

half-orcs” or “eight sessions of political debate about repealing gnome-segregation laws” do not

make for the sort of high-drama, high-action stories that make up most D&D stories.

D&D provides spaces for both reiterating and questioning racist tropes and ideas. It is

clear that playing D&D provokes critical thought about race among many of its players. Racism

is part and parcel of D&D’s cultural makeup, but the game at least encourages (some) players to

rethink and question familiar racial tropes. One of my formants gave a particularly good

explanation of the uses of race in D&D. 168

in-game perceptions are safer, because they're not real, of course. We can

experiment with the in-game groups. We can indulge the idea that they all have

traits in common and see where that takes us, or we can subvert it. It's just like

any fiction that way. The orcs can really all be awful ravening monsters who

want to rape our white women if we make it so, or we can meet a gentle orc who

just wants to open a florist's shop, or we can discover that the orcs were right all

along and it's we who are responsible for the violence between our peoples. Just

like any fiction. With the risks inherent in any fiction, too, to reinforce or dispel

whatever preconceptions we brought with us. (Interview 3)

While all fantasies are indeed possible, they are not equally probable in practice, and the repetition

of racial tropes, the playing with them and the subverting of them is a critical part of Dungeons &

Dragons. And race is in D&D is intrinsically bound up with gender and sexuality, just as it is in

more mundane reality.

Gendered Play & Sexual Dungeoneering

As the discussion of elves and dwarves above indicates, gender and race are intertwined

in D&D, just as gender and race are inextricably linked in real life. Race, gender, and sexuality

are all present within the game, because they are major aspects of a person’s character, and these

are games about vicariously experiencing that character. That process sometimes involves

deliberately bringing up topics that are sensitive or taboo in real life. There is an adolescent male

crudity endemic to many of the stories I have collected, and almost every game I have personally

played in has had plenty of sexual and off-color humor. “Being a guy” can mean being deliberately blunt, offensive, or crude, especially about sexual matters, and some of the most explicitly racist or sexist jokes told around a D&D table demonstrate this. Part of this is a desire 169

to be willfully offensive and edgy that a significant minority of players display, and almost

everyone has a story about “that guy” pulling something atrocious at the table. Some internet fan

communities even have a slang term for when players bring up their sexual fetishes in-game in

ways that make other people uncomfortable. To inflict this on one’s fellow players is to ask them

to enter one’s “magical realm,” a memetic reference to a popular story or urban legend about a

Dungeon Master who forced his players to encounter in-game content involving his urine fetish.

This term came up three separate times during my observations. This story is memorable because of its disgusting nature, but also because it nods to constant tension between wanting to indulge in fantasy and the risk of someone making others uncomfortable because they do not know where the line of “acceptable fantasy” is drawn.

The problems with gender and sex in the playing of D&D are sometimes harder to notice

than its problems with race because of the de-emphasis the game’s texts put on gender. But these issues are no less present in the process of play. This follows a familiar pattern established throughout this dissertation: While race is an integral part of the game, gender is an afterthought,

and the deep problems with sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination in the gaming

community are often afterthoughts, too, at least to the portion of the population who do not have

to deal with the constant expectation that they deal with their table-mate’s sexual advances.

According to one of my informants, “That’s why I don’t play with people I don’t know…

especially if there’s not another woman in the group. Most people are okay but it’s not worth

meeting the ones who aren’t.” (Interview 41)

Based on my interviews and observations, the problems with race in the game come up in

open play because they are literally written into the texts of the setting. Racial antagonism comes

up naturally in the story. But the problems with gender in D&D’s player culture emerge first and 170 foremost from the social dynamics around the game. While I saw and heard plenty of crude sexual humor and references during my observation sessions, most of what I saw was tame compared with some of the horror stories that players had to share about past experiences. The sort of content that I observed included jokes like “can I roll to have sex with X?” to “I roll to seduce whoever” (Sessions 17, 1) and “don’t let Rufus near any little boys.”37 I never observed any offense or anger at such comments, although there was plenty of exasperation at the delays caused in the game. That I did not see examples of some of the worst gaming behavior is not surprising, since people who participate in the most toxic kinds of games are also less likely to invite someone to be an observer that game. Based on my research, engaging in problematic behavior unobserved seems to be the point of some of the most toxic sorts of gaming groups, and that was certainly the opinion of more than one of my informants.

While most of my informants had at least one story about a particularly awkward or uncomfortable gaming group, the women, trans, and queer individuals I interviewed expressed a pervasive discomfort and a feeling of being targeted that my male-identifying players did not, although some of those who also identified as queer reported a consistent feeling of trans- and homo-phobia in some of their groups. In a few cases, these were cited as reasons to switch or leave groups. While I observed plenty of instances of players, including non-male players engaging in sex or gender-based humor during my observation sessions, it was in each case clearly mutually enjoyably, or, at worst, a case of a joke in poor taste quickly moved on from.

But in personal interviews, some of my informants shared stories of pervasive sexual harassment and abusive behavior far beyond bad jokes. “I had a group where one player would constantly

37 The character in question was a Cleric, a priest who gets magical powers from their deity., Making “Catholic Priest” jokes that assume that all clerics are pedophiles is, like making jokes about drow as if they were African- Americans, a common example of ideas from real life being transferred to D&D based on superficial or thematic correspondence. 171 make sexual comments about my character… saying that I should have sex with or seduce other characters… it wasn’t always me, but it was mostly me.” Was one typical report (Interview 41), while another woman noted that “In my college group, there was this one guy who would constantly suggest that we should have sex, then add, “in character,” and wink. I asked him to stop and he would always say it was “just a joke.” (Interview 19)

The problems I talk about in the following paragraphs are one of the reasons that there is a gender gap in gaming circles, and that the opinions here are almost exclusively from people who have not been driven out by the hostile treatment. The female players I interviewed are the ones who have picked up the hobby and stayed with it despite the harassment (although three female players said they’ve never had any major problems with toxic male players, only minor incidents. These were also players who picked up the hobby as adults and did not game with strangers). Based on my informant’s stories and my own experiences, there are many women who get discouraged and leave the hobby because of pervasive harassment by a minority of players, supported and perpetuated by the consent or non-action of the rest. As one of my informants said, “Eventually it just wasn’t worth it trying to find a good group… I stopped playing in college and got back into it because my husband had a group of people he played with” (Interview 37 ) D&D “just not being worth” the harassment was a sentiment most of my female players, for all that they loved the game, could empathize with.

Tabletop gaming, as a whole, has problems with institutional misogyny. Stories of sexual harassment among gaming groups are endemic, to the point where every woman I spoke to has at least one story of being made sexually uncomfortable in a gaming environment. Sometimes it was part of the initiation into the gaming group. One woman said that before she was allowed to join the game, she had to read the Dungeon Master’s sexual fanfiction and give (non-threatening) 172 feedback, something the other, male members of her group were forced to do (Interview 19).

Unwanted sexual content can also be part of the narrative and social contexts of the game. One player informed me she left a group because “The game started with all of us in prison together, and [The DM] started describing all the things that had been done to us while we were in prison… when he got to me, he described how my character had been repeatedly raped… none of this was discussed before the game.” (Interview 13). Another female informant reported “I have had multiple groups, all guys, tell me that I “had to” play a female character.” (Interview

23). Many were frequently exposed to sexual content that made them uncomfortable and were made uncomfortable complaining about it. Just being a woman in a gaming space singled them out, and many of the male players they played with could not or did not alter their behavior to make those spaces more inclusive. “When I played, plots centered on romance and sex more than was normal… It was hard to say “oh, it was definitely because I was a woman,” because there weren’t any other women in the group, but I felt like it was, it felt like it was about me.”

(Interview 24). For many of the women gamers I have encountered, being women in male- dominated gaming spaces means running the risk of being sexually threatened.

Not every gaming group is so hostile, but fourteen of my seventeen non-male informants had at least one serious problem with sexual harassment while playing D&D.38 Almost without exception, my female informants had been part of at least one group where they were consistently pushed to indulge and support the sexual fantasies of male players. All three who did not report any incidents were women who had picked up the hobby as adults and had never played with more than one group. While there were a few acute incidents like those mentioned

38 By “serious incident,” I mean something that made the participant feel either acutely or pervasively threatened while playing the game. This includes being made to feel unsafe in specific instances, as well as things like “constant rape jokes despite repeated requests to stop.” 173 above, more often it was the smaller and more pervasive forms of harassment, such as crude sexual humor, innuendo, and the like, directed not in mutual fun, but as an attack or demand for sexual submission.” One boy in the group was always just a little off.” Ran one typical comment from an informant. “he would make really uncomfortable comments… a lot of dead baby jokes and sex jokes… [Other Player] said that he was worse around me because he couldn’t talk to girls… ” (Interview 24). For some men and boys, sexualized banter and crude humor are part and parcel of the game and its culture, and it is a culture that they are unwilling to change to make it more friendly (or just less hostile) to people outside the in-group. In many cases, they cannot or will not understand why their behavior is problematic and threatening. Many male geeks, feeling themselves ostracized, are jealously possessive of “their” space, and see any potential changes as threats to something they hold dear. While many male geeks claim to want to include female players, my interviews with non-male informants show that there is a pervasive unwillingness among some of those male geeks to stop engaging in hostile and sexually threatening behaviors.

When I asked male informants if they or other male gamers changed their behavior when gaming around women, responses varied. “I haven’t had a lot of girls in my gaming groups”

(Interview 5) was a common comment, with another male respondent commenting that “not a lot of women are interested in D&D… at least not a lot of women want to play D&D with me!”

(Interview 36). When asked why they thought there were relatively few women playing D&D, one male gamer said, jokingly, “how many girls want to hang out with a bunch of nerds in a basement?” (Interview 32) while another noted that “D&D was created up mostly or entirely by guys… I don’t think it appeals as much to a ‘typical woman’”39 (Interview 15). Of those who

39 The informant in question was not able to define what they meant by this. 174 had women in their groups, responses were equally mixed. twelve of the informants asked gave some variation on “I don’t think I change my behavior much based on who I play with.”

(Interview 7). Ten others said something like “I’m generally more polite” (Interview 12).

Speaking of others they gamed with, informants were more likely to speak openly of problematic behaviors. Fourteen of my male informants reported having played with at least one group member who was “not good with girls,” (Interview 4) as one informant euphemistically said. But this descriptor covered a range of behaviors from simply not speaking to making lewd or unwelcome comments (and possibly more). While none of my informants implicated themselves as a problem player, more than one of them commented along the lines of “I’m definitely glad nobody was recording any of the games I played while I was in middle and high school.”

(Interview 46). While my male informants were often less able or willing to identify specific instances of abusive behavior, there is a definite if sometimes unspoken understanding among male gamers that women are treated differently in gaming spaces.

But even if my male informants were aware that women were treated differently, it was my female informants that revealed the scope of the issue. For them, it was difficult or impossible to separate gaming, gender, and sexuality. While my male players certainly talked about how sex and gender affected their experience as gamers, my female informants talked about how their experience as gamers was intrinsically tied to sex and romance. As one of my informants put it, “All of my gaming has been tied up with romances.” (Interview 24).

Sometimes this was because women were invited in originally as someone’s significant other, and sometimes because of the expectation that they would pair up with someone in the group if they did not already have a significant other. “I’ve never been in a group where I wasn’t asked out at least once… there was one guy who would make comments every time I was single.” 175

(Interview 44) Not being paired with a man was not a valid option. Out-of-character, it was hard or impossible for many of my female informants to avoid romantic tension with other players.

“’’I’m taken’ was okay. ‘I’m not interested in you’ wasn’t… College was easier,” another informant reported, “because I could always say I had a boyfriend… not being in a small town, they wouldn’t expect to know him.” (Interview 51) Unlike their male counterparts, who could be there “just to play the game,” these women were not allowed to avoid flirtation and were often put in situations where their bodies and their femininity were the focus of attention whether they wanted it or not. There was a subtle (and sometimes unsubtle) demand that they serve the role of sex object, and that they respond to and reinforce the sexual fantasies and desire of male players, with the constant threat of ostracism for being too sexual or not sexual enough.

Sometimes, one or more members of the group would position themselves as being helpful or protective, until or unless their problematic behavior was pointed out or their romantic advances rejected. As one of my informants put it, “it was fine that you were a woman, until you said no.” (Interview 22). The experience of many of my female informants is the familiar story of women who venture into male dominated spaces and risk punishment no matter how they handle their sexuality. Withholding, whether not giving in to sexual or romantic desires, or simply by not going along with the sexual or martial fantasies of their male cohorts, was likely to get them kicked out. Speaking of occasions when she had complained about the way she was treated, one informant said “I have been told multiple times, especially in a couple of places that

I used to go to, that I needed to grow a thicker skin. It was always ‘this is our space and we don’t want anyone ruining our fun.’” (Interview 44)

Dismissing anyone who doesn’t “get the joke” as humorless or hypersensitive is just one form of gatekeeping is common in geek social spaces. There is a certain species of male geek 176 who is convinced that there is a plague of “fake geek girls,” i.e., that women, especially attractive women, cannot possibly be “real geeks,” and that any attempt by these women to engage in geeky activities is a ploy to manipulate and obtain the attention of males. There is a deep streak of misogyny and pathos in this line of thinking. It reeks of wounded, childish aggression towards attractive women based on the idea that pretty girls hurt them or reject them and cannot be trusted. Gaming forums also have elements extremely critical of “SJW’s” (social justice warriors), a popular derisive term aimed at anyone who criticizes the social politics of games. These elements are especially toxic and vocal within video-game fan subculture, but the same types of behavior and outlook persist across the spectrum of geek hobbies. It is a mindset that sees any attempt at change or criticism as an attempt to take away one’s toys, that rejects the idea that fantasy reflects reality, and that insists that and problematic behavior is “just fantasy” or

“just a joke,” and that any offense is the fault of the offended party. This attitude was referenced directly or obliquely throughout most of my interviews when discussing problem players.

Male geeks of this stripe often set themselves up as gatekeepers, believing at least implicitly that as (usually) white males, they are the arbiters of who is and who is not a “real geek.” The very term, “fake geek girl,” implies that the speaker is an authority figure on who is a

“real geek.” Despite the notion that geekiness is for “all comers,” there is a deep thread of

“geekier than thou” within geek culture, and while both male and female geeks can be subject to challenge, female geeks are challenged more frequently and vigorously. “whenever I go into a comic book shop, there’s this chance someone will quiz me… ask me questions like ‘hey, what’s your favorite comic book? Oh, you remember that one thing from that one issue?’… Sometimes it’s just conversation, but sometimes it becomes a thing where I’m being tested.” (Interview 44)

Speaking personally, I have been visiting hobby shops and gaming spaces for more than twenty 177 years, and no one has ever challenged my geek credentials. Not so for many of my non-male informants.

According to my non-male informants, getting into a relationship within a gaming group meant knowing that if it ended (and especially if it ended badly) there was always a risk of not being able to continue playing. “I was always the odd man out, figuratively speaking… Whoever

I was dating, the groups were always his friends first.” (Interview 24). Whether they were brought in as someone’s significant other or whether the relationship started after the game began, women in male-dominated gaming spaces reported a constant fear of being exiled from the game for non-game behavior in ways that simply did not come up in interviews with male informants. Being male typically means “belonging” by default within a D&D group.40 The difference is that gendered behavioral expectations serves to fence men “in” where it serves to keep women “out.” Many men reported social pressure in the confines of gaming groups. They did not have to fear being rejected or kicked out of a group because of their romantic relationships, but my male colleagues also reported abusive or toxic gaming groups where fear and pressure were used to coerce behavior. One informant described a group where “The DM was a total bully… he would play people’s characters for them just constantly… threatened anyone who didn’t go along with whatever his terrible plot was.”41 (Interview 5) Another player faced a situation where “This one player sabotaged the group… she was aggressive and confrontational. She would constantly snipe at people until they did what she wanted.”

(Interview 46) The difference is that being male does not mean being a default target for victimization within those toxic situations. And there are certain situations, like demands for

40 Odious personal behavior or social pressure can cause males to be ostracized as well, but the difference here is that men and boys are assumed to belong until proven otherwise. 41 When I asked for clarification, the informant said that the threats were against people’s characters, not the people themselves. Speaking of self and character interchangeably is common among roleplayers. 178

sexual favor or attention, that disproportionately affect women. In a subculture that supposedly

runs on inclusion, tolerance of difference, and friendship, many of my informants found that

their gaming groups replicated hierarchies of domination, with nerds competing to replicate the

swaggering, sexually aggressive behavior of the alpha male jocks that they so often vilify.

All of this is further complicated by the way that nerd identity is linked to sexuality. A

common theme among stories I collected is that nerdy social outlets are, for a subset of the

population, also sexual outlets. When geek subculture is separated from daily life, it can be a

place for safely breaking normal taboos. It is something of an open secret that many people like

to “hook up” at conventions and have been doing so for decades. “For me, it was a safe place to

explore my interest in other women away from a conservative catholic environment” (Interview

24) said one woman of her regular convention hookups. Another woman noted that “Cosplaying

can be very empowering… you can be like the aspects of the character that you want to have…

sometimes that includes sex” (Interview 37). Many of the stories I collected were about women,

not because men did not participate, but because female sexual promiscuity is always more

heavily monitored and more likely to be the subject of comment.

There is a pervasive problem of sexual assault and misconduct at conventions. “Creepy behavior and harassment are pretty common… some organizers try harder than others, but it’s an ongoing problem.” One study (Asselin 2014) found that of surveyed respondents, 59% felt that there was a problem with sexual harassment in the comics industry, and that 8% of respondents of all genders reported being groped, harassed, or raped at a convention. Asselin’s

study is one of the few pieces of hard data, since the problem of harassment at conventions is

much talked about (at least in recent years,) but little researched. That there is constant debate

over what sexual behavior is acceptable at conventions and a long-running question over how 179

people in costume should be treated shows how geek culture refracts the sexual norms, taboos,

and expectations of mainstream American culture. While there is an increasing understanding

that “cosplay is not consent,” as in “wearing a revealing costume is not license to touch, grope,

or make someone uncomfortable,” the fact that many conventions are having to actively pursue

such a policy indicates how pervasive the problem is in the first place.

At least some of the sexual aggression in D&D is explicitly linked to more generalized

aggression and competition. Even though the game is theoretically cooperative, some groups can

become highly competitive over the relative power of characters or who gets to be the focus of

the narrative. Put more simply, sometimes games become less about the story and more about the

politics of personality within the group, with players (and/or the Dungeon Master) jockeying to

be the star of the show. One of my informants said the mechanical, competitive aspects of the

game encouraged players to “think of stories and relationships as something to be won.”

(Interview 36). Sexual aggression and gross sexual display can be tools for this sort of social

jockeying, with aggressive players more interested in showing their dominance by making other

people uncomfortable, rather than telling a mutually enjoyable story. When asked why they

stayed in toxic groups, the most common responses range from “because I didn’t have many

friends” (Interview 36) to “I didn’t want to let the DM down… I didn’t realize until college that

no D&D is better than bad D&D.” (Interview 51). Because geek culture has traditionally been a

refuge for people who see themselves as exiled from normal social interaction, it is especially vulnerable to the kind of isolation that makes toxic group dynamics fester.

Not all of the sexual connotations of D&D are negative. Or, at least, some of the women I

talked to had relationships with D&D and sex that were complicated and bittersweet. Informants

reported that nerd spaces gave them a place where they felt sexually desired in ways that were 180

empowering and objectifying at the same time. D&D and fantasy gaming can be a space of

sexual exploration, for some informants to express themselves and explore queerness, non- monogamous relationships, and other forms of sexuality. “Gaming for me was a way to tell stories about not being a good, scared, straight Christian boy… Realizing two male characters I had created had feelings for each other made me realize there were feelings I had been hiding from.” (Interview 18). But these empowering elements were and are always linked with the potential for threat and danger. The prospect of a sexual encounter was, for most of my female

informants, linked with the fear of meeting someone dangerous. As one of my informants

observed in retrospect, “There was always an expectation whenever somebody did something

nice. Even if it was just the expectation that I smile and flutter my eyelashes.” (Interview 24).

Female informants had to put up with harassment, to reinforce the fantasies of male players and

walk a dangerous line between being valued as sexual objects and being degraded as dead weight

and inferior players.

Sexual content in roleplay is not itself evil, and there are spaces both physical and digital

that cater to consensual adult roleplay. The stories I have collected are not that. D&D is not the

root cause of any of the problems described above. But specific aspects of nerd culture, of which

D&D is an integral part, keep abusive and predatory behavior from getting called out. A 2003

article that fans still cite today describes the “five geek social fallacies” It describes how geeks,

believing themselves to be ostracized, are reluctant to exclude people from activities, even if that

behavior is bothering other players (Five Geek Social Fallacies). Likewise, the author observes

that many geeks equate “criticism” with “abuse.” This can lead to toxic friend groups where

players whose behavior is disruptive or even abusive are not called out, because people are

worried about being bad friends, or hurting someone’s feelings. This is not unique to geek 181

culture, of course, but it is especially pervasive and severe within geek culture because the

attitude of “all outcasts together” is one of the cornerstones of geek identity. In the case of D&D,

this means that disruptive players often don’t get called out on bad behavior, which can be

exacerbated by a “bro code” attitude among male gamers, particularly if there is only one woman

in a group.

The original article does not mention race or gender explicitly. But when looked at in

combination with the observations above, it is clear that there are consequences to geeks

operating under a sense of social awkwardness or an unwillingness to confront and deal with bad

behavior from other geeks. It is equally clear that this refusal results in spaces which are often

dominated by white males, where women and minorities are made to feel uncomfortable by a

repugnant but obvious few. The reluctance of the rest to correct this behavior constitutes a form

of collusion. This doesn’t mean that geeks are inherently bad people, nor does it mean that all the

problems come from men. I have personally played in a campaign where the sole toxic and aggressive person was a woman. Two of my informants reported similar stories, and one informant told a story of “A trans woman in our group… she was just kind of a mess… she’d get very graphic with sexual details about her wish-fulfillment characters and then say we were bigoted when we complained.”(Interview 34). But, based on my interviews and on the sheer preponderance of sexist and racist tropes promulgated through the game, nerd culture has a pervasive problem with racism and sexism, and is a problem that requires active measures, such as directly confronting the behavior people creating hostile environments and making it clear that said behavior is not acceptable. What my informants tell me over and over is that there is an unfortunate minority of gamers who snarl at any mention of diversity, and who lash out at anyone who attempts to question or critique their often violent fantasies. These are people who 182

will sexually threaten and socially punish the object of their sexual desires, and they are drawn to

this hobby by the power fantasies involved.

Geek culture has and is becoming significantly more accepting of diversity. But it is still

learning to value, seek out, and promote diversity. And by “diversity,” I mean “the viewpoints of people who are not white men.” Even more than with films, television, and other mainstream media, the producers of geek culture remain overwhelmingly white. This both reflects and creates the white, male-dominated spaces of the gaming store and the gaming table. There are almost no people of color or women in positions of significant authorial or editorial power in

gaming, although the number of women in WotC’s employ has slowly risen over the years.

One of the central challenges facing D&D is how to address its problematic relationship

with race and gender. While individual problems stem from individual players, the issues raised

in this chapter are not things that can be solved just by getting rid of a few bad people. Sexist and

racist tropes are part of gaming culture because they are part of American culture, but also

because sexist and racist tropes are foundational to the D&D and to the tropes it is made of. But

by the same token, gaming culture has the potential to be a pivot point of personal and public

sentiment. We can never change the attitudes of every player, but by encouraging safe and

supportive gaming spaces and challenging problematic behaviors, we can try to make gaming

spaces into places for positive change and thoughtful reflection on critical topics. 183

CONCLUSION

While I was finishing this dissertation, one of my friends contacted me, asking for some help with a D&D campaign he was planning. He wanted the scenario to be based on Joseph

Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He had chosen the story because it was “on rails,” which is to say that it was a linear narrative that would keep the players tightly focused. This was desirable because he wanted to use this module as an introductory adventure to a larger narrative and having the game on rails would make it easier and quicker to design, while familiarizing the players with key details of the setting. On the other hand, it was also 2019 in the United States, and it seemed to us that setting up a roleplaying scenario asking the players to be employed by slave-owners would be problematic at best. Unsurprisingly, trying to turn Conrad’s work into something more sensitive and inclusive proved to be a challenge. Heart of Darkness, while it condemns the horrors of the Belgian occupation of the Congo, also treats the natives as little more than objects, leaving them voiceless. My friend and I discussed a number of options for making the scenario more racially sensitive: Is it better to make the “native” population nonhuman, in order to distinguish the conflict in the game from real-life problems and make it clear that the scenario is not intended as an accurate allegory for slavery? Or is doing so no more than a polite lie that disguises the festering racism at the heart of the scenario? Attempts at divesting the fantasy of its reality quickly became mired in the impossibility of the task. My friend summed it up best in saying “it doesn’t matter who the natives are, the scenario just requires an oppressed group.” Given that I am supposed to be someone who studies race in

D&D, discovering that I had no good answer on how to fix the problem of telling a sensitive story with insensitive tropes was both unsurprising and unwelcome. 184

Beyond being somewhat personally embarrassing, this is a good metaphor for D&D’s issue with race. Even when players or designers come to the table with the intent of engaging in an entirely fantastic scenario, there’s always more reality in our fantasies than we would like.

The tropes and stories that we tell are, ultimately, always reflections of reality, and many times those reflections are like funhouse mirrors: Distorted, but in ways that are anchored to basic truths we might find uncomfortable. Racism and sexism both exist in D&D because they exist in real life. In the case of race, it seems so pervasive in both real life and in the fantasy genre that it is virtually impossible to imagine a game of D&D without racism in it. To many players, the idea of different races and species in competition is so obvious and natural seeming that its absence is more jarring than its presence. In D&D, just as in real life, race is so frequently bound up with national identity that it is a core component of how players and characters see the world, both personally and politically. The understanding of power, sex, gender, and race that comes with players from the real world into the fantasy realm is so essential to their concept of reality that to excise it would be to make the game incomprehensible.

D&D inherits its issues with race and gender from its source material. From Tolkien’s

“good races living happily apart” model to H.P. Lovecraft’s virulent hatred for nonwhite peoples,

D&D’s foundational texts are rife with scientific Eurocentric racism. And these racist attitudes are not simply artifacts of the author’s times that can be easily sanitized to suit a more progressive social climate. They are baked into the tropes that define those authors. H.P.

Lovecraft’s stories take their power from the fear of the racial other. Robert E. Howard’s stories use racial tropes as a shorthand for character, and he constantly invokes racial stereotypes as the reason why his characters act as they do. The idea of race as something essential that determines a person’s character is integral to D&D, just as it is in these early sources. The foundational texts 185

of D&D also demonstrate limited roles for women. Women are often nonentities, and when they

are present, they more often than not play restricted roles. The power fantasies present in

characters like Conan the Barbarian are designed to appeal to a white male audience, and so

D&D is based on appealing to that audience, too.

It is not just the tropes of the fantasy genre that cause these issues. Some of them are

inherent in the game itself. For one thing, D&D is, at least partially, a power fantasy even more

direct than that of a Robert E. Howard story. Rather than empathizing with the powerful

character, D&D invites the player to imagine themselves in the role of the powerful character,

not to read about their adventures but to decide their course. Dungeons & Dragons is about

imagining oneself as a person who has powers, skills, and abilities that a person in “real life” does not, and much of the enjoyment of the game derives from using those powers to overcome

challenges. D&D is never going to be a game about harmony and equality, because the pleasures

of inequality are fundamental parts of the game. Even the name suggests this – both dungeons

and dragons exist to be overcome and exploited by the power and cunning of the characters. And

that’s what those players come for. While it is entirely possible to play a game of D&D

peacefully, most of my subjects agreed that at least part of the pleasure of the game came from

combat. “I play D&D because it’s fun to imagine chucking fireballs at orcs,” as one informant

put it (Interview 4). Even if we attempt to make the targets of D&D’s violence more acceptable

to modern social mores by having more nuanced presentations of race and gender, D&D still

requires an “acceptable” target for violence for its basic format to work.

But the tropes that D&D plays with are not static, and as many of the examples in the

preceding chapters show, there is considerable critical thought among the players of D&D.

Players question racist and sexist tropes and opt to mock and subvert them at the table. Authors 186 like Steven Erikson of the Malazan Book of the Fallen series and Elli Stephens of Goblins Show that some players want to think critically about the tropes they play with, and that they find more pleasure in questioning narratives of racial dominance and gender disparity rather than reveling in them. D&D is a game of telling stories, and these are stories that change in the telling.

The culture of D&D is sexist and racist, because it is part of American culture. The male power fantasies and racist fears that influenced the early pulp writers did not spring from a vacuum. D&D, more than most forms of media, thrives on recycling tropes. And, based on the stories of my informants, there are plenty of gaming spaces where misogynistic attitudes, racism, and sexual harassment persist. But that is true of American culture as a whole. D&D is a way to reflect and talk about reality. If those reflections make us uncomfortable, that is a good thing, because it means that in observing the tropes deployed in gaming, we see uncomfortable truths about hierarchies of power in the real world.

The culture of D&D, in other words, includes every alignment, from Lawful Good to

Chaotic Evil. But I cannot help but be hopeful, at least for the players, because D&D is ultimately a game about thought and empathy. It is a game whose core activity is trying to imagine one’s way into the head of another person, who is also a reflection of the self, and to imagine what would have happened if we had been born someone different. For all that many characters are pure power fantasy, I regard any attempt to step outside the self and understand what makes a person act the way they do to be a positive thing. Because reaching out from one’s self is the fundamental act of empathy, and empathy is the first step to solving the issues that divide people. Although as D&D also proves “kill them and take their stuff” remains an attractive option for many players, and many people. 187

This analysis is far from comprehensive. I have, after all, observed only a few games of

D&D, mostly in the midwestern United States. There is a great deal of potential for future

research in this area. The most significant trend, in my mind, is the increasing diversification of

D&D. While the foundational texts of the game are certainly problematic, those foundational

texts are also less important. People now write Lovecraftian stories like Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft

Country (2016) that invoke Lovecraftian themes while directly questioning Lovecraft’s racist

ideology. While there are always reactionary elements and people who want to keep their

problematic tropes, there is increasing diversity in nerd-centric spaces. D&D continues to evolve

because it is not anchored to any one set of tropes, and even the most iconic authors are not

essential to understanding. I have played D&D with people who have never read Tolkien, and it

did not inhibit their ability to understand. D&D is a wonderful tool for genericizing tropes, and

the game’s racist, sexist origins do not condemn it to remaining forever racist and sexist. D&D is

the human imagination given space to play. It is also a strange time-capsule of tropes, preserving whole strata of popular fiction and the tropes it inspired. Yet those tropes are constantly changed, twisted, and moved by the forces of cultural seismology. The barbarians players create today may have descended from Conan, but they are never the same as the source, and always borrow from many sources of inspiration. While the power fantasies may appall a sensitive observer,

D&D pushes tropes and ideas to change by putting them in conversation. Some players will always want to kill the orcs and drive them out. But, inevitably, some will start to ask why they’re so bad, and could not the characters negotiate with them instead?

Good, bad, and ugly, D&D is a game of ideas, of empathy, of shared social spaces and a whole series of uncomfortable tropes about how people treat those perceived as different. But it is the players that give me hope. The people I met during this process were not good people or 188 bad people, they were just people. Some of them had opinions or ideas I found wrong-headed, and a few profoundly objectionable. But the gaming table was a place to put those objectionable ideas to the test, for players to ask each other not just what they would do in a fantasy scenario, but why they would do it. Writing now, in 2019, I wish more people played D&D. They might argue and throw snack foods at each other, but at least they’d be having a conversation. There are no easy solutions to the world’s innumerable complex problems, but sometimes it helps to sit around a table, roll some dice, and try to understand one another a little better. It is certainly better than the current process for public debate. 189

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APPENDIX A: LIST OF THINGS MR. WELCH IS NOT ALLOWED TO DO IN AN RPG

Included here are a few of the “Mr. Welch” Jokes described in chapter three, as further

illustration of the type of humor described.

“736. No taking the party to Kara-Tur just because my character has a thing for Asian chicks.”

“740. Not allowed to give my character a name from a bushman click language.”

“889. I will not try to regain sanity by nailing the reporter chick in public.”

“997. I can't beat on the drow until he admits his name is Toby.”

“1105. Even if it is just my character speaking, I will not claim Texas was stolen from Mexico. I

will live longer that way.”

“1278. An elf wardancer chick in nothing but body paint is totally hot. A Vesten berserker in

nothing but body paint not so much.”

“1481. The Island of Small Breasted Fantasy Females does not exist.”

“1596. Even if she's the most dangerous, the party doesn't appreciate me killing the naked chick

first.”

“1683. Killing the orc horde by drowning them all at once is heroic. Killing them by drowning

them one at a time is an alignment check.”

“1720. Contrary to popular opinion, the girdle of masculinity/femininity does have a noticeable

effect on elves.”

“1757. The princess' menstral cycle doesn't factor into her rescue.”

“1756. Despite what the module says, not every woman in this campaign is a closeted lesbian”

“1775. Just because I spared the villain's life doesn't mean she owes me a first date.”

“1850. There is also an elven word for heterosexual.”

“1905. No nailing the GM's girlfriend's character.” 197

APPENDIX B: IRB APPROVAL LETTER

DATE: April 17, 2019

TO: Philip Clements, M.A. FROM: Bowling Green State University Institutional Review Board

PROJECT TITLE: [1056665-4] Dungeons & Discourse: Intersectional Identities in Dungeons & Dragons SUBMISSION TYPE: Continuing Review/Progress Report

ACTION: APPROVED APPROVAL DATE: April 17, 2019 EXPIRATION DATE: April 16, 2020 REVIEW TYPE: Expedited Review

REVIEW CATEGORY: Expedited review category # 7

Thank you for your submission of Continuing Review/Progress Report materials for this project. The Bowling Green State University Institutional Review Board has APPROVED your submission. This approval is based on an appropriate risk/benefit ratio and a project design wherein the risks have been minimized. All research must be conducted in accordance with this approved submission.

Please note that you are responsible to conduct the study as approved by the IRB. If you seek to make any changes in your project activities or procedures, those modifications must be approved by this committee prior to initiation. Please use the modification request form for this procedure.

All UNANTICIPATED PROBLEMS involving risks to subjects or others and SERIOUS and UNEXPECTED adverse events must be reported promptly to this office. All NON-COMPLIANCE issues or COMPLAINTS regarding this project must also be reported promptly to this office.

This approval expires on April 16, 2020. You will receive a continuing review notice before your project expires. If you wish to continue your work after the expiration date, your documentation for continuing review must be received with sufficient time for review and continued approval before the expiration date.

Good luck with your work. If you have any questions, please contact the Office of Research Compliance at 419-372-7716 or [email protected]. Please include your project title and reference number in all correspondence regarding this project.

This letter has been electronically signed in accordance with all applicable regulations, and a copy is retained within Bowling Green State University Institutional Review Board's records. - 1 - Generated on IRBNet