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Voted, read an article in the pretentious overpriced literary mag The Believer, and did laundry this morning more or less at the exact same time. How is this possible? Simple, the voting poll booth was located in a high school across the street from the laundramat. Yes, I can multi-task. Edgy about interviews tomorrow, so distracting self. Will write up questions soon.
An article in The Believer that I read while doing laundry, clarified a few things. What it clarified was why I never played Dungeons and Dragons as child, teenager, or young adult. Why the game annoys me on a certain level and intrigues me on another one. And why I feel an urge occassionally to rant about it and annoy role-playing experts.
Here's the explanation - presented succinctly by the author of the article [ Destroy All Monsters by Paul Le Farge, in 37th issue of The Believer, dated 9/06/06].
1.D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play even the basic game, you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions. (Everything according to the Le Farge is laid out in precise detail including what the characters look like and how powerful they can be.) It would be a mistake to think of these rules as an impediment to enjoying the game. Rather, the rules are a necessary condition for enjoying the game, and this is true whether you play by them or not.
2. What may you ask, is thedifference between a "brazen strumpet" and a "wanton wench"? I don't know, and it doesn't matter; this is a rule which exists purely for it's own sake. Here you have one reason why D&D appealed more to boys than to girls; it just wasn't written with girls in mind.
And later - Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist who published a book-length study of fantasy role-playing games in 1983, reported that "in theory, female characters can be as powerful as males;in practice, they are often treated as chattles." Indeed, one of the players Fine observed reported that he didn't like playing with women, because they inhibited his friends' natural tendency to rape the (imaginary) women they met in-game. The author comes up with theory on why this happens in a footnote: It's hard to know what to make of this, but the phrase castration anxiety comes to mind.. [While collecting stories for folklore classes in undergrad - I came across quite a few that could be analyzed as "castration anxiety" or the result of castration anxiety. My favorite is the joke about the penis getting eaten by the dark dank cave. LOL! Which was retold in a different form in Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods.]
Women according to the author have created their own version of the game - "I have been a player in an all female game where we spent all session shopping."
( My reaction to all of this )
An article in The Believer that I read while doing laundry, clarified a few things. What it clarified was why I never played Dungeons and Dragons as child, teenager, or young adult. Why the game annoys me on a certain level and intrigues me on another one. And why I feel an urge occassionally to rant about it and annoy role-playing experts.
Here's the explanation - presented succinctly by the author of the article [ Destroy All Monsters by Paul Le Farge, in 37th issue of The Believer, dated 9/06/06].
1.D&D is a game for people who like rules: in order to play even the basic game, you had to make sense of roughly twenty pages of instructions. (Everything according to the Le Farge is laid out in precise detail including what the characters look like and how powerful they can be.) It would be a mistake to think of these rules as an impediment to enjoying the game. Rather, the rules are a necessary condition for enjoying the game, and this is true whether you play by them or not.
2. What may you ask, is thedifference between a "brazen strumpet" and a "wanton wench"? I don't know, and it doesn't matter; this is a rule which exists purely for it's own sake. Here you have one reason why D&D appealed more to boys than to girls; it just wasn't written with girls in mind.
And later - Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist who published a book-length study of fantasy role-playing games in 1983, reported that "in theory, female characters can be as powerful as males;in practice, they are often treated as chattles." Indeed, one of the players Fine observed reported that he didn't like playing with women, because they inhibited his friends' natural tendency to rape the (imaginary) women they met in-game. The author comes up with theory on why this happens in a footnote: It's hard to know what to make of this, but the phrase castration anxiety comes to mind.. [While collecting stories for folklore classes in undergrad - I came across quite a few that could be analyzed as "castration anxiety" or the result of castration anxiety. My favorite is the joke about the penis getting eaten by the dark dank cave. LOL! Which was retold in a different form in Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods.]
Women according to the author have created their own version of the game - "I have been a player in an all female game where we spent all session shopping."
( My reaction to all of this )
