Role Playing Games ... a personal essay

1. Then

When I was extremely young (sometime in the last Century) I stayed for a while at my Grandparents' home in a small rural village in the midlands of England.  The village today bears no relationship to the village I remember.  Housing estates have sprawled over the farm fields behind the Edwardian Villas.  The gentle rolling pastures, where we walked the dog and gathered fresh mushrooms for breakfast, have vanished under road metal and manicured lawns.  No-one picks those delicious field mushrooms any more.  Not only because of the recent urban sprawl, application of artificial fertilizer by a 'modern' farmer had wiped them out some years after I had last been privileged to harvest a few.

I remember the narrow winding lane that led uphill from the house, scarcely wide enough for a car, with dark, worn sandstone walls partly hidden by dense hedges.  As the lane neared the crest of the hill it turned left and followed the brow of the hill a ways.  It paused at the big old chestnut tree in front of the church before wandering down the other side towards the village centre.  The church and tree seemed timeless to me.  I sometimes played with my cousins in the fields behind the church.  The village was full of interest and character.   Footpaths meandered across fields, leading through dark woods where all kinds of creatures scurried and where our imaginations fancied we intruded on the ancient folk.

The oldest cottage I can remember was a small shop whose proprietor must surely have been a kindly witch.  The interior was dimly lit, the floor was stone and I am certain that as you stepped down into the shop from the outside, you stepped back in time at least a hundred years.  It was a favourite place to be taken to ... the small counters were set with large boxes of all kinds of biscuits and sweets.  I can still remember two things about this place ... its smell and its temperature.  It was always cold!   Cellars are cold too ... and my Grandparents home had a wonderful cellar.

When you walked into the hallway in my Grandparent's home, you would see on the right a dresser and mirror, beyond that the steep stairway up to the bedrooms.  On the right, beneath the stairs, was a small scullery with a cooking range that my parents used.  I would sneak in there often, tip-toeing down the musty, smelly and cobwebbed steps leading down into the cellar.  I am not sure that I could stand up in there nowadays, but I remember half lights letting in dust-speckled sunlight, and cobwebbed bottles of curious shapes and colours in half-forgotten corners.  I found little treasures in some of my explorations ... lead soldiers, abandoned tools, musty boxes and game pieces.

2. Later

My family moved North, and my environment changed from village to city, from the land of my birth to my mother's land.  At first we lived in a four story twelve apartment tenement, there were tramcars, and undergrounds, and docks, and factories.  There were winter fogs that were opaque with grime from coal fires and museums with dinosaurs and winter carnivals.  There was, beneath the post Victorian Industrialism of the city, a buried history, spanning two millenniums in fact, still measured by remaining stone and nurtured memory and the culture of invaders who came to stay.  The past is present, if you care to take the time to see.

Every year brought something old as well as something new.  A trip to North East England and the feel of ancient forces in a stone circle amidst the mountains.  An exploration of a long-abandoned mine with mossy entranceways, the steady drip, drip of water filtered from the mountain above, faint pick marks witness to the unknown hands that laboured long before.  In Southern Scotland, a Norman keep still shrouded with an evil mist where no birds sang and neck hairs bristled as the boat drew near the solitary tower.  And in the North no monster found but mystery ... a buried chamber with an overlook where once a hermit lived, found once but lost in later visits.

Look deep beneath the manicured land.  All is not as it appears.  The hill you just drove past ... didn't you think its shape was a little ... regular?  Its sides are steep, its shape oblong.  Did you think it just grew there?  No, it was wrought nearly four thousand years ago as a burial mound, a memorial perhaps to a long forgotten leader.  Once you learn to read the land, strip away the debris of the industrial age and reveal the settlements, the forts, the barrows, the temples, the drovers' roads, the mines, the very trappings of civilizations past.  Wonder at the certainty that over three thousand years ago there was a peaceful time where merchants traded from the farthest reaches of the known world, where Northern chiefs are buried with exquisite ornaments from far off India and their warriors' fine wrought blades seemed naught but ceremonial.

3. Now

I was born, more or less, at the same time as the transistor, shortly after the end of the WWII.  More than any other invention this marks the division between the centuries.  A vacuum tube is understood, it glows with energy and hums with purpose.  My father built a television out of war surplus tubes and other parts when I was five years old although I seem to remember it stopped working when a mouse ran down the antenna wire and jumped inside the case.  I think the mouse stopped working too!  I didn't listen to my first transistor radio until I was 10, and as an amateur hobbyist I learned to use tubes or valves before I worked with transistor circuits.  As I started working after leaving school,  I designed systems using early integrated circuits (maybe 30 or 40 transistors in a package) and a soldering iron and now of course I use microprocessors (maybe 300 or 400 thousand transistors in a package) and design by typing.  Like millions of others, I have seen this society achieve some great technical wonders - planetary exploration on an annual budget less than the amount of money women spend on makeup in the US every year is a wonder!  The first digital watch I saw was built from a kit of parts and it is the same size as the smallest cell phone I see today.  I noted the other day that my first 'real' computer had one 10 inch floppy drive and ran at 6MHz with 64k of RAM - my current one is obsolete now also, its a PII 200MHz with 128M of RAM.  It was 1/4 of the price brand new and is 1/8 the volume.  In my lifetime the population of the planet has more than doubled.

Change is everywhere, and if we measure the rate of change in terms of computing power, the change is exponential.  But exponential growth in any system can only occur for as long as the resource upon which it is based is unlimited.   The biggest lie we live with is "sustainable growth".  We are all living in a kind of pyramid scheme which at heart we know is bound to collapse. We are no longer in control.   At the very moment when we need to train people broadly so the tightly linked eco-system we live in can be appreciated as such, we train armies of individual specialists.  The brilliant chemical engineer produces DDT , the smart MBA markets surplus milk substitute to a population without the means to use it.  There are specialists in nuclear weapons .... 

We can hardly keep track of what the changes are, we think some are for the best, we worry that most are not.  We are all trained to be specialists with little regard for the consequences of our actions in other areas.  "Its not my job!"  "I was just doing what I was ordered to do!"  Once there were peoples with a 'world view'  who had the vision to undertake massive projects over several generations, for example the builders of Stonehenge.  Arguably, they knew their responsibility, the future was entirely theirs to shape.  Those who came later did not pause to understand, or learn to appreciate, but perceived heresies and destroyed them and their culture in the name of righteousness.  They took away the need to think and forgave us our trespasses and now we play the game of life with no controls.

We are all swept along in this maelstrom that is the technological age, most bob around in happy, uncaring oblivion ~ some give up to despair and drown while others seek the calmer eddies to catch their breath.   So now, for me at least,  gaming is that calmer spot, where I can, at least for a while, transport myself to a simpler land where there are Rules and Consequences and  I too can take my turn at being the Dungeon Master.

©Richard Whitwell,
January 9th 2001