Essay

Did you know that there are rock-paper-scissors tournaments?

I’m not joking. Yes, it sounds like a joke, but the WRPSA is a real institution, with games taken as seriously by its players as any other sport. There are championships, books on strategy, trainers…

Now, the easy(and likely immediate…) reaction is to laugh. It really sounds like a lost Monty Python sketch, doesn’t it? You could see it on The Simpsons; hushed reporters discussing with retired masters the strategies this particular player is using…Oh, Paper; that’s the same opening he used against Keriovick in Moscow last year. A risky gambit; will it pay off, John? And the camera pans to the retired seven-time world champion, who’s maybe 14 years old.

It’s easy to laugh, because RPS means something to most of us; it’s a “game” only in the loosest of terms. There is no strategy, no skill, it’s entirely random, right? It’s what you do when you need to roll-off or cut-high but don’t have any dice or cards handy.

But it’s not entirely random, because you choose. You decide whether you throw Scissors or Paper or Rock, and surely there is some strategy in the choice, right?

H.P. Lovecraft, the racist little muppet, has a famous saying that gets trotted out like a prancing pony every time Horror as a genre gets mentioned.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

Most people, I think, get too wrapped up in this idea, and think that he was explaining his overall thesis statement: but consider, how much of Lovecraft’s horror is about the unknown? Most of his horror, I think, comes from the idea that exploring and discovery is dangerous. It’s an anti-intellectual sentiment, that the more you learn about the world, the more horrifying it becomes. A more accurate thesis statement might be “Ignorance is bliss.”

Now, do I have a long-winded yet articulate dissertation on Hit Points Lovecraft in the hopper for you? No. This is a half-baked idea at best, but it’s a fitting prostige(A portmanteu of prologue and prestige, used to define the practice of telling a seemingly unrelated story as an opener to a thesis; made famous by Rachel Maddow and lefty-Youtube video essays.) to what I want to talk about: Looking Behind the Scenes.

Look at the published stats for any “moral choice” game, and you’ll see that most everyone picks the “good-guy” path, rather than villain. We don’t want to be cruel and evil people, we don’t want to cause pain or suffering, we want to be the hero.

So here’s my question: why would anyone want to be the bad-guy?

Because people do want to be the bad-guy. Look at all the people who play Warhammer 40k as chaos-marines, tyranids, orks, necrons, and dark eldar. Count all the people who love playing Evil RPG campaigns, or relish in being the anti-hero. Consider how many people reach for red lightsabers and stormtrooper outfits, or vampire capes, or purport to identify with the Joker.

I say purport, because no one really identifies with the Joker. I mean, if anyone was really given the opportunity to join an oppressive dictatorial regime predicated on the suppression of the poor and downtrodden, no one would actually join up, right?

Some would. Some already have.

I’m Gender-Neutral.

Or perhaps I’m Genderfluid. Agender fits too, and ultimately every time I try to nail down my gender identity to one of the currently accepted terms, I come away thinking “I mean…maybe? I guess?”

I’m autistic, and for me, gender is just confusing. There is a lot that goes into it, a lot that comes out of it, and I just don’t flippin’ know anymore. I don’t care anymore. I don’t have the time or energy to devote to this when I could be planning my next RPG session or struggling to finish this dang-blasted chapter!

But that doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts. If you need evidence of that, look at my post on gender-neutral nobility. Give me enough time, and I’ll fix all the problems with the English language!

Eh, maybe not, but I certainly will share my opinions! Thank you for asking! So glad you’re curious! No, no, the doors are locked, don’t bother trying to flee, you’re mine now! For the next few minutes, anyway.

Titles are an interested etymological study.

Consider that we use the word “human” to describe our species as a whole, “woman” to describe the female of the species, and “man” to describe the male. Wouldn’t it make more sense to say “man” is our whole species, while “woman” is female and “human” is male?

That was how it was done in Old English: “man” was separated into the words “wereman” and “wifman.” (Note that I’m being general, here. This is not a detailed explanation, nor is it meant to be precise. If you want a longer and more detailed/accurate explanation of old english words, please go to a primary source, or a work dedicated to the subject.) to designate male and female. Wifman became the word “wife,” and wereman became…well, at some point we dropped the idea that males needed to be defined seperately from the species. “Man” became both non-gendered and gendered, depending on context.

Think about what this does. It implies that “male” is the default, that “man-kind” is the baseline expectation, and that being a “wo-man” is to be different from a “normal-man,” or a man. This encourages viewing females as an “other,” a being that requires special treatment of some kind, leading the way to thinking women shouldn’t read or study, be given the right to vote for how the world is run, or be allowed to speak their mind with benefit of the doubt.

I’ve had an…interesting relationship with fan-fiction over the years.

I will admit, I was quite dismissive of the genre at first. Not the effort or the results, but the desire to tell a story in another person’s playground. Every fan-fiction story out there could be re-written with minimal changes in a new universe; why copy someone else’s? It was a kind of plagiarism in my eyes; a kind of laziness.

A lot of this, I think, came from my social issues. The idea of inserting yourself was — well, still is — frightening. You aren’t the original “official” writer of Star Trek; if you wrote a story about the crew of the Enterprise, you might get it wrong.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s a silly mindset when you think about how many times the official IP has “gotten it wrong,” and that’s even before you question the whole idea of a story “being wrong” in the first place. I was young and stupid.

Please read my last post before reading this one, I’m kinda jumping in the middle of a train of thought.

A train of thought that began: in Grimdark Future, you can make the argument that anyone can be a “good guy,” depending on your perspective. Good’Nuff Gaming mentions this as a pretty key point for grimdark, as you aren’t supposed to have good guys in grimdark.

Now, in Warhammer 40k you could make the argument that the Space Marines are the “good guys,” or are at least not nearly as “bad guys” as everyone else. Sure, they’ll burn heretics, but the Tyranids, Necrons, and Orks want to genocide humanity. The Chaos Gods have plans that are even worse than genocide, so being alive in an Imperial dystopia is better than death and/or eternal torment, right?

In a pure Grimdark setting, that would be an open question. The peace of the grave might be preferable to the unending machine of the Imperium, and the torment of the Chaos Gods little different than the dead Emperor’s oppressive fist. Either way, the universe will look pretty much the same no matter who “wins.” In a weird way, the ideal in the universe of Warhammer is this constant war; the instant someone wins the dystopian universe will get even worse.

I told you that last story so I could tell you this one.

This happens a lot. An idea gets stuck in my head and I work backwards. Eventually I want to talk about the idea, but I have to then start at the end and work my way to the beginning of my thoughts. Brains are strange things.

So, let’s talk about a specific genre: Grimdark.

What is grimdark?

I’ll be honest. A lot of this whole mini-series of posts is a result of me watching this video. I’ve used the term grimdark before, always with a fairly clear idea of what the term meant, and this video got me thinking about it more than I had before, and not only because they use a different definition than I do.

What is genre?

I’ve talked about it before, I’ve brushed past it before, I’ve even ignored it before. Is now the time to have a long-form discussion about genre?

Nah.

I can talk a little bit about it, sure, but other people have covered genre in much better ways than I ever could. My go-to example is the marvelous Ian Danskin over at Innuendo Studios, who talks about genre in this third video in his [[Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood series.

Did you watch the video? Good, because I want to jump off of a question he begged.[^fn:1] Specifically, the question: “do Video Games tend to have descriptive genre titles?”

Do you know the Robert Frost poem, The Road Not Taken?

Of course you do. It’s one of his most famous. Everyone knows at least the last three lines:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

I have heard multiple stories about the writing of this poem. Generally it is agreed that it was written as a bit of a joke, poking fun at an indecisive friend. The entire poem, in defiance of the last three lines, is actually a bit of irony; specifically about how his friend would always regret taking the taken path and not the other.