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Dangerous Games

What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

The Birth of Fantasy Role-Playing Games

Imagination is but another name for super intelligence.

—Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jungle Tales of Tarzan

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Dungeons & Dragons inspired countless other fantasy role-playing games, defining the genre. The origins of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson's extremely successful game did not lie in theater or storytelling but in wargaming—a hobby in which players simulate historical battles using miniature soldiers. Wargaming developed in the nineteenth century, primarily as a training exercise for Prussian military officers. It was eventually adapted for civilian leisure, but it has remained an obscure hobby. Not only does wargaming demand a serious interest in military history, but the rules frequently require complex mathematical calculations and charts that most people would regard as a tedious exercise rather than entertainment. Thus wargaming was an unlikely midwife for the genre of fantasy role-playing.

D&D combined two very different ways of thinking about the world. On the one hand, it entailed a preoccupation with mathematical models and rules, the roots of which can be traced back to Prussian officers perfecting "the science of war." On the other hand, it reflected the cultural trends of the 1960s, including a fascination with history, myth, and fantasy as well as a renewed appreciation for values such as cooperation and imagination. This combination of mechanistic and romantic thinking was developed by a group of wargamers at the University of Minnesota and in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. In traditional war games two players control armies, with each acting as a sort of abstract commander. As in an actual battle, each game ends with a winner and a loser. However, some wargamers began to experiment with scenarios that involved numerous factions, which might or might not be adversarial toward each other. These experiments in wargaming required an impartial referee to mediate between players. Others were changing the genre of wargaming by including elements of the fantastic. Where traditional war games reenacted famous historical battles, by the 1960s some players were designing rules for battles that involved dragons and wizards. Finally, the scale of the conflict shifted from entire armies to individual heroes. Together, these changes resulted in a new game that had much broader appeal than war games ever had. It was a game that resembled both science and art, combining the analytical and the creative functions of the brain. But something else happened: the new genre of game somehow smacked of religion in a way that wargaming had not.

THE EVOLUTION OF DUNGEONS & DRAGONS

While Gary Gygax did eventually write a number of fantasy novels, the creators of D&D were not artistically inclined in the ordinary sense. C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, both members of Oxford's literary circle "the Inklings," shared interests in mythology, theology, and writing. By contrast, Gygax and Arneson were wargamers who would have been more at home discussing the comparative merits of crossbows and longbows than Anglo-Saxon poetry. However, the most important development of the fantasy role-playing game was not the content of the fantasy but the ability to create plausible simulations of an alternate reality. This was something that Gygax and Arneson learned from war games.

War games are almost as old as warfare itself. Simple games designed to represent battle existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia as early as the third millennium. Go was created between 206 BCE and 8 CE and was a favorite game of Chinese generals and statesmen. Chess, the classic war game, is believed to have originated in the Gupta empire of northwest India in the sixth century CE. While chess entails strategy and employs the symbols of feudal warfare (knights, castles, etc.), it is a symbolization of war rather than a simulation. In Europe, war games changed following the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers believed that war, like anything else, could be understood scientifically and simulated using mathematical models. In Prussia, military officers attempted to make an increasingly accurate simulation of warfare using models to represent all of the factors that determine the outcome of a battle. This process began with Christopher Weikhmann, who created an expanded version of chess called Koenigspiel (The King's Game) in 1664. Weikhmann claimed his game "would furnish anyone who studied it properly a compendium of the most useful military and political principles." In 1780, Johann Christian Ludwig Hellwig, master of pages to the German Duke of Brunswick, developed a game called Kriegspiel (War Game). The game was played on a board with 1,666 squares. Squares were painted different colors to represent different types of terrain. Pieces could move a different number of squares depending on what type of terrain they were crossing. The pieces represented units rather than individual soldiers and were designated as infantry, cavalry, and artillery. Hellwig even created rules to represent entrenchment and the use of pontoons. In 1798, George Vinturinus of Schleswig expanded on Hellwig's game to create "New Kriegspiel." This game expanded the board to 3,600 squares and featured a sixty-page rule book.

War games were revised again following the Napoleonic Wars. In 1811 Baron George Leopold van Reiswitz and his son developed a new game that they called Instructions for the Representation of Tactical Maneuvers under the Guise of a Wargame. This game introduced many of the elements that came to define modern wargaming as a genre. It did away with a board entirely and was instead played on a "map" consisting of a special table covered in sand. Ceramic models could be placed on the table to represent terrain. Units were represented by miniature soldiers, colored red and blue respectively. Each unit had a different "speed" and could move a different distance across the map each turn. The game also featured dice to determine the success of actions, and an umpire to adjudicate the outcome. The game was prescribed for Prussian officers, but the rules were so complex and tedious that some officers were reluctant to play it. In 1876, Colonel von Verdy du Vernois produced a simplified version of the game that removed the dice and delivered more authority to the umpire, who was expected to be a veteran officer who could draw on his own combat experience to determine what the results of each player's action would be. This role was an early forebear of the dungeon master.

For the Prussian military, war games were not understood to be an "escape" from reality. On the contrary, the experience that officers gained while playing these games was expected to have immediate application in the real world. Game designers also understood that the more realistic and detailed their models of warfare were, the more the simulation would prepare officers for actual combat. In 1870, the militia army of Prussia defeated the professional army of France. The Prussian success was attributed to war games, and other Western militaries began to develop similar training exercises. In 1880, Charles Totten, a lieutenant in the United States Army, developed a game called Strategos. Within a decade, German-inspired war games were introduced to the US Army and incorporated into the curriculum of the Naval War College.

War games were not easy to learn, and it was some time before anyone attempted to create a war game for civilians. The science-fiction writer H. G. Wells was among the first to create an "amateur" war game. In 1913, he created a game entitled Little Wars: A Game for Boys of Twelve Years of Age to One Hundred and Fifty and for That More Intelligent Sort of Girl Who Likes Boys' Games and Books. A pacifist, Wells was not interested in creating a game that would train better officers. Little Wars was meant to be fun and possibly even to satisfy impulses that might lead to actual wars. This book also contained over a hundred photographs depicting battlefields that featured miniature soldiers and scenery. These photographs added nothing to the strategy of the simulation but were a source of pleasure for the players. In this sense, Little Wars marked a transition in wargaming from science into art.

Evidence of what may be the earliest transition from wargaming to role-playing appeared in the pages of Life magazine in 1941. An article entitled "Life Visits the Planet Atzor" described nineteen-year-old Frederick Pelton of Lincoln, Nebraska, who had organized a club around a fantasy world called Atzor. Each member of the club created a persona who ruled a nation of Atzor. The group held parties in which attendees would hold court in their personas. Aztor parties were attended in costume, which generally resembled the dress of European royalty. The club eventually expanded to 400 young Nebraskans, many of whom were women and played queens and empresses. Court gatherings usually resulted in declarations of war, and battles were resolved using miniatures. But Atzor involved much more than simulated battles. Club members produced Atzorian currency, a passport and postal system, and even a dictionary of the planet's language, Samarkandian. Atzor became a paracosm, and the war game became a sort of performance art. Daniel Mackay suggests that the increasing emphasis on aesthetics in war games was a backlash against the cult of reason and efficiency that had, paradoxically, inspired military simulations in the first place.

The first commercially successful war game was Tactics designed by Charles Roberts in 1953. He later formed the company Avalon Hill and published Gettysburg, a game in which players could simulate one of the most storied battles of the Civil War. Gettysburg was a huge success, and by 1962 Avalon Hill was the fourth largest producer of adult board games. It is significant that the first truly successful war game in America was about Gettysburg. This battle was not only the turning point of the American Civil War; it was a sacred event, vital to the story that Americans tell themselves about their nation. In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke in explicitly religious language about consecrating and hallowing the battlefield as a sacred space. The carnage of the battle, according to Lincoln, had also been "the birth of a new freedom." The popular appeal of war games, then, did not lie simply in models and calculations but in revisiting and reenacting moments of historical and cultural significance. Gettysburg was commercially viable because it allowed Americans to experience and participate in a moment of sacred history while sitting at their kitchen tables.

Dave Wesley and Braunstein

By the 1960s, a subculture had formed around wargaming. There were several magazines for wargamers, and wargaming clubs had begun to appear on college campuses. As with Gettysburg, wargamers turned to military history for new conflicts to simulate. Where the military games of the nineteenth century had been attempts to simulate current technology, wargamers created simulations for World War II, the Crusades, and the campaigns of Roman generals. Dedicated groups would arrange series of games known as "campaigns" in which each battle determined the starting conditions of the next. Campaigns added a further sense of realism and immersion into another time and place.

The first step in the transition from war games to fantasy role-playing games occurred with an experimental game called "Braunstein" hosted by Dave Wesley at the University of Minnesota in 1968. Wesley enjoyed war games but disliked their competitive nature. Too often games degenerated into bickering. Another problem was that games lasted for hours and allowed for only two players. In college wargaming clubs, it was not uncommon to see bored wargamers sitting idly, waiting for their chance to play. Wesley discovered a copy of Totten's Strategos in the university's library. Like the Prussian war games, Strategos called for a disinterested referee to supervise the game. This was an element that had been dropped from war games like Tactics that were intended for a popular audience. Reintroducing a referee offered one way of resolving the arguments that marred the games.

But Wesley also wanted to create a non-zero-sum game that was not inherently competitive. In the 1960s, opposition to the Vietnam War and militarism had inspired interest in noncompetitive games. The so-called New Games movement began with Stewart Brand, the editor of The Whole Earth Catalog and a member of Ken Kesey's "Merry Pranksters." In 1966, an antiwar group asked Brand to create a public activity to oppose the war in Vietnam. Brand responded with a game called Slaughter. As the name implied, Slaughter was a full-contact game. It featured a six-foot ball painted to look like Earth. There were virtually no rules other than to push the ball to the other side of the field. Teams were not declared but rather formed spontaneously. Curiously, whenever the ball neared one end of the field, some players would spontaneously decide to change objectives and begin pushing the ball in another direction. Much like fantasy role-playing games, Slaughter was "pointless," as there was no way of ending the game or determining a winner. However, its proponents defended it as art. If nothing else, Slaughter seemed to be an interesting critique of the Cold War as an equally pointless struggle by the two superpowers to "steer the planet." Brand went on to found the New Games movement, which emphasized play for the sake of play over competition. Whether or not Wesley was aware of the New Games movement, his experiment at the University of Minnesota bore a family resemblance to Slaughter.

In Strategos, Totten emphasizes that the referee "must remember that anything which is physically possible may be attempted—not always successfully." Wesley expanded on this idea to create an entirely new kind of war game. He took a game published in Strategy and Tactics magazine called The Siege of Bodenburg to use as a springboard for his experiment. The Siege of Bodenburg was designed by Henry Bodenstedt, the proprietor of a hobby shop in New Jersey. It is a relatively simple war game in which an army of knights defends a medieval town against an invading force of Huns. The game called for miniature knights and Huns that could be purchased at Bodenstedt's shop. Wesley renamed the town "Braunstein" and set the siege during the time of Napoleon. More importantly, he modified the game to include multiple players as well as a referee. As with a traditional war game, two of the players assumed the role of the French and Prussian commanders. Wesley included more players by allowing them to assume the roles of various parties in Braunstein: the mayor, the banker, the university chancellor, and others. When interest in Wesley's experiment attracted twenty people, he found roles for all of them. Each role had its own objectives and goals. With autonomy came chaos. The game did not develop the way Wesley had imagined it and resembled an undisciplined brawl. The Prussian and French commanders announced that they had agreed to fight a duel, and Wesley was forced to improvise rules for this contingency. Wesley felt his game was a failure, that the players had taken over the game, and that the rules he had lovingly created no longer applied. The players felt differently about Braunstein. They had enjoyed their chaotic struggle over the town. One particularly enthusiastic player was Dave Arneson, a student at the University of Minnesota. He recalled his experience of the game: "As a local student leader, I tried to rally resistance to thwart a French attack. (I ended up arrested by the Prussian General because I was 'too fanatical.')" Wesley's experiment had failed as a strategy game, but it had triumphed as a role-playing game. He created more scenarios including a game set during the Russian Civil War and another set during a Latin American coup. Local gamers came to use the term "Braunstein" (or "Brownstine") generically to describe this new genre of open-ended war games.

The cooperative spirit of Braunstein, which was reflected by the New Games movement, also marked a "ritual turn" in war games. Claude Levi-Strauss argues that while games and rituals often resemble each other, games are disjunctive while ritual is conjunctive. In games with winners and losers, players or teams begin the game as equals, and differences are established between them. By contrast, ritual creates a union between groups that are initially distinct, such as congregation and priest. Levi-Strauss cites the Gahuku-Gama people of New Guinea, who play football continually until both teams have won an equal number of matches—a process that often takes days. For the Gahuku-Gama, Levi-Strauss argues, football is not a game but a ritual. The Gahuku-Gama learned football from the British but "ritualized" the game, giving it a conjunctive function. Wesley made a similar move with Braunstein. As wargaming developed into an autotelic pastime, it increasingly came to resemble ritual.

Gary Gygax and Chainmail

The same year that Wesley organized Braunstein at the University of Minnesota, Gary Gygax organized the first annual "Gen Con," a convention for wargamers. It was held in the Horticultural Hall in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which Gygax rented for fifty dollars. There were ninety-six attendees, which was just enough to cover the costs. Gygax was not a university student. In 1958 he married Mary Jo Powell, with whom he had four children. He worked odd jobs and took night classes at a junior college where he made the dean's list. He was admitted to the University of Chicago, but decided instead to take a job as an insurance underwriter for the Fireman's Fund in Lake Geneva to support his family. Later, he ran a small shoe-repair business out of his basement.

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Excerpted from Dangerous Games by Joseph P. Laycock. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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