Now, for those who have been around D&D as long as I have, the question of race and racism is hardly new to the hobby, although perhaps of slightly newer vintage than the question of sex and sexism. Even so, we can rightly say that whether or not tropes in the game (orcs, drow, and other "evil races") map in any way onto our present political questions and struggles about race and racism has taken center stage. However, rather than talking about these things in general (although perhaps the question of race and monstrous races might be a worthy topic for a later date), I would like to take a look at a recent Twitch video by Matt Colville, "The Future of This Hobby". (Jump to around 18:15 if you want to hear what he has to say.) In this...what shall I call it? Video musing? Proto-essay? Extended thinking aloud while his fan base listens on?...Colville explores a certain tension he has begun to experience between media that he enjoys and has no intention of abandoning (in particular D&D) and what he takes to be the "fundamentally conservative" character of that hobby.
[For those who do not know, Colville is a game designer who has worked for years in both computer games and tabletop roleplaying games and who has amassed quite a following on social media as well as founded a gaming company (MCDM Productions) which, so far as I can tell, has been quite successful. I should also say that I enjoy his YouTube videos very much. He is a thoughtful gamer and has inspired many people to return to or, even more, try for the very first time to play a game he and I both enjoy. We are also basically the same age, although I began playing the game almost a decade before he did. We also both love Rush (the band, not the pundit)! What follows is criticsm in the academic sense, not an ad hominem attack.]
As a framing device, Colville considers music that he very much loves, and in particular progressive rock. While this music bears the identifier progressive, Colville thinks that this music (think Jethro Tull and Genesis) is basically "backward looking", "bucolic" and "pastoral", a "romantic [Romantic?] version" of England's past. It is the world of English folk song and madrigals, "progressive" in its use of decidedly older musical inspiration: whether the techniques of Classical music or those of jazz, but of a jazz already twenty to thirty years prior. Was progressive rock really progressive?, he asks. Or was it the opposite?
On Colville's reading, progressive rock, in its æsthetics and inspiration, is fundamentally conservative. By conservative, Colville means that which is committed to maintaining the status quo, to keeping things the way they are, or even to go back to the way that things were. What is the status quo he has in mind? It seems to be some kind of dominance, or at least centering, of the experience of white men. The æsthetics, and he thinks the appeal, of prog rock was designed for people like him, people like me. The rock out of which it progressed and the punk which rebelled against its (alleged) pretensions to overwrought complexity were likewise, on this view, conservative. Punk, after all, sought to return to how things were before prog rock made it complicated and inaccessible. However, the status quo ante which it sought was still a world of guitar rock and garage bands, i.e. the musical world of white men.
So, if rock & roll and prog rock and punk were conservative, what in the 1970s was progressive? While electronic music sought to be, it never managed to be truly popular. Or rather, it only became popular when it was merged with that dance music we know as disco. That's right, the truly progressive music of the 1970s was disco.
To make sense of this claim, we need to understand what Colville takes progressive to mean. On his view, disco was (and in its progeny is) progressive because it is (using his words): more democratic, more egalitarian, more inclusive. It showed and enacted the idea that there was something for people who felt excluded by (white) rock & roll (and prog, and punk, etc.), people from the city, women, persons of color, people from different (think marginalized) communities and ways of life.
More than that, however, Colville repeats over and over the contrast between backward-looking conservatism and forward-looking progressivism. To be a progressive is not merely to embrace democracy and equality and inclusion. It is to do so precisely because these are the future. The future, in other words, has a direction, and that direction is represented by the politics of progressivism. To be oriented to the past, even æsthetically, is to be at least partly aligned with maintaining the status quo (or even the status quo ante), and thus (although he never states it this baldly) with the politics of exclusion.
At this point (after briefly noting the "incredibly backward-looking" character of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth), Colville begins to pivot towards his main question, namely, whether Dungeons & Dragons is forward-looking and progressive, or fundamentally conservative?
Perhaps unsurprisingly given what he has already said, Colville has to admit that D&D, as we know it, is basically conservative. Its tropes are knights and kings and castles, which are for the most part left unquestioned. That is, D&D places near its center those very people whose existence depended on, indeed was dedicated to, the maintaining of the status quo. While he doesn't mention it in this video "essay", in other videos he likewise notes that the æsthetics of the game presume a (white) Middle Ages, and thus, like the prog rock also dear to him, presume people like him as the audience.
Yet, Colville wonders whether or not D&D might be able to be progressive. Or, in his more provocative exhortations, "Let's be disco!" Might not D&D find a way to engage what is new, be more egalitarian, more democratic, more inclusive? Might it not tell stories which do not center or presume white, male players? Might it not evoke a style of play that seeks to transform the status quo, or even to tear it down? Might it not, that is, be able to be future-oriented?
After all, Colville notes, "Disco won."
[To be continued...]
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