Fire in the Hole

While I have been fumbling over books
And thinking about God and the Devil and all,
Other young men have been battling the days
And others have been kissing the beautiful girls.

--Aldous Huxley

When I set out to write this editorial I thought about conflict and its inevitable role in all of our lives. I thought about how without struggle and change we begin to die; without the proper perspective of what matters to us, nothing has any value.

I thought about all of the things that we fight for in our day to day lives and what preceding generations of humans considered essential and worth dying for. I thought about all of the wonders that had to be won, and all of the greatness that was lost, and how when humankind was making history they really didn't know what they were doing and the genius in their mistakes that brought us to here.

I thought about all of this... and then I thought, how do I write about it? What can I say about conflict that hasn't already been contrived?

Here goes. Conflict and war are in our bones; our DN FREAKIN' A! Our species cannot live at peace, because it is not how we arrived. If you are a creationist, you believe that Jehovah (or another god) built everything, and all that evil soon followed, tempting man from the proper path with the seed of knowledge and the promise of glory. Sin after sin, and then generations later we are still paying the price for that insurrection.

If you're a Darwin/"big-bang"/evolution/whatever-ist then you believe that humans evolved from a hundred creatures; developing through several hundred different evolutionary stages to arrive at the point of Homo-Sapien-Sapien (our point right now along the Homo-Sapien index fossil). In order for a species to thrive under the conditions of Natural Selection, a species must fight against anything else in its niche. In order to dominate its piece of the food-chain, it must be the only species that is hunting deer, or gazelle, or whatever (when food supplies are low, war happens, etc.). So it goes that we have always known struggle and struggle has been as natural to us as procreation. These tenets are the very basis of what we know and live. [Those of you looking for more anthropological discussions are asked to read Dr. Richard Leaky's Origins of Man and Origins I1.1

However, neither theory is preclusive of the other. Those of you that read/watched Inherit the Wind, or know the story of the Scopes-Monkey trials may be familiar with this idea: a god may have made everything, but no one said how quickly (a day is as thousand years, and a thousand years is as a day). If this is true, then we know that humankind has had many years to develop. If we can see evolution with other species, surely we can see it in ourselves?

But imagine this if you will: nature demands that life must feed upon life in order to survive. In order for each piece of the Natural Order to continue, there must be death, and there must be interspecies conflict, and there must be struggle in everything that we do. But with the rise of civilization and cities, those needs changed and morphed into something else; in fact, quite rapidly (about 8,000 years vs. the estimated 11 million years of primate evolution), and our DNA says one thing and we live another way. Cars, electricity, guns, air conditioners, and bottled soda pop are all evidence that we have built something for ourselves with the tools we forged from nothing. Not bad for a species that once dug ants out of holes in the dirt for food with honeyed sticks.

But here we are anyway. Edison, Socrates, Milton, Galileo, Tesla, Einstein, Da Vinci, Bon Jovi, Gates; all brought us closer to some perceived plateau of humanity while youths with guns in inner cities fight like 2,000 year old tribesmen, or children in San Salvador fight with rats the size of dogs in landfills for orange rinds, or men and women in Taiwan fight for the god-given right of freedom against an oppressive regime determined to remind them that they are subserviant miscreants. All this we support under some assumed flag of progress. The extents of human history is far greater than any fiction.

Now many of you probably play gigantic, epic, high fantasy or space opera campaigns where magic is common and fighting against a tyrannical battle-beastie is the soup du jour. I for one say : way-to-go! Whatever you are doing that is creative and fun, keep doing it. There is NO RIGHT WAY TO PLAY! I don't typically play high fantasy, but whatever I am playing, there is always an important moral imperative to it, even if I'm some unimportant, lowly grog shield-bearer. There must always be an issue of morality in the games we play, because if there isn't we won't be playing for very long, as we get bogged down in the minuetia of how many innocent villagers we slay, or how many women and children are in the coffee shop our party is blowing up. Something begins to wane when we forget to apply ethics to our gaming.

We enjoy an enterprise few understand or appreciate. And on so many levels, and in so many ways gamers share an enterprise for creation and conflict that suggests we are not happy with things the way they are. We will not sit idly by while there are Orc-Scourges ravaging the fields where we once farmed. We will not allow dragons to raze our villages, nor mad sorcerers to enslave our young. We will never sit back and rest on the laurels of previous generations of adventurers that gave their lives fighting against the injustice of an evil king.

I know I began gaming as a whelp because I wanted to be something better than I was. Whatever we strive for it must never be easy, lest we grow stale.