November 2023

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okay this episode of code switch podcast on race in dungeons and dragons (and fantasy as a genre more broadly) is mostly all stuff i talk about here all the time but the specifics surrounding gary gygax the history of d&d/rpgs was new to me and really made it clear how it’s just like. oh you really don’t have to connect any dots you don’t have to extrapolate or read between the lines it’s just right there huhALT
KUNG: I mean, it's not a coincidence. Literally, one of the most prominent founding designers of Dungeons & Dragons, like, the guy who's considered the father of role-playing games, was a self- described biological determinist. DEMBY: Wait. What? KUNG: Yeah. So his name was Gary Gygax, and he was constantly sharing his opinions about the game. And among them were things like, girls don't enjoy games as much as boys because male and female brains are unquestionably different. DEMBY: Oh, so he was one of those? KUNG: Yeah. Biological essentialism is the belief that people's abilities are inherited, that your skills are kind of, like, baked into your body. DEMBY: Right. KUNG: And we can see this thinking in how the game treats race. And again, what it means to be a wood elf or a dragonborn or even a human is written into the D&D manual in some ways that can be kind of unfortunate.ALT
KUNG: And evil orcs were this, like, you know, default disposable enemy. They're consistently described as savage, less civilized, filled with an uncontrollable urge to destroy things. DEMBY: Oh, man. It's like - it's giving Manifest Destiny. It's giving scramble for Africa. Ugh. KUNG: And like how evil races come about in the real world, the designation is functionally a pass to have enemies you don't need to feel bad about killing. DEMBY: Right. So in the game, the orcs and evil races are like the goombas in Mario Bros., like, just mindless grunts that you stomp on and you merc (ph) as you go on your adventures. But like in real life, we go through these cycles of, like, fictional bad guys as cannon fodder in our popular culture. Like, it's usually some real-world other that exists to be squashed by the good guys. It was the Japanese during World War II, Native Americans in Westerns. You had Soviets during the whole Cold War. It's a kind of, like, dehumanization that happens whenever countries in real life ramp up for war. KUNG: Yeah. I mean, speaking of war, that's also baked into the origins of Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Gygax, the biological determinist, and the other creators of D&D started in the historical war gaming scene. Like, they were loading up tables with miniature figurines and simulating real-world battles.ALT
also sidenote i know this is something i never shut up about but honestly the amount of harm jrr tolkien did to fantasy as a genre (and obviously, you know, real life people of color) by constructing the modern conception of orcs as, in his own words, “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types” … truly immeasurable. literally imagine what we could have if the foundations of this entire fucking genre hadn’t been built on white imperial fantasies about good and evil and wanting to be able to guilt-free dream up scenarios where they could massacre hordes of some inherently evil subhuman species to save the worldALT
As I recently said to a group of d&d newbies that I was running through their first adventure: “ Gary Gygax was a racist and an insurance underwriter, and D&D has spent the past half century suffering from these facts”. It’s where death of the author fails…. if I still want to play this game I love, if I want to share what I love about it with other people, hell if I want to be able to enjoy the fantasy GENRE, I need to understand the ideology of previous generations and prevent their weird hangups and bullshit worldviews from creeping in under the radar. There’s nothing fundamentally bigoted about the idea of roleplaying games, it’s just a consequence of living in the society that we do that the people who had the resources and free time to invent them were themselves bigots. ALT

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