CSU's The Audit

Host Stacy Nick: The big overarching question, I think, is how do politics and Dungeons & Dragons translate? What can we learn from a game that's been around for 50 years about the political situation we're in today?

Fielder: So, the two big concepts I use to frame games are the “magic circle” and “symbolic correspondence.” That will dovetail into two other key points in describing the politics of the world. So first, the magic circle: the term was created by the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga in his seminal work “Man the Player (Homo Ludens)” in 1938.

The idea of the magic circle is that games are similar to a ritual performance where when the players are inside the game space — and it could literally be a circle like the table we're at now, or it could be a football field, a baseball field, a card table, playing dominoes — everything inside the game is what's real to the players. So, players are willing to believe all sorts of strange rules and world events that, once they're outside of the circle, might make no sense whatsoever.

But what makes it so powerful is, in the game because of this effect, risk feels real. So, when they feel like they're facing a risk in the game, like in Dungeons & Dragons finally facing the titular dragon, and then they conquer the dragon by working together as a team so when they come out of the game, it's like, “We actually killed a dragon.” And they will remember that for years, maybe even decades after. Sociologist Dr. Gary Fine noted in his work, “Shared Fantasy,” which studied roleplaying gamers, that they could remember games decades later with crystal clear clarity because of this effect, down to what people were eating and wearing. Even when they couldn't remember what they had to eat a week prior. So that's the first term, the magic circle.

Again, you're now inside this performative space where everything feels real. The second term, symbolic correspondence, is the idea — this also comes from ritual — in that you're in a ritual performance where the ritual leader coming from animist religion might be wearing the mask of an animal or in the skin of an animal or the mask of a spirit. The idea is that, similar to a magic circle, the ritual participants watching this are not pretending that they're with a god or an animal. They believe that the ritual leader is a god or an animal. So, it becomes a miniature rite of passage that transforms them in some way when they come back out. The modern cynic might say, “Well, we don't really have animist religion and people wearing the skins of animals.” I would say, if you're wearing a suit to go to work, you're wearing the "skin" of a businessperson. I was in the military for 25 years putting on the uniform and wearing the “skin” of a sergeant or a lieutenant colonel.

This process allows players to put on the identity of a character in the game. Perhaps the character wants to explore playing a different gender or playing a different alignment. Like I'm always good, so maybe I can be evil in the game, or even play a completely different type of creature like an elf or a dwarf. And while they're wearing it, everything they learn about that character becomes part of the player.

If debriefed correctly at the end of the game — just like professional war games, a good entertainment game should also be debriefed — they leave their negative experiences behind, but everything good, transformative that they felt playing that character leaves with them when they come out of the game, and it changes them in some way. So, taking those two ideas then leads into, particularly in Dungeons & Dragons, the relationship between agency and power.

A role-playing game gives players agency, at least a good one does. The sense that, if I make a decision in this game, it actually changes the world in some way. Starting at a very low level, where you maybe conquer one goblin or save one cat. That means that's one less goblin in the world; no offense to goblins or anything. And the family who wanted the cat back is happy. Now I can experience and see the Dungeon Master describing that the family is so happy you've returned their cat, and it makes both the character and the player feel good, like they made a real difference. And with it, their character’s power starts to increase.

I would argue that power in Dungeons & Dragons starts linear, up to maybe level five or level six, and then it becomes exponential up to level 20. So, players start by saving cats; by level 20 they are a universe-shaking power, one of the most powerful beings in existence.

Host: So, if you're relating this to politics, it would be like starting with city council and ending up as president?

Fielder: Yes, that'd be a good way of looking at it. Or even saying at level one starting as an active voter and then — my vote made a difference, or my participation in the local political process made a difference, and before you know it, I'm president of the United States. I've reached level 20. Then along with agency, there is the idea of working with power. So now players are practicing having power. What do I do with this power? Again, very low stakes at the beginning, but by the end, 20th level, which could take years for them to achieve, they're making decisions and carrying out actions that can destroy worlds.

In a well-designed and well-played game, ideally, the players see the consequences of their actions. Up ’til now, I've said it's been positive, but it can also be — because you killed that entire nest of goblins, it has changed the local power dynamic and now a criminal organization has moved in to seize the same territory that the goblins had occupied. So, what are you going to do about this criminal organization now? Or say you’re at level 20 and because of your actions an entire world has been destroyed. All to take out one evil wizard, you've killed millions of innocent bystanders by doing so. When you have negative consequences — certainly good consequences feel good — but negative, when you look the players in the face and they realize what they’ve just done, it sticks with the character, but also the players will remember that.

I mentor inmates using games and allowing them to think about the consequences of their actions. They say by playing roleplaying games, it gives them a better personal sense of responsibility. That this is a safe space where I'm practicing decisions where I don't want to make the same mistakes that I made in real life, and I can make a mistake in the game and recover from it. And that lesson sticks when you come out.

Host: Wow. That is powerful. That's a really great way to translate that because I think it's hard for people to see, how does a game make any difference to my actual life. So, let's go a little deeper into the political realm then. How can the campaign narratives and decision making that you use in Dungeons & Dragons be compared to the strategic maneuvering and policymaking that we see in U.S. politics?

Fielder: So, I want to make two different level links here. The first is, let's say you're a level five character. That is the level I would argue that you as a character are carrying out local political action that actually affects local politics. Now perhaps you are on the town council or you're on the Parent Teachers Association or the local school board or something like that.

So, you're wielding enough power that your decisions are going to be affecting real people. That's level five. Level 20, that's probably you’re president of the entire Earth, so I'm going to dial it down a little bit. Maybe level 12 or so, or level 15 — remembering it gets exponential, so five is local, by 10, you're a senator or a president or something like that. Now in the game, you're making decisions that will influence an entire kingdom, and dare I say multiple kingdoms, because now it's not just about framing it local politics, but you're making decisions at what now is affecting our foreign policy. I just made a decision that made the state next to us really, really angry. Are they going to invade now or is there going to be some sort of power vacuum that I've created?

Host: In what ways do the character alignments and the faction dynamics in D&D mirror political divides and partisan groups within the U.S.?

Fielder: That's an interesting question because I would argue that prior to the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons — and now we're on edition 5.5 — the alignments were framed as having a heavy moral component. That if you're playing an evil character, you're expected to be the villain, like twisting your mustache and running over people with trains and whatnot. That you were carrying out what we would, as a culture, consider evil and immoral acts. Versus the good character, the one who's rescuing people or making our area of the world safer. Framed through older rule sets, you now might paint the different sides of the political spectrum as being morally evil and morally good. They're making decisions that are both objectively and subjectively evil.

Modern rules would say the alignment is not as important as the motivation of either the character you're playing or the non-player characters you're interacting with. So, instead of saying that that big green orc is evil because they're morally evil and they were born that way, it's more about how, as a culture, they might have teachings that value aggression. So, it's not that they're being evil by attacking people. It’s that they value aggression and have a warrior culture. Framed in that way, now it gives you a better lens to analyze the political spectrum, such as what are the motivations of both candidates and voters, as opposed to putting it in a moral frame. If you understand motivations, I would say that gives you a better platform for dialog and negotiation.

Host: Can we just require everybody to play Dungeons & Dragons before talking politics with their families over the holidays?

Fielder: Yes (laughs).

Host: We 've talked a lot about the players, but how might the role of the Dungeon Master, who kind of narrates the game and leads the process in guiding a campaign, be analogous to the role of political leaders in shaping national discourse and policy?

Fielder: Depending on the viewpoint you take with the responsibilities that Dungeon Masters have is going to change the question in some way. My view is a Dungeon Master should provide what are called guardrails without having a railroad. By guardrails, you're shaping the narrative, and in some way that you're trying to convince players not to do something totally foolhardy and rash that breaks the game.

Railroading, on the other hand, is now you're trying to guide the players to reach a certain decision that you want. Railroading, in my assessment, is not good gameplay. When players feel like they're being guided to an outcome that they have no choice in avoiding, that takes away their agency and they don't feel satisfied. But if you have guard-rails, players now get a better sense of — to have a good story, we should contain it in some way. But it still gives us a huge playground on where to make decisions and feel like our choices matter.

Host: Can the way that players negotiate and form alliances, as we talked about, and resolve conflicts in D&D offer insights into political candidates and parties and how they interact and collaborate in the U.S. political system?

Fielder: Yes, in a way. The way that Dungeons & Dragons is designed encourages players to play good characters. Now, it's not so much about a moral standpoint but the motivations you have in it, because of those motivations these are the kind of decisions you make. By having a table of good players, they are more likely to cooperate with each other to overcome a challenge because their goals roughly align, and they realize it's better to work together to overcome the challenge than be at odds with each other.

You will have players who want to play the evil character, the one who's maybe very self-centered or just in it for themselves. But looking at the literature, if you have, let's say, three good characters and one player playing an evil character, there's usually now discord at the table. Certainly, the player is trying to role play that character, but then it has an effect on how the players perceive the game. As in, this character is ruining our fun because now they're at odds with their goals. So, it ends up, either the player eventually leaves and stops playing, or they end up getting kind of rolled back in the fold in some way. The other players say, “Hey, we know you have self-motivated interests, but can we work together to overcome this? And then we can feel good about our decisions, and you can get all the loot that you want.”

You can have tables though, where they all say they all want to play evil characters. So now there are roleplaying game settings that are designed to accommodate that, like we're all playing a bunch of thieves, and we're all just in it for the loot. And that's fine as long as the table is in agreement with each other. But still, the same outcome is that in the game, you should be working together to overcome a goal. If you're at odds with each other, you don't achieve anything. So, the lesson for both a table — whether it's “good” players, a middle of the road table of “neutral” players or a table of “evil” players — is that we're learning to negotiate in order to overcome a challenge. And that lesson sticks. You come out of the table learning how to negotiate with other people, it worked, and you overcame a challenge.

Host: How do themes of power, leadership and governance in D&D reflect broader concerns? And as you mentioned, debates within the current U.S. political climate?

Fielder: I would argue that it points to showing how much your power is related to the potential consequences. The more power you have, the more awesomeness you can do and the more destructiveness you could cause. So, by framing U.S. politics through the lens of levels in Dungeons & Dragons, you could say, locally, we can see discord in, say, Fort Collins or Loveland or Denver, and see a few people who have different levels of power.

That power dynamic is playing out in such a way that it's either making the majority happy or making a lot of people really angry about the decision making. Fast forward to now, the presidential level/national level politics, you can see the fear of people saying, I'm worried about what this 15th level character is going to do to my personal life. So, you sense a bunch of first-level characters now have real fear that now their agency has been taken away because of a 15th level character.

Host: When you talk about this with people or you talk about this with your students, what is their reaction? Are their minds blown?

Fielder: Yes, very often. I have a standard talk that I give about the dynamics of how games work. Most people have never heard it before, and they don't realize what those dynamics are. They maybe don't realize how powerful games are and how games can be absolutely transformative. It's a fundamental part of our humanity, playing games. I mean, certainly you'll see play in other animals, but humans, it's how we transmit culture to each other. Many people, whether they're kicking that soccer ball around or throwing the football or playing a deck of cards, the dynamics aren't readily apparent. But then when you tell them, it’s like, “Whoa, I didn't think of it that way before.”

Host: Yeah, I mean, for me, I'm wondering if we should have a mandate that all politicians should be required to play Dungeons & Dragons before they take office.

Fielder: That would be pretty awesome. Actually, there is a documentary called "War Game," and it's a film of people playing a national-level political conflict game. It's not exactly Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s the same kind of concept. But now you're just watching regular people play. Now you're giving them power like a president. What do they do with it? The realization, as the documentary goes on, is how stressful it is in reality.

Truth is stranger than fiction in that I do professional wargaming as well. You do have senior level officials who play war games first with their counterparts to think through problems before they actually make a decision. And again, tapping into the magic circle, they will start feeling the same stresses in this game that they will feel in real life. Then they come out of it feeling more confident, and that lesson sticks with them.

Host: We've got a lot of military operations that can be done with the push of a button, with a video game aspect. It's what people think of when they think of the “gamification of war.” How does that translate to what we’re talking about here?

Fielder: I want to divide this into two parts. The first part is just the war game, the "we are practicing something, but there's no consequence." But if it's done right, the players have a very, very painful realization of the consequences of a mistake. So, they carry out an order that they realize, they’ve just killed 500 civilians. Inside the magic circle, it feels like they've killed 500 civilians.

A well-played, professional war game will leave players with the same physiological reactions as if they made a huge blunder that just did an enormous amount of damage. I certainly have cynics who would say, why is the military playing games? They hear the word "game,” and they think it's child's play. It's absolutely not child's play.

My favorite example is from a strategic level war game in around 1983 or so where you had high-level Department of Defense officials and State Department officials playing a nuclear deterrence game. When it came to the time where the person playing the president had to make a decision on whether to launch nuclear weapons and had his finger over the button, the referee told him, if you launch that missile, it's going to kill 25 million people. The player basically had a nervous breakdown. Sweat pouring out of him, hyperventilating, shaking all over. He had to be immediately taken out of the game and debriefed, and he said he really felt like he was about to kill 25 million people. That's how intense it is going to be.

That's just inside the game. Now, the actual — and I certainly have experience with this, I was in the military from 1994 to 2019, and I saw the transition to the use of more unmanned vehicles and live video and moving map screens. I will say that in the military, we did not see it as a game. We would see the moving map indicator of an aircraft. We would know a bomb was dropped. We would know that it had killed people. We would get the battle damage assessment definitively offering evidence of the deaths. And so, we knew that, yes, it's all on a screen, but there are real people dying in this. Certainly, during my later time in my service, I heard debriefs of young airmen working at different locations in the U.S., working with weaponized unmanned vehicles and actually being involved in eliminating targets and seeing it with their own eyes. They're also experiencing PTSD because they're having difficulty separating the fact that they literally just drove to work today, watched someone die, signed off of work, and then went back home and had dinner with their family. So, there's now this huge difficulty separating what looks to an outside observer like a game. But to them this is not a game yet, they’re not in a combat zone doing it.

Host: This comes back to the question of whether the moral and ethical dilemmas faced by characters in D&D can provide a lens through which we view, as we’ve talked about, the ethical consequences involved in politics?

Fielder: Absolutely. You will have players that will make decisions in the game where they're thinking short term, like here's my tactical situation, how do I solve it. And then later, the Dungeon Master might say, well, because you did X, Y happened. And Y is a lot worse than X was. So, now what are you going to do about that? By again, taking out the goblins' nest over here, a criminal organization now moves in. You've been away from this region for a while, and so the criminal organization went in and massacred an entire town.

And I'm not just telling you as a Dungeon Master that they massacred the town. You find out by coming to the town and finding the remains of the townspeople — scattered bones everywhere and the houses burned down. This is that kind of moment where the players are looking at each other like, what did we just do? What's also an interesting finding in the literature is you will also find players who will play evil characters who carry out atrocities in the game. But then when they come out of the game, they don't feel good about themselves. They feel unclean, like, "Oh my God, I can't believe I just did that." And so, yes, that sends a very powerful message.

Host: As we mentioned earlier, this is the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. Do you think when it started, when the creators made this game, that they had any concept that there was such a link to this larger sense of agency and this larger role that it could play — not to make a pun there — but role that it could play in our lives?

Fielder: They absolutely did not. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, they were just... I mean, it actually did come from entertainment war games that originated in tabletop war games where you're moving units around the table. Then — I'm highly simplifying this history of D&D here and mixing and matching a little bit but — the realization came that they could actually give character attributes to this unit and then make the unit an individual. So now, if someone's playing a character, because they were both fans of science fiction and fantasy, it became, instead of fighting other people in a war, let's have them fight these fantastical creatures.

They had a sense they were on to something when they printed up their first 1,000 copies of Dungeons & Dragons, and it just metastasized into this — what started with a thousand quickly became 2,000, 5,000, 10,000. I'll put it this way, in all human history, very, very few games have been created. You might say football, basketball, baseball — OK, that is the idea of a kinetic sport. Or poker, spades, hearts — that's cards. Prior to Dungeons & Dragons there were only about six or seven actual genres of games that had ever been created in all of human history.

What they did not know at the time was that they had created a brand-new genre of game that had never existed before. That is why when I say Dungeons & Dragons was the first commercial role-playing game, it was actually a historic moment. It changed human culture when they did that. So, it was transformative, but they didn't know it at the time. They just thought it was fun.

Host: Do you think a lot of politicians are playing games like D&D? I mean, Dungeons & Dragons has been around for a long time, so maybe we've got some gamers out there.

Fielder: Maybe I'm being unfair just from my own observations that there's still a sense that only nerds or freaks or geeks play games. In older generations, remembering the satanic panic from the 1980s and associating Dungeons & Dragons or role-playing games with immorality without realizing that most players are playing good overcoming evil, not evil overcoming good, but again I'm making a moral statement there. So, I haven't seen it as much on the national level. But speaking in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis — hopefully he listens to this podcast, and I can play a game with him — he is an avid Dungeons & Dragons player.

Host: Really?

Fielder: I have friends in the larger Denver/Fort Collins gaming community who say, yes, they remember playing with him when he was younger. I almost want to interview him now to say, what lessons did you learn at the gaming table that actually influenced your outlook and how you interact with people?

Host: All right, Polis, the ball is in your court now.

Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you being here.

Fielder: Happy to be here. Thank you.

Host: That was CSU political science instructor James "Pigeon" Fielder, talking about the valuable political strategies found in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. I'm your host, Stacy Nick, and you're listening to CSU's The Audit.