Imaginary worlds and real life
I'm trading blog posts with Sylvia this week, who is the owner of a very fine blog and has prompted me with 'Imaginary worlds and real life: What has immersing yourself in TTRPGs taught you about real life? What useful experience have you gained from imagining other lives and worlds?' which is fascinating, as were all her ideas.
Would it be weird to say Dungeons and Dragons has made me more religiously accepting?
The background is that I wasn't even brought up non-religious: I was brought up explicitly atheist. In my house, religion was a cause of much badness in the world. Which I don't disagree with. Also, I grew up in one of the most diverse cities in the UK ethnically and hence religiously.
Real life is much more nuanced and challenging than childhood's bubble. I had to develop some way of understanding religious people. I'm still a literal card carrying humanist and advocate secularism but I'm trying to understand. I have a basic understanding of the central tenets of major world religions and am most sympathetic to the one providing me with the best food on the most regular basis (winners: Hindus and Sikhs, bonus point that they aren't interested in signing you up.)
I'm working on empathic understanding, on getting into other people's frame of reference, meeting people where they are. And there are a lot of people for whom religion forms some, if not a large, part of their frame of reference. I needed to go deeper than 'tolerate'.
Enter, Dungeons and Dragons. A traditional setting like Forgotten Realms is pretty religious. I tried to play an atheist character once. But in the world of D&D gods are real. Cosmic powers, other dimensions... This is all baked in. Atheism doesn't make sense.
Characters in this world can choose not to worship gods or follow their teachings or have any respect for them... but gods are real. Real in the sense we conceive of godly things. They take action, they confer power, they curse and punish. People in these worlds have a very real and tangible relationship with the gods. To be loved, to be feared, at the very least to be considered.
This, I realised, Is the world religious people live in. Gods are real. End of. It doesn't matter how wild that seems to me. It is part of their reality.
To play well, to immerse, to fill a role, I had to do the textbook empathy thing of putting myself in someone else's shoes. As DM, a lot of different shoes, each session. For some religion was their entire thing. I could feel this out. What if religion were part of my way of understanding the world? How would I act differently, think differently. The challenge, the dignity in that. Not just as an intellectual thought exercise but really immersing myself.
Fiction is praised for building empathy skills and games like D&D are a further step into the immersion, hence a further step into empathy.
All the other stuff I tried, all the empathy, the logic, the reading, the writing, the listening, couldn't get me close just playing a game in which I had to believe.
This has absolutely made me better at being a human. I still think humanity would be better off without it but I'm far less hostile to and suspicious of religious inclination in people. I can meet them where they are and fully accept that.
Sylvia also suggested murder hobos, which is not something I have had to tackle but it does relate to another idea about how players (read: humans) rarely respond in the way I expect. Recently I set up a Dickensian roost of orphans living in the attic of a building they own (but do not occupy). I was sure they'd do at least something about these kids forced into a life of crime and living in poverty. I mentioned the orphans several times and the players steadfastly avoided getting involved. Well done them for staying in character, I guess?
Sylvia has these very cool sidenotes on her blog which I discovered the day after reading about using sidenotes and margin notes as opposed to footnotes and endnotes. I write in a very 'additional notes' way but do not at all like how endnotes work on the web and barely use them. So... Expect something like that soon.