Of Monsters and Melancholy: D&D, Art, and Disappearance // Spencer Gordon
As part of our guest-edited month, “D&D and Creativity,” Spencer Gordon, co-inventor of The Puritan, shared an incredible essay about the classic RPG, art and the inevitability of loss.
It’s late summer, 2014. I’ve just finished playing Dungeons & Dragons with six other friends—some of them recent, and some I’ve known for decades, since we were children. We’ve been playing for two consecutive days (Saturday and Sunday) in my parents’ humid basement in Burlington, Ontario, where I lived and grew up, and where we’d play this game—this exact game and world, with this exact set of characters—over similar marathon weekends all through middle- and high-school and again when we’d return from college and university for those fleeting holidays and summers of minimum wage. We still play the game in Toronto in a low-key way but I’ve called us home, back to this old grotto, because my parents are in the process of packing up and moving out, leaving the house and ghosts they’ve owned since the early '90s. This is our last chance, I figure, to do this. Yes—we are grown-ass men.
So we’re wrapping up late on the Sunday. I’m still hungover from the night before, our post-session trip to a terrible bar that ended in waterfalls of beer. I’m watching these dudes with their balding heads and adult-heft as they shuffle up out of the basement, dining room and kitchen, lumber into their shoes, call a goodbye to my parents, and slide off into their cars, variously bound for Hamilton,Burlington, Collingwood, Toronto. I don’t have a car or license myself, but my dad has agreed to drive me home tonight. We sit together in the dark while he watches baseball highlights and crunches sunflower seeds, and I watch my friends’ taillights disappear into the August dark, and part of me breaks to know that it’s all really over—the house, this house, all our little houses gone.
This isn’t the first time D&D has triggered a weird kind of melancholy—nor will it be the last. Some of it is understandable. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug—and playing D&D with old friends in my parents’ house for the last time is like taking a big, honking snort of the stuff. In any case, I’ve read the same tenor in other long-form treatments of the game, too: a feeling in each ending like the authors are holding back a sob, unsure of how to express this ludicrous sense of sadness, this loss.
This is banal shit, obviously: nothing new, nothing remarkable. “Area man mourns childhood by playing board game!” But before I can enjoy this luxurious feeling of sadness, I feel a far sharper prick of regret: the feeling that playing D&D in 2014 is a colossal waste of time. A sudden, desperate need to have a shower, scrape off my shame, rush back to my life in Toronto, and not do this for a very long time. That despite the profoundly creative, prosperously imaginative, mentally rigorous experience of D&D—the innocent fun, you might say—what I’m doing is really just playing it safe: running from “real” artistic practice, filling the gaps in my “adult” missteps, and trying to pretend that I’m not a disappointment in-the-make.
I think, if you’re an artist or writer or creator, or even just out of step with your peers, you’re going to know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s a meme-worthy trope: the anxious artist, never working but always dwelling on work. The novel unfinished. The poem in shambles. The essay you’ll never write, let alone file.
It sucks to lose the days and hours you would otherwise be spending on building your life, or art. So, my question is: why can’t I see D&D as an art, even as it takes, and deserves, the attention and skill of the artist? And why is even raising that question so damned embarrassing?
** *
D&D brings with it some complicated emotions. It hasn’t been easy these last few years—watching it emerge hyperactive and slick in the news, on my walls, brought up at work and at parties. It is, as this TownCrier theme rightly claims, seemingly popular—or at least more popular than it was a few years ago, when it was the hobby I grew upon and was sealed in a jar of nerdiness I didn’t want to open in front of the unconverted.
I was 11 years old when I first dipped in. My dad had fished the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1977) from our dusty workroom when Monopoly and Life were getting a bit stale. “Here, I guess you’re old enough to play this,” he muttered, handing me the cardboard box and opening a chasm that threatened to swallow my life. Even to my wet, boyish eyes, it was clear D&D was not a board game. It was not make-believe, dress-up, or toy soldiers. It was something unique and devastating—a simulacra of the world, a blank canvas, a literary device, and a social enterprise. I didn’t have any words for it, but I suppose it was like when Evil Knievel saw a motorcycle and a row of buses. Everything just clicked.
Some of my best memories of those early days of elementary school and suburbia are of playing the game in the evening with Dad and my sister, after school and dinner—me freshly bathed and robed, the coffee pot percolating in the kitchen, the lamplight glowing over an old DM’s screen, the clatter of dice and sharp number 2 pencils, the looming catastrophe of bed. We probably played a dozen times, but it feels like a hundred, and nowhere near enough. Other little boys and girls my age were not interested and I had no ability to maintain the kind of consistency you need to run a proper game (i.e., a game that tells a long-term story, which is how D&D turns into something religious and not just a forgettable afternoon of pop and chips and polyhedral dice).
So, through those first few years I did not so much play the game as read and re-read its lore and impossibly vast rule sets, all written by bearded, bespectacled men who reeked of cigarettes and spent their time as cs in basements with other similar men. I’d followed the hex map unfolding before me into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, D&D 2nd Edition, the profusion of campaign settings, adventure modules and supplements flooding the early '90s, including TSR’s separate monthly periodicals Dungeon and (you guessed it!) Dragon. My brains were stuffed with fantasy trivia, names of tentacle’d monsters, heroic and gothic quests and a million poorly drawn maps, all enjoyed frantically and without a drop of irony.
By middle school, I’d found another troupe of humans to play with. This was a big deal, of course. But along with finding this coterie was a less-than-happy realization: that admitting you played D&D publicly (I mean, to other school children) meant instant ridicule. By the time high school rolled around, admitting that you played was social suicide—anathema to public reputation, your ability to appear "cool," to get a date or just avoid the teenage overlords who kept the tradition of bullying alive and well in Southern Ontario.
This was the late '90s and early 2000s. D&D had passed through its international boom and the Satanic Panic and had settled down into its reputation as possibly the geekiest thing you could do with other people (aside from LARPing, or Live Action Role-Playing, which is even more gauche, even among die-hard role-players). There was a role-playing club at my high school, but this was not a place you wanted to be found, and from the looks of it, their campaigns were terribly whiny and aggressive affairs that traded in the worst masculine clichés of the genre.
To cope, my fellow gamers and I kept the whole thing secret. From the sixth grade on, I drew a border down the centre of my social life between my "mainstream" friends and those with whom I role-played. We spoke of it in whispers and code words—we called it our “taboo,” as in, “Any taboo on this weekend?” or “Is your Mom going let us use your basement for taboo?”—and vehemently denied partaking in anything related. This mindset followed us all into college and university. When we were forced by intimacy to tell our various love interests that we played, it was stressful, to say the least—a confession not unlike revealing that you had a secret toddler somewhere or you’d murdered someone in Ball’s Falls.
In any case, keeping something like D&D an intense, fiery secret just makes the bonds between those inside the closed circle a little stronger. Email threads began that would see thousands of words spilled out and emptied. Thousands of miles were driven to find each other in distant towns and cities just to keep the storylines cooking. Sacrifices of time and energy were made, weekends devoured whole, social engagements skipped without guilt, and other more normative and important activities were ignored—and I’m talking about everything from homework to activism, vocational hobbies to family—and relationship building, as well as art.
In terms of its time-swallowing power, role-playing is uniquely rapacious. It’s not worth playing for an hour or two—a short session is usually three-and-a-half, perhaps four hours. It’s best consumed over the course of a day: six or seven hours, even more. This is almost impossible to visualize or understand for those who don’t play seriously, and who thus hear about a Saturday sacrificed to the dice and think it literally insane, cultish, foolhardy, or something worse. But it’s not merely the hours spent playing that fly away in a flow state, a state of positive Samadhi. When you start getting absorbed in a good setting, with a good group, you don’t want to stop talking about it. Even as you wrap up, brain aching, you want to sit around and recap, summarize, re-tread, plan moves and argue, often over drinks. It can chew up your whole social life if you let it. Add to that a sense of interiority, that secrecy and shared world—those knowing looks at a party, a 20-sided die slipped into someone’s pocket—and it can be even hungrier.
***
In the last few years, D&D as I know it has seemingly pulled an impossible trick, and has started crawling out of its pit-trap again, attracting an acceptance and crowd that it’s perhaps never enjoyed. Even conventionally attractive people (like, even Hollywood actors!) are evangelizing on behalf of the game, which wipes out half the taboo for white kids. Because of heroic action and shifting cultural touchstones, more POC, women, and LBGT2IQA+ people can finally be open about loving the game, try it out for the first time, or find a welcoming table to play at. This is all fantastic. It’s changing RPGs for the better, creating far more healthy dynamics, transforming how it’s all executed. Importantly, it’s breaking a stale product out of years of trash: a monotony of univocal content, racist stereotypes, homophobia and rampant misogyny. One can use D&D and other roleplaying platforms to decolonize the western mindset—seriously (the first thing I’d recommend doing in your world is simply removing the “white people,” or whatever they’re called in your world).
The D&D of my own experience was never exclusionary, per se—I’d have loved to play with girls. My version of "taboo" was a refuge for the overly imaginative, the sensitive, the irredeemably geeky boys around me. But with so much secrecy and shame, it was hard enough to find just a few other nerdy dudes. I wouldn’t blame the girls for not wanting to descend into our smelly basements, share our broken couch cushions, and waste away a blazing Saturday in July in a dungeon. I guess I should have extended the invitation, but hey—I was too scared!
So, now, with all this attention, all these new players, I’ve naturally started playing even more. I’ve even had to make a deal with several groups to keep things to four sessions per month, max, spread over two separate campaigns, when I could be playing three times this amount. There are enough people willing to try it with an experiencedDM (or Dungeon Master, if you didn’t know) that I could run a campaign with my colleagues at work, with my oldest high school friends, with two or three new groups of friends and acquaintances, and still have room for the hobby to expand, encroach, and weigh upon my life.
ButI’ve never shaken that sense of shame. It’s still as if this whole hobby was coated in grime. And, as a “creative person,”I’ve realized that the shittier I feel about my own artistic practice, the more I’m likely to put the work aside, and instead invest time in the absurdities of D&D, both in world-building and in playing. And the more I play, and the older and more gnarled I get, the more D&D eats right back into the one thing that’s always making me feel guilty, always gnawing a hole in the back of my brains. It’s what very intellectual people call a “Vicious Circle.”
** *
A short pause here, as I’d like to stress three things about creativity and the game, especially in 2019.
First, please know that you don’t have to spend money to like this stuff. One of the greatest things about role-playing games—the whole vast, sweaty spectrum of them—is that they are extremely inexpensive to get started. This is especially true if you are poor and used to inventing creative ways to get around the various traps of “living in a destructive capitalist society.”
Sports require equipment and fees; video games and other computer programming-related crap can be pricey as hell; at the very least, after you actually buy your instruments, your shitty new band needs strings, picks, capos, cables, pedals, sticks and oceans of booze just to keep going. Going to concerts? Forget about it. Write off pottery, literary events, carpentry, glass-blowing, tattooing, zip-lining, and suping up icy Honda Civics. Other nerdy hobbies at least related to role-playing, like wargaming, require small fortunes forked over on plastic miniatures, paint, glue, terrain, and your sexual attractiveness.
You don’t have to buy anything to play an RPG. I mean, you need pencils and paper. The full experience requires a set of those famous multi-sided dice. But everything else can be winged: you can flip coins or use online die rollers; you can photocopy or pirate the rule books or just use old PDFs, use coins or tokens as figurines, borrow real-life maps and props from the library or this thing called the Internet. Some games use decks of cards, Jenga sets, and candles to resolve conflict.
If you do it right, playing an RPG for several years is less expensive than going out for lunch once with your friends in Toronto. For real!
Second: we should be real about what we’re discussing when we’re discussing D&D. I’m not talking about which system you’re playing, like 5e or 4e or 3.5. When we’re discussing the popularity of Dungeons& Dragons, we should be careful to remember that we’re speaking about a specific consumer product—and one owned by Hasbro, one of the largest toy-making companies in the world.
When Stephen Colbert sits to play D&D with Critical Role’s Matt Mercer for a cute and cringey tête-à-tête; when Terry Crews or Vin Diesel or the werewolf d00d from True Blood sing D&D’s praises in endless YouTube featurettes; when the New York Times or Bloomberg or the New fucking Yorker report on D&D’s Fifth Edition’s double-digit new user growth for four years running, we’re not witnessing the power of “word of mouth.” We’re not celebrating role-playing games as a genre, either. We’re watching the attendant tech priests of capital applauding a resurgent product that is being carefully, exquisitely pitched to consumers, and only so long as the money rolls in.
Perhaps we’d like to think that something as peculiar as D&D is quote-unquote popular due to our intense love or something, but let’s be frank—it’s not the OSR blogosphere or 25-year-old campaigns or that comic store guy that led Wendy’s—that bastion of minimum wage, animal cruelty, and damp buns—to develop a free role-playing game. More than half of D&D’s rise out of the dim-lit crawlspace is due to experimental marketing and the handshake of capital. It’s like talking about Pepsi or Nike or Osh Kosh B’gosh.Let’s keep our shorts on and not get too excited over advertising.
Noting this, it’s key for all beginners to know that D&D is merely the most popular expression of the tabletop role-playing game. It has endured because it was basically the first of its kind and enjoyed both advertising bucks and a period of right-wing hysteria. Its fantasy tropes have both influenced and been influenced by 40 years of culture. And, at its most basic execution, the game asks little of its players in terms of creativity, philosophy, ethics, or art. It can be played by little children with deep satisfaction. So many of the “campaign diaries” or stories you see online today are mirror images of each other—for some reason, despite the game’s real claims that it lets players explore any world they can imagine, everyone ends up doing the same thing. People try D&D and dropout because, well, it can really suck—who wants to play TheLord of the Rings, albeit stripped of originality, plot, poetry, and tension? Who wants inconsistent rules, stereotypical or cliched characters, and cavernously awkward silences?
Better to think D&D (the product) as one thing, and D&D the“concept” as another—a chassis upon which you can build something truly your own, fitted to your needs and desires, matched to whatever breathlessly ambitious concept you wish to devise. Know that there are countless other systems out there from other companies, both big, small, and infinitesimal, with different rulesets and mechanics, different paces and philosophies, different emotional tonalities and moods. D&D as written is the popcornMarvel blockbuster, albeit directed by your buddies. It’s not the only kind of movie.
If you are a deeply creative person coming to this hobby, then know it’s ready for you. Just don’t get stuck thinking about that one Hasbro product and get funnelled into an absurd dungeon crawl with emotional bozos just because you assume that’s all there is.
Third—and we’re almost done—is the need to sing D&D’s praises as a training ground for creative thinkers, and especially those who come up with stories. Concurrent with D&D’s resurrection, prominent writers who are far better and more successful than me have described how the game has shaped their artistic practice. I’m not going to expand upon many of these reflections, but since we’re talking about creativity, they’re worth re-iterating in brief: that D&D helps the would-be writer develop a stronger sense of plot and pacing. It can help one formulate genuine character motivations—drives that seem real, believable. Dramatic reveals, flourishes, double-crosses, all get tested at the table, with a live and often immediately responsive audience. Perhaps most vitally, designing a good one-shot or long-term D&D campaign will help the writer understand the fundamental elements of concise description—so much of what the referee is relied upon to do is describe and unpack primary elements of form, space, and time. Economy and precision of language, attention to the right detail, the ability to cleave to the essentials—these are invaluable skills to learn and get better at, and in game-terms, they will mean the difference between a bad afternoon and an irresistible wormhole. In the world of conventional, plot-driven fiction, it’s probably half the battle for any decent book.
** *
WhatI mean to say is: if treated with seriousness and respect, D&D can do all sorts of incredible things. We can see that. But despite the intelligent treatment I can give it, and despite the rational part of my brain dismantling the differences between RPGs and “real art,” it still feels like a joke and a harmful distraction from making something legit. It still feels shameful—there’s a hot flush of shame writing this out, even now. So I should’ve spent that weekend in Burlington with my parents, writing lofty poems about my old bedroom, etcetera. I shouldn’t have spent it sweating and rolling dice with those goons.
I understand now where this comes from: a feeling that no matter how creative or moving or meaningful our campaigns are, have been, or will be in the future, they’re limited to the people at the table only. Ignore your real studies or discipline and instead devote time to D&D? Your reward, the result of all your precious work, is that a tiny handful of people might have a good time. Maybe they remember it for the rest of their lives. But it’s gone with them.The musician plays for a crowd of three, and the performance is forgotten. Who wants that kind of artistic practice? Who wants to scribble poems for their spouse only, or shove them into a drawer to rot? Who wants to see things contained so dramatically, so permanently barred from the public?
I probably don’t need to tell you that this idea presupposes that your real art has an audience. I never really interrogated this assumption in 2014. Back then I was completely immersed in the process of writing, the dreaming of books, what some people still call a “career.” Back then, five years ago, this reality, this timeline, was unthinkable—or at least a worst-case scenario. But now I’m much better prepared to say this one crooked, semi-painful thing:
That D&D is simply art, sped-up.
Through writing fiction and poetry you may have a wider audience, receive attention that is “critical,” maybe one-day have a consumer product in a bookstore. You get to go to social events and launches and sometimes find a wide community, both online and IRL. These people can become your friends and dear and cherished comrades. If you’re supremely lucky, you win awards and gain cash, actual capital, get invited to festivals and put up in fancy hotels, get appointments and residencies and get interviewed on stage or appear on television. You get to have a nice head shot in your book. Maybe it’s by a professional photographer; maybe you hire your friend to take glamorous photos of you to appear like you’re in demand as a commodity. Anyway, you may have readers who last a little while.
But even with decent sales of your work, few people are going to re-read your stuff in just a few years. Add a few decades, half a century, and almost no one in your generation will be read. In a few hundred years—if we can make it on this planet with finite fossil fuels still being ripped out of the ground, thank you Justin—maybe one or two writers from this era will be read and remembered. The circle will close. The writer you envied or resented, loved or felt great emotion over will get buried over by time. Cue “Ozymandias.” There will be few fragments poking out of that dust, and certainly none of this will endure.
You know this, but you don’t know this. I know this, but I don’t know this. If you knew deeply now that your art is, with certainty, going to be forgotten with rapidity, would it change how you feel about it?Would the process feel better, less cruel, spread across a longer timeline?
Playing D&D is simply a highly accelerated illustration of this process.Playing the game with passion and integrity, creating those feverishly personal ties and shared experiences with a tiny circle of four or five or six people merely inflames this sense—that all stories eventually come to an end; that not everyone can be touched or reached; that the things that matter to us almost always die with us, too. People stop playing and you fall out of touch. Your parents sell your childhood home. You lose your family and lovers and all those memories wink out like they held the world, your world, in their heads.
Understanding this in terms of art will ask of you one more step, and that’s seeing it as the natural process of being alive. It is deeply uncomfortable but unthinkable not to consider it—to not look unflinchingly at it. D&D is just as much a waste of time as art itself, which is equal to anything else you could do. Nothing is made to last. We wisp up and evaporate into the living air: bubbles rising in the sink, a shrinking pile of memories.
So, if D&D is sped-up art, then art is just sped-up life.
** *
After that night in August, I wanted to re-experience my childhood home by myself—not with my D&D pals—one more time. I wanted to linger in corners, lick some door jambs, soak up the smells and shadows, commune with the historical spirits. I wanted to see versions of myself at every stage of my short life, draped with all my baggy emotions, my frazzled nerves, the tears I cried as a little boy in endless frustrations and the blood I dripped in desperation over the telephone at 19. Places I stormed, playing games that meant everything; the spots where I collapsed to mourn the dead. All versions of myself that are, quite literally, different people, and now completely and utterly nonexistent—or as real as I am now, and thus all part of the same dream.
But my folks sold the place quick, and I didn’t have a chance to comeback, and the house was demolished. A hole was dug deeper than the basement and sat there empty for an entire season. Poof, so long!
My creative life has so far been defined by a series of revelations about the purpose of all this. I can’t just “make stuff”; I have to know why I’m making it. I need to understand my motivation, and that motivation has to burn ferociously if I’m going to be driven, satisfied, or any good at this crap. Maybe you feel that way, too.
WhatI can say is I’m thankful we went back there to play again—to hell with those feelings of waste and shame. It was time well-spent to return, to dive into the flimsy sheets from our childhood, our minds flying through a magical world. I was lucky, and am lucky, because I found friends with whom to share it. And that is more important than any art, and any game, we’ve yet devised.
Spencer Gordon co-invented this publication (The Puritan) and ran it for a decade. He's also played D&D for 22 years. He is the author of the poetry collection Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions, 2017) and the short story collection Cosmo (Coach House Books, 2012), among numerous other things. More made-up stuff can be found at www.spencer-gordon.com or on Twitter at @spencergordon.