Yudhishthira’s Dice

I wrote this for Church and State, and then used parts of it for commentary in PUSH: New Thinking About Roleplaying. Since then I’ve had several querries and comments about it, so I thought I’d put the whole thing up. Maybe the “Gaming Dummy” will become a regularly monthly column — I could easily see various articles on history, rhetoric, religion, and such being useful to folks and I do know plenty of otherwise useless trivia.

Anyway, Marxism for Gaming Dummies:

A lot of us Swine are a trash talking college boys whove gotten more education than was good for us, and promptly started spouting things about how the “dominant hegemony imposes consumer fetishes through the pseudo-individualism of post-modernist para-texts.” Now that’s all well and good for people who spent too much time in culture theory classes sucking up to the teacher, but for those who want to make their NPCs speak intelligently without having to take a class on Neo-Marxism, this section presents a few names and terms that you can drop into their dialogue to give it that authentic pseudo-intellectual stink. By dropping the following names and terms into his ranting, you can make your players think you too are one of the Marxist l33t.

Cultural Determination: The basis of many Marxist arguments is that there is no inherent human nature. Rather man creates the world he lives in, and that world in turn shapes the nature of man. So if we create a society based on greed, then people will be greedy. But if we can break the vicious circle and make a culture based on cooperation, then people will become cooperative.

Marx: The grandfather of Marxist theory (bet you couldn’t guess), Marx argued that our culture is driven by greed and the desire for material wealth and that the dominant society makes an ideology to legitimate their domination. In other words, everyone wants lots of stuff, just for themselves, and the rich make up rules that let them have the most stuff.

Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove: The iron fist is the obvious methods of physical control — the police, military, and the courts. The velvet glove is the more subtle methods of mind control — such as media, education, and the church. Althusser is the name most associated with the use of this term.

Culture Industry: This theory says that mass-media (movies, radio, television) are all part of the velvet glove, which make the masses (that’s us) stay happy, sappy, and pliable while bilking us of all our money. So every time you go to the movies The Man programs you, makes sure you stay happy and in control, and takes your money at the same time. This to leads pseudo-individualism, which is what happens when people start defining themselves by the mass market. So if you think you’ve got a real personality because you like Eminem and not The Backstreet Boys, then you’re really just a pseudo-individual. Adorno is the name to toss when talking this talk.

Hegemony: The process of control and education that makes people see the current power structure as not only right, but as a matter of common sense. So people not only think that Bill Gates really deserves to have 32 billion dollars, but that there is no other possible way the world could work if people couldn’t get that rich. Gramsci is the name that you must drop to give this word some theoretical respectability.

Structuration: Theory that the repeated acts of individuals are what create social structure, and that social structure then reinforces the acts of individuals. This stance also says individuals can make a change simply by not repeating the actions that shape society. So if you want to change the world, you start by changing yourself and your relation to the culture around you and it will inevitably lead to social change. Giddens, who isn’t really a Marxist, is the big name behind this little theory.