Rhetorically Speaking: Community’s “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons”

It was good fortune for this episode’s airing to coincide with the work I am doing on my research paper about the psychology behind Dungeons and Dragons groups.  In addition, one of the resources I am using details a psychologist’s use of D&D to reach a child who had no other way of expressing himself.  In this episode of Community, a college student known as “Fat Neil” is undergoing major depression and thoughts of suicide.  After giving all of his D&D books to Jeff Winger because he “won’t need them anymore,” the study group decides to play a game of D&D with Neil to make him feel better.

The episode, from a rhetorical standpoint, is amazing in the number of controversial issues tackled here: race, sex, violence, hatred, and links to teen suicide.  They do not all play a major role in the story, but the show makes a nod to each one.  If you analyze it long enough, the show seems to claim that people blow these aspects way out of proportion when using them as a basis to condemn D&D gameplay.

The first reference to race comes when a comical Chang paints his skin black and dons a silver wig, to which Shirley says, “So, we’re just gonna ignore that hate crime, huh?” not realizing that he was emulating an elven race in the game known as the drow.  The second comes when the group finds a tavern populated with “beleaguered gnomes” and Brita tries to speak to them.  In Abed’s game, there seems to be a caste system where these gnomes are very far on the bottom.  This leads to an interesting discussion in which Brita is telling the gnome that he should treat her as an equal, and Abed, as the Dungeon Master, role-plays the gnome’s dismay at such an idea.

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My First True Academic Paper

I’ve posted up some academic work I’ve done, but those are all little things.  None of it is anything worthy of attention by scholars, just rote work to prove understanding of concepts.  But now, I’m starting my first academic paper to submit to the college, and I’ve narrowed my interests down to a couple of topics.  Feel free to comment.

Number One

The social/psychological aspects of Dungeon Masters leading their groups and of the groups themselves. This is inspired by the recent news report of D&D being banned from prisons due to it emulating gang activity.

Number Two

The usage/treatment of current religions in science fiction. Someone once told me that certain religions, when used in future-based science fiction, must be assumed to be false. For example, it goes against the scriptures of Christianity for Christianity to still exist in the year 2500, and therefore must be false. People who worship Christianity in a world where the year 2500 is a possibility must have come up with—made up—a reasoning for why the return of Christ hasn’t happened yet. Another spin on this: Orson Scott Card is a Mormon, but you really couldn’t tell due to the absence of religion from some books, and the usage of Catholicism in his Ender’s series. I would love to find out how he, and other writers, handle it.

Number Three

The effects of productivity on the bottom line.  In my job, we were harped on the fact that if we could “save people 5 minutes, we would save them 5 minutes every time they did that, adding up to tons of saved time.” I’d like to find out, in dollars, how this works. I’d like to study the ways people can be taught, and perhaps methods on how to best train, en masse, broad groups of people to create a positive return on investment.

Quote Pantheon Unquote

Today’s release of episode 19 of the Save or Die Radio podcast brought back my trials dealing with gods and deities while playing Dungeons and Dragons.  Everyone has their ideas on how gods should work, and after many years of DMing, I came up with my own structure.  I lay that here for you.

But first, some back-story.

      When I started DMing, I was much more comfortable leaving the gods out of it, so to speak.  They were entities that were prayed to, that were worshipped, but we never really saw any action from (with the exception of the divine spellcasters, of course).  I had trouble understanding the true role that deities played.  It always made little sense to me how we could have all these gods that never seemed to interact with their followers, and for what reasons exactly did they grant their power to their clerics?  Why don’t we see epic clashes of good versus evil on a cataclysmic scale on a daily basis?  I had left them that way for a very long time, until one day a friend of mine was discussing with me an encounter he had participated in where a player challenged a deity to battle.

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