Compilations and Greatest Hits

Recently, Queen’s Greatest Hits became the first album to sell six million copies in the UK, meaning that now a third of all UK households contain a copy.  I know that mine does.  It also contains Queen’s Greatest Hits II and III.

Now, keep calm, because what I’m about to say may shock you.  Rein in your natural violent impulses and bear with me for just a few seconds.

I don’t like every song on Queen’s Greatest Hits.

I know, I know.  Happily for me, I don’t live in Pakistan; otherwise I would be sentenced to death for blasphemy.  But I’m afraid it’s true.  I don’t really care for ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ or ‘You’re my Best Friend’.  The rest are pure genius, naturally.

The thing is, that someone at some point, presumably at Queen’s record company, sat down and thought, “You know, there are some really good Queen songs out there.  I should collect them all together in a single volume, so that people can have a single consolidated source of Queen-based musical joy.”

I don’t know who that was (and I’m too lazy to Google it), but they had the job of sifting through the significant body of Queen songs and selecting the ones that they considered to be the best, the most representative of Queen throughout a career that included pop and rock, up to the sad death of Freddie Mercury in 1993, and (in the case of GHIII, beyond).  Overall, I would say that they did a reasonable job, apart from the exceptions noted above, but even then I can see why they made those choices.

My point though, is that unless I want to source every single individual Queen single (which would be difficult and extremely expensive, assuming it’s still possible at all), I have to rely on the subjective opinions of this unknown compiler, and clearly we disagree on certain issues.  I would have included songs that they haven’t, and left out songs that they included.  Ultimately though, I have to rely on the fact that this person (or persons) has a greater and deeper knowledge of the corpus of Queen’s work than I do.  I can accept their decisions as authoritative, even if I reserve the right to disagree with them on certain points.

What this has all been building up to is a comparison with another compilation volume, condensing a massive body of work down into a relatively (!) concise volume: the Bible.

Some very learned people sat down and sifted through vast numbers of books, deciding what would be included in God’s Greatest Hits (and possibly planning on Greatest Hits II and III further down the road).

I am a wishy-washy liberal sort of Christian, and I don’t hold to a literal interpretation of the Bible.  In fact, I outright disagree with some of its assertions.  Counter to many people’s opinion, I think it is practically a duty to pick and choose from the Bible.  That said, I acknowledge the greater wisdom, insight and learning of those ancient compilers, and I accept their reasoning for including and excluding certain books, but that doesn’t mean I have to agree with them on every single point.  There was a degree of subjectivity (and no doubt more than a little politics and diplomacy) involved in what became canonical, and what was left to gather dust amongst the tape cassette and LP singles.

I consider the Bible to be an authoritative source of divine revelation, but that doesn’t mean that I have to think that it is an absolute and final authority, or that works not included in it (often because they didn’t exist at the time) can’t be just as revealing of God’s wishes for us.

I eagerly await the release of Greatest Hits II, but unfortunately I can’t see a wide enough group of people being able to agree on what should be included for it ever to happen.

Meanwhile, Queen still has quite a way to go to beat the sales of God’s compilation album.

Roleplaying Games as Theological Analogy (Part 3)

I wasn’t actually planning on there being a third part of this series, but based on recent events, I’ve decided to add an extra little bit.  I should hasten to say that this makes use of a very similar analogy to one used by CS Lewis, but I think illustrates the point better.

I am running a game for some friends from university, done over the internet and playing by text on a private internet chatroom.  This game has been going now for about five years, with a couple of longish breaks.  Several player characters have been killed along the way, until only 2 of the original 5 who started the campaign were still alive, although other characters had joined to replace those who had fallen (played by the same players).

This week, one of these two survivors finally fell, but not in a particularly satisfactory way.  The player had some stuff going on at home that meant that his attention was only intermittently on the game, and so I was controlling his character, and making his dice rolls when he couldn’t come to the computer.  The characters had got into a fight, and the character in question was badly injured, and quickly bled to death.  The player returned to the computer to find that the character he’s been playing for the last 5 years had died in his absence, something that I felt badly about, and so I offered him the option of me using my GMly omnipotence to undo events, and say that his character had survived after all.

However, the player was happy to go along with whatever I decided, and so I erred on letting events run their course, with the result that the player is now taking over control of a recurring NPC.

Now, I could have reached into my created world, and worked a Lazarene miracle, indeed not only bringing a dead character back to life but making it so that they had never died in the first place.  The only reason I even considered this was due to the unusual circumstances involved.  I’m glad that the player didn’t insist that I bring his character back to life, not that I expected him to, because once you break the laws of a universe once, it becomes easier and easier to do so, and for worse and worse reasons.  Other players start complaining if one person is seen to be immune to the universal laws that they are bound by.

Nonetheless, miracles can and do occur, but only very occasionally, and we do indeed hear people complaining that only certain people seem to get miracles.  “Why doesn’t God heal the amputees?” is a common (albeit often somewhat mocking) question.  I think the game illustrates this very well.  After all, if The Great GM in the Sky reached into this created world and broke the game rules frequently, then not only would they not be miracles, but they would not be rules.   The game would break down completely and that would be no fun at all, either for the players, or for the GM.

Sometimes it’s best not to insist on receiving miracles when things go badly wrong, but simply to accept the decision of the GM and play with what you have.  Although the character within the created world may not see it as such, ultimately the player knows that it is the best thing, both for themselves, for the other players, and for the Game itself.

The Leap

You might not realise it from this blog, but I actually write very little poetry.  Most of my stuff is prose, but poetry tends to be easier to post in a blog, since it's normally quite short.  So here's another poem.

Most of the poetry I do write is comic stuff, since the little serious poetry I've written is pretentious and awful, but there is one exception, which I give to you now.  This was written some time ago, and I can't remember the exact circumstances that gave rise to it, but unlike the other writing I've posted here, this hasn't been seen by anyone else before.  It's a Made-up Things world premier exclusive!

The Leap

I am standing on the edge of a great lake

 in the depths of a starless night.

In front, nothing but darkness, and the sound of wind,

And the ripples of the water.

If I were to just walk forwards a little way,

That dark, deep cold would close over my head,

And swallow me up.

But then, I hear a single note,

A clarion call, a trumpet in the distance,

And raising my head, I see a tiny silver light.

So minute, so faint that if I look straight at it

It disappears.

Only in the corner of my eye can I see it,

And it is beautiful.

And then, that small, still voice that says,

‘I am with you.  Do not be afraid.’

And I feel the infinitesimal pressure

of your hand upon my back.

And I take a step forwards.

I feel the water at the edge, I take another step,

And I do not sink.

I step again, and still I do not sink.

Another, and another.

Each step, a miracle of courageous faith.

And I do not sink.

Now, there is darkness all around me,

And nothing but deep, dark water beneath,

and your voice which whispers softly.

‘I am with you.  Do not be afraid.’

Copyright Thomas Jones 2014

Roleplaying Games as Theological Analogy Part 2: World Building

The purpose of a roleplay game is to have fun.  The clue is in the ‘game’ part.  Obviously the players are playing to have fun, and presumably most people who GM enjoy it as well, or at least are willing to do it for the enjoyment of their friends.

Assuming that the person running the game has created their own setting (as I tend to do) rather than using a pre-published setting, of which there are a great many, they have done so with the enjoyment of their players in mind.  Even if they have created worlds purely for the enjoyment of the act of doing so, certain details will be concentrated on while others are ignored.  Politics and warfare tend to receive quite a lot of attention, while economics is usually touched on only briefly.  This is because there are very few (if any) games where the Player Characters spend each day running a small shop.

So a GM’s fictional world is usually created and shaped to enhance the enjoyment of their players, but the world also has to be challenging.  It would make for a very dull game, and remove the need for any rules or adjudication, if there were no obstacles, or only very easily overcome ones.  Almost all RPGs include some sort of experience system, where character grow and develop as they defeat challenges and complete missions.  The point is that it may well be great fun for the players, but for their characters, experiencing that reality, there is a lot of pain and fear and hardship, and an awful lot of arduous drudgery that is lightly skipped over.  “You walk for two weeks without incident” is a common thing for a GM to say.  There’s no fun in roleplaying two weeks of boring, wearying trudging, but that doesn’t mean that the characters get to skip it.

As I’ve briefly mentioned before a common question is why God would allow bad things to happen to us (or at all), why he wouldn’t cure every disease, right every wrong.  There are plenty of answers to this, but one of them is that the question assumes that the universe is here for our benefit (which it may be) and that that benefit is a short-term, worldly one.  I’ve never come across any reason to think so.

The Great GM in the Sky hasn’t created a world for the benefit of his characters.  He’s created it for the benefit of his players, and that benefit exists largely outside of and after the game.  I firmly believe that we were not created to enjoy ourselves (not that I’m saying that we’re here to be miserable, far from it!), but we were created with our good in mind.  We were created to learn, and to grow.  What is good for us as characters within a created world is not always the same as what is good for us as beings that also exist outside that world, but that can use that world to grow and develop, and become something more than we were born into the world to be.

Roleplaying Games as Theological Analogy- Part 1: God the Good GM

Quite a long post today, since it requires a bit of an introduction.

One of my main hobbies is table-top roleplaying; mostly games in the vein of Dungeons & Dragons, although actually I don’t particularly favour D&D itself due to matters of personal taste in terms of the game rules.  I tend to prefer rather simpler rules systems, and have even written my own (which you can see here), purely for my own use.  I have created several entirely fictional universes, again just for myself, and partly for the pleasure of creating them.  I have no intention of trying to publish either the rules or the setting at any point.  I have no delusions about my chances of success in shoe-horning myself into an already saturated market.

Anyway, I tend to run more games than I play, and almost every rule set has as its most unshakeable tenet ‘The Games Master is Always Right’.  When you sit in front of a group of players, you are God.  You hold the laws of physics, the workings of a world, the past, present and future of every single living thing in that world, in the palm of your hand.  Now not even the most obsessive GM takes into account every sparrow that falls (although you could make a table, and then roll a set number of dice per day, based on regional weather, predator numbers, food availability and prevalence of disease…  No!  Madness that way lies!), but nonetheless, you are omnipotent.  Within the world that you have created and populated inside your imagination, and which you have permitted your players to enter, you are all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-seeing (at least in theory).

This is heady stuff, and for some running a roleplay game becomes a power trip, being able to do things to your players’ characters just because you can, to needlessly assert your authority.  Omnipotence does not always come with Omni-benevolence.

What this is all leading up to is an analogy with the Great GM in the Sky.  There seems to be some interesting food for thought here, and my google-fu has not presented me with anything similar, so I’m hopefully not rehashing something someone else has already thoroughly thrashed out.

Before I actually get started, I should probably just briefly cover something.  Back in the 80s and early 90s when roleplaying was extremely popular with teenagers, there was a huge public backlash against the games, primarily led by what we now call the Christian Right.  The fact that many roleplay games include magic, and often feature demons and devils, alongside the elves, dwarves, orcs and dragons, made some people extremely worried that these games were corrupting their youths with unholy and unhealthy ideas.  There were attempts to link D&D and similar games with Satanism and witchcraft, due to their ‘magical’ content, in the same way the Harry Potter books would be fifteen years later.  The American evangelist Jack Chick published his now-infamous Dark Dungeons comic strip, fanning the flames of hysteria.  It was all what can most politely be described as bunkum, and it gradually died away, but there are still some Christians out there who are extremely twitchy about RPGs.  Well I am a keen roleplayer, and I’m not now, nor have I ever been a Luciferian, Witch, Satanist or Demon Worshipper.  (Although I suppose that’s exactly what I would say if I was…)

Free Will and Railroading

RPGs work by the GM presenting a world, and a story within that world which the players interact with and take part in, in the roles of characters within that world, be it traditional mediaeval-style fantasy, science fiction, modern horror etc, etc.  Unfortunately, as the old adage goes, no plot ever survives contact with the players.  They might be meant to be travelling to the distant city to help fight off the invading army, but the nature of the game means that technically there’s nothing stopping them going off in the opposite direction. 

Some GMs will come up with increasingly contrived ways to prevent the players from straying from the plot.  This is frowned upon, and generally considered to be Bad GMing, and is referred to derogatorily as ‘railroading’.  The best GMs accept the unpredictability of the players, the fact that they (or their characters) may not fully understand the mission they’ve been assigned, and work with and around it, hopefully gently steering the game back in the right direction, but otherwise catering and compensating for the change of direction.

I know at least one person who when he GMs games will not allow player vs player conflicts.  Player characters are not allowed to fight or attack each other, even for good in-character reasons.  It is simply not permitted.  Presumably this is due to some prior bad experience, and if a player is just trying to ruin the game for everyone else, or is bringing a real-life grudge to the gaming table then it’s not unreasonable, but the nature of RPGs means that it may well be perfectly possible for 2 player characters to have very good reasons for fighting, maybe even to the death.  If that’s the case, then I personally would have no problem with them fighting it out.  It may not be the best thing for the player party or the plot, but ultimately it adds to the game, as long as it’s done in a good spirit.

By railroading your players, you are removing choice, negating free-will and usually reducing their enjoyment of the game.  Taken to extremes, you get to a point in which you are no longer running an RPG, you are just telling a story.  You have effectively nullified the point of the game, which is for your players to take on a role, and act within it.  You have become a GM in the Calvinist mould, in which your Sovereign Will is more important than the choices of your people.

Being brought up Methodist, I have a fairly heavily Arminian theology.  I believe that like a good GM, God allows us to make our own choices, make our own mistakes, even to ignore or potentially derail his plans for us.  But I also believe that like a good GM, He takes our waywardness into account, He goes along with it, He turns even our mistakes into good and steers us back on track, and as a result, the Game is richer and finer, and at the end, whatever shape that may take, we will have chosen to do what was right, not been forced into it by a narrow and inescapable story, written even before we were thought of.