2020 Geek-A-Long: Carpe DM

Listen up, whippersnappers! You there with your droopy drawers and unreasonable expectations of health-care, living wages, and educational equality! In my day, we had to walk barefoot, uphill in the snow (both ways!) for the privilege of being bullied for playing Dungeons & Dragons. These days you can get a starter set from an end-cap at Target. Target! The very place where you can feel good about not being at Walmart. The same Target that censors children’s books will sell you a Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG), and they aren’t even hiding that shit on the bottom shelf. It’s just right there in the open, ready to corrupt young impressionable minds. /s

The world sure has changed. 

Except obviously, that it hasn’t. The discrimination and bullying that has always gone hand-in-hand with gaming became more subversive in some ways, and the keys changed hands. Sort of… I’ll get to that in a minute. But the Gatekeeping is just as strong a force as it’s always been.

I had to hide my D&D habit growing up. Mind you, this was right at the tail end of the devil worship hysteria that swept across middle-America for a while. For those of you that weren’t around for it, you’ve probably heard jokes about how, “At level 5, the spells are real!” There were actual, educated adults that honestly believed D&D was a gateway drug to Satanism, and that playing D&D risked summoning actual demonic forces. Or, at the very least, made kids want to summon demonic forces. I think we shouldn’t be too hard on those parents. In their own way, they were trying to do right by their children and for the most part they believed this because trusted authority figures told them it was true. Put your ire where it belongs on this one and blame those authority figures. That’s really more of a topic for a thesis rather than a blog post though. If you want to learn more I recommend: Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds by Joseph Laycock.

The point I’m getting at is that for a long time, D&D was where the outsiders congregated. It fostered a sense of community, but has always had an undertone of us-against-them. Every time we calculated thaco (to hit armor class zero), we stuck it to the cool kids, who bullied us. Don’t get me wrong, gaming has never been a particularly open or welcoming community to women, BIPoC, or the LGBT+, but nowhere else was either. We stayed because games are fun and the harassment was predictable. By the time I was in college, suddenly it was a badge of honor to have grown up nerdy. You’d meet new gamers and tell them about the games you cut your teeth on the way an old war veteran might talk about their most glorious battles. Sometime in 2000-and-late, D&D started getting a new surge of popularity, and it was straight-up cool to be a nerd. Celebrities like Stephen Colbert, Vin Diesel, and Joe Manganiello came out of the dungeon as gamers. Critical Role hit the scene, and thanks to what I like to lovingly call “The Mercer-Effect”, D&D was everywhere.

Even Target. 

As with most things, change made some gamers feel threatened. Privileged people tend to see the world as a pie. If someone else has a slice, that means there is less pie for me and mine. And although they tend to see themselves as lifetime victims, the core of the gaming community is mostly white and mostly male, and inherently privileged. So this core audience looked out at the new generation of gamers coming at them and they feared for their pie. Lackofpiephobia was a direct contributor to gamer-gate. If women can be successful at something that’s been male dominated, obviously that means that:

1. Men maybe weren’t so special all along.
2. Those women will get some pie.

In the D&D community, all you have to do to see Lackofpiephobia thriving in the wild is look at the comments section on literally any social media post Wizards of the Coast puts out there with a woman, BIPoC, or LGBT+ person referenced or pictured. The keys to the gate passed from the jocks or religious leaders that bullied nerds on to the old-school nerds bullying newer/younger/browner/gayer nerds. These new gatekeepers piekeepers are really the same cranky old white men they’ve always been. The pie flavor changes, but the power differential doesn’t.

The good news is there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

First of all, Millenials will out-live Boomers. I don’t know what the next generation of piekeepers will fear specifically, but rest assured there will be a new flavor of fear, so at least there is that. Second, in the wise words of Smokey the Owlbear:

Only you can put out social media fires!

If you see someone being a douche-canoe on the internet, say something. Call them out and set the record straight. Don’t sink to their level. Don’t call them stupid — no matter how stupid they are being — just correct them with facts, pay a compliment to whoever they were bullying, and then drop the internet mic and walk away. More importantly, deny them any additional pie. If you play in a game with someone who’s being a dick, tell them it will not be tolerated, and then actually don’t tolerate it.

My parting gift on this post is to point you at this handy set of in-game tools that allow players to express when they are feeling uncomfortable with something that another player is doing: The Tools of the Table. It’s an awesome way to be a part of the solution and make your game safe for everyone. Except Nazis. As my WW2 Vet Grandfather always said, “Fuck Nazis.” 

Whether you’re knitting, crocheting, or cross stitching this square, you can download the Carpe DM (D4) pattern here. Instructions and charts for both knit and crochet are listed in the pattern. When you’re finished making it, don’t forget to Instagram your squares at us @lattesandllamasyarn with the hashtag #geekalong! Want to hang out with other people making the blanket? You can find moral support in the Geek-A-Long group on Ravelry here.

~Megan-Anne

Be the best player by being the best person.

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