Textual Poaching

There is a special joy in admitting that you like Dungeons and Dragons, almost like telling someone that you secretly have a pet hampster that you’ve never revealed to them before. I am fascinated with how scociety reacts to Dungeons and Dragons, and roleplaying games in general, and have struggled to come to terms with why this and many of my other favorite hobbies are viewed as puerile and lacking substantial content.

My relationship with Dungeons and Dragons has been very much like the Skin Horse’s experience of becoming ‘real’ and loved through long association, from ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’. I started playing Dungeons and Dragons when I was about seven, and continued to play on and off with my older brother up until I was a teenager, when I started leading my own games at home with my younger brothers. When I started working at a Boy Scout camp at fifteen, I lead groups of friends in role playing games every summer, and then at college played multiple games with my brother and his wife, a hobby that continues still today. Over the years, the game has become an integral part of who I am, and I feel that only the people who have a similar relationship with the game can understand my relationship with it.

What fascinates me with Dungeons and Dragons, is rather like the ratty stuffed rabbit, it is so often discounted as childish and unimportant, while such plotless games as Modern Warfare are allowed to slip through the cracks as ‘a great adult game’. As I began to analyze the nature of roleplaying, I realized that roleplaying is so unbelievably commonplace in our culture. Particularly at BYU, there is a strong culture of putting your best foot forward, and not admitting your doubts, stresses, or insecurities. We all create a ‘BYU Character’, who we often hide behind, hoping to be able to marry well, get great grades, and slip under the eye of our Ecclesiastical Leaders without ever revealing the real us. I decided to create a BYU Character Sheet, and remixed a number of the character statistics to better fit this vision, as well as superimposing a picture of myself in the background instead of the emasculated barbarian sketches which are the backdrop of most DnD character sheets. I personally believe that everyone should be familiar with the concept of Roleplaying games, as we play them in real life constantly, from our resumes to our Facebook pages.

This project quickly became extremely personal to me. I have always loved Rage Against the Machine, and discovered just recently that their classic album ‘Rage’ is actually an entire album of covers! I was amazed, because each of the songs seems so personally theirs. I similarly began to pour my personality into this project, and quickly became aware how much this idea of masking and roleplaying has effected my life. Most of my childhood and teenage years I was convinced that I had to hide my weaknesses from my parents and especially my friends. I was so insecure with who I actually was, and thought that repenting and changing meant hiding the things you were not happy with. I am just barely beginning to realize that because of this, I have an extremely unclear idea of who I actually am as an individual. This project has changed me spiritually and emotionally, and I have set out to discover who I really am, not just the character I say that I am.