Why Do Players Enjoy Being Puppets?

A few days ago, I critiqued an argument given by Kotaku blogger Cecilia D'Anastasio that the history of Dungeons & Dragons was partly about how players had gradually wrested autonomy and control from an all-powerful Dungeon Master. Or, as she might have put it, if D&D is about storytelling, then in early D&D, the story was largely told by the DM, whereas now it is largely told by the players.

I claimed that, if anything, this was actually the reverse of the truth.

I cited one of the most popular current Wizards of the Coast adventures, Storm King's Thunder, where almost every major event or happening is predetermined by the DM (or the authors of the adventure) beforehand. From A Guide to Storm King's Thunder:

8. Iymrith: The group gets the artifacts and returns to the oracle. They learn that they need a conch. On the way out, Iymrith attacks and Harshnag makes a heroic sacrifice.

9. Find the Conch: In the book, every giant lord has a conch. The heroes will need to go steal a conch from a giant lord. I liked a lot of these areas, so in my version I changed things a little so I can use Svardborg, Ironslag and the Cloud Giant castle in my campaign.

10. Use the Conch: It takes the group to Maelstrom (page 201). There, the heroes hopefully expose Iymrith and get a clue to Hekaton's whereabouts.

11. King Hekaton: The group tracks down Hekaton and saves him!

12. Final Battle: The adventurers team up with Hekaton to take down Iymrith.

And so on. 

There were two caveats to my claim. The first caveat is that the movement away from player autonomy is an average trend, not an all-ecompassing law. When you look at the question, at the one extreme, you have absolute player choice with no manipulation by the DM or predetermined planning by the scenario author or authors. At the other extreme, you have players as total puppets. No D&D game in history has ever been played at either of these extremes. While I think it's undeniably true that there's much less of an emphasis on player freedom and choice now (in terms of actual play, not silly rhetoric by those such as D'Anastasio), that's certainly not how everyone plays. The very existence of the OSR is proof of that. And while I think that contemporary D&D, as promoted by Wizards, allocates much less freedom to players than, say, original D&D or early AD&D, it's at least arguable that 5th edition D&D represents a small reversal of the overall trend (when compared to, say, 4th edition).

The second caveat is that while I think there's less player autonomy now, control hasn't necessarily been usurped by the DM per se. Rather much of it as been taken from the players by, as I put it, "an uncredited collective of author bureaucrats, employed by a multi-million dollar corporation." It's the scenario authors that are directing you through their story in, say, Storm King's Thunder. The DM is simply helping them to do their dirty work, so to speak.

Let me, insert a third caveat or point that I didn't bring up in the earlier post. The loss of player control is actually even worse than the above suggests. Not only are current players much more, so to speak, at the mercy of the DM and the scenario authors, they're also much more at the mercy of the dice. Randomness is not the same as player choice, and can often hamper it. Now, of course, random dice rolls have always been a central part of the D&D experience, especially for combats. What I'm referring to here is the progressive replacement of determining many outcomes based on player initiated problem solving in favor of, say, "knowledge checks" and the like. This takes real autonomy away from the players. "Choice nodes" or "problem solving nodes" are replaced with "dice nodes."

So, I would say that, in so far as players have ever been puppets, they're much more puppets now than they ever were. Indeed, I would say, again to speak very generally and roughly, they weren't puppets in early D&D, but they are now to a large extent,  - or they are now in "official" Wizards of the Coast D&D.

D&D may not be as popular as it was back in the day (and I would argue that the puppet thing is one reason why it's not as popular), but there is no question that the game is still relatively popular. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of children and adults play it, and the products are, I assume, still money makers for Wizards.

So let me ask (and then try to answer) a blunt question. Why do current players enjoy being puppets?

Let me suggest four answers:

1. They don't know they're puppets.

It's at least conceivable that someone could play through Storm King's Thunder and not know that the major happenings and events that they "experience" were all preconceived and determined beforehand. In the same way, many early published D&D adventures and current OSR offerings contain some "railroady" elements. It's perfectly fair to think that the players are often not aware of them, or if they are aware that they exist, they don't know which of them, precisely exist, if that makes sense. But it's hard for me to believe that this is the case with most current D&D players. If one reads the rulebooks, or any of the adventures at all, or even any of the blurbs on the back of the adventures, one can't fail to notice what's going on - "This will take your players from 1st to 8th level, as they progressively meet greater and greater challenges!" Of course, greater and greater challenges are precisely what they are not - in the same way that going from room 1 to room 8 on a Disney ride is not to confront greater challenges per se.

2. They like being puppets.

To some degree, actors are puppets. They (usually) didn't write their lines, and are often told (by the director) how to say them. But that fact does not detract from the enjoyment that many actors get from their craft. It's fun to dress up in a period costume and pretend you're Richard III, etc.

3. Puppets still have some freedom.

Or at least D&D puppets do. Just because the universe has already determined that you're going to fly in the cloud castle to Bryan Shander and experience the frost giant attack, and steal a conch and save Hekaton, doesn't mean that you can't goof around in the cloud castle and try out different tactics in the frost giant battle, and save Hekaton in a variety of different ways (I assume), etc. etc. And it's not like the players are sitting there with actual strings attached to their arms. A lot of playing a fantasy game is being willing to suspend your disbelief. If you can suspend your disbelief that there aren't really dragons, you can suspend your disbelief that you don't really have complete freedom in choosing how and where to proceed in a predetermined sequential adventure, such as, say, Tyranny of Dragons.

4. The puppets don't know any better.

Why do people play D&D? Not just to exercise what we have called player choice, but more generally to simply be in or experience (via pretend) a fantasy world. Even if you're playing with a bad DM or a stupid rule set or a railroady scenario or whatever, D&D still might be fun, at least for awhile. And if you don't know there's anything better...

They say that bad you-know-what is better than no you-know what. Well, I wouldn't know about that, but I get the point.

After my return to D&D, almost six years ago, and my shock and horror at 4th edition, it still took me a number of months to "discover" the OSR. And while I'm not an internet expert, by any means I'm not a total wallflower either. The existence of the OSR is taken as a given by many of us, but most D&D players are completely unaware of it. And if you don't know that something better exists, you're not necessarily going to have an easy time finding it if it does.

I love sushi. It's pretty much my favorite food. But I didn't eat it for many years, even when my friends did. I thought or assumed that it was gross. When I started eating it, it wasn't because my preferences had changed, but, rather, because I had suddenly "discovered" it, or more accurately, I discovered I had been wrong about it.

So, I don't think game preferences are completely subjective. Certain things work or work better for most people, and certain things don't. But "preferences" for most people (including me) often reflect only what we know or what we think we know.

I suspect that if they knew there were an alternative, many would prefer a less puppetish existence.

By using the term "puppet," I'm not trying to be snarky towards anyone, especially players (or players who "like" being puppets). But I think it's valuable to sometimes use blunt names for things. To some extent, even I think that games that treat people as puppets or partial puppets can be fun. I love Call of Cthulhu, but many CoC scenarios, especially the "classic" ones, are at least potentially somewhat railroady. In some of these, you're a quasi-puppet, being taken on a predetermined path from New York to the Himalayas to Timbuktu to East Oshkosh, etc. But it's still fun.

But I think contemporary D&D would be more fun, or at least more fun for many people, if it went back to its original, yes, Gygaxian conception, where player agency was emphasized more - less Storm King's Thunder and more Keep on the Boderlands or In Search of the Unknown.

And despite my often strong "power to the people" language, here and elsewhere, I don't believe it's all an evil corporate conspiracy. While I think that Wizards publishes many banal and inferior contemporary products, they also have republished many of the best original ones. They're not really trying to make you into a puppet or control you like a puppet (I hope). They don't care one way or another. They just want to make money.

But what about you? What do you want?

Do you enjoy being a puppet?

Cecilia D'Anastasio's Silly Theories About the Tyranny of Gygax and Early D&D

Power to the people

I was pointed to this by a blog post at Castalia House.

In the guise of reviewing the graphic novel Rise of the Dungeon Master: Gary Gygax and the Creation of D&D by David Kushner and Karen Shadmi, Kotaku blogger Cecilia D'Anastasio celebrates contemporary D&D as a good thing. However, for D'Anastasio, D&D started out as a bad thing, or at least a sort of bad thing. Gary Gygax created it (with a little help from Dave Arneson and others) but the game only really came into its own when it grew away from him or beyond him.

I wouldn't waste my time writing about a silly Kotaku post except that I've heard this sort of argument before. It's especially popular among the crowd that loves bringing politics into D&D. I want to consider the argument and then hopefully put a stake through its heart, not because it offends my politics, but because it doesn't even work on its own terms. In seeking to make a subjective claim - old D&D = bad, new D&D = good - it gets most of the objective facts wrong. And it ends up sort of slandering a few people in the process - Gygax, not least among them.

D'Anastasio's "review" begins like this:

Storytelling was never the same after Dungeons & Dragons. When players, guided by a dungeon master, knit a dense narrative whose many threads are each supported by their neighbors, it makes the case that many voices are greater than one.

As it happens, I think storytelling, at least in some form, is certainly a part of D&D; there is nothing wrong with dense narratives per se; and sometimes many voices are in fact greater than one. But if someone puts all those together in the lead paragraph to an essay on Dungeons & Dragons, I guarantee you they have some silly agenda up their sleeve.

Even now, we can perhaps implicitly see the outlines of the argument. Consider: when you started playing D&D, you didn't think of the game as storytelling, had no idea what a narrative, let alone a dense narrative, was, and would have puked had anyone suggested that playing D&D was just like holding hands and singing, or whatever. That's because, in some sense, it was a different game then. See, old D&D = bad, new D&D = good.

D'Anastasio calls Rise of the Dungeon Master "enchanting," but then states, "perhaps Gygax has enjoyed enough time on D&D's altar of hero worship." Even this is, in and of itself, unobjectionable. No mortal man should spend too much time (any time?) being worshipped on an altar. And the criticism of Gygax here is pretty restrained - perhaps he shouldn't be worshipped on an altar? Perhaps? But one senses there's something more going on. Sure enough, in the comments section of the post, D'Anastasio flies her true colors:

I am a diehard D&D fan who seriously dislikes Gygax and his legacy.

Okay. This is strong stuff - not dislikes but seriously dislikes. And it does seem a bit contradictory and odd. After all, since D&D is clearly a big part of Gygax's legacy, how can she be a diehard fan and hate it at the same time? And if she strongly dislikes the man so much, why would she find a picture book about his life enchanting?

But I think the most relevant question is why does she seriously dislike him?

She tries to tell us:

If you compare Gygax’s Dungeons & Dragons adventures to today’s, it will strike you how much control—and veneration—he allocates to the dungeon master...

It is he, the smiling, all-knowing dungeon master, who controls the game’s mysteries. An afterthought, players are the puppets who act out the fantasy...

Today’s Dungeons & Dragons adventures ask more of the player and less of the dungeon master. Scenarios are open-ended. Dungeon dimensions are less particular, to leave room for players’ whimsies. On top of their race, class, alignment and stats, today’s character sheets want to know why the player adventures, and what they ultimately hope to gain. Today’s Dungeon Master’s Guild, an official D&D website that publishes anyone’s adventures and additions to the game, tells us who really owns its legacy. It was Gygax who originally fought against making the ruleset open source.

Today is the age of the player...

We might summarize the above, this way: Gygax and early D&D were a necessary social stage (sort of like capitalism). But we've past out of that and are now above it (true socialism has come). In past ages we were puppets, being manipulated by a tyrant in his own dungeon. But today, we're in the open air and free. It's our time, now. Yay!

Do not misunderstand, I like good Marxist analysis just as much as the next man. The problem is, her analysis isn't very good. Pretty much everything stated in her above four paragraphs is either extremely misleading, false or (and this applies to the majority of it) the reverse of the truth.

How does D'Anastasio justify her claims?

Well, here she is on Gygax almost insulting his players with his blatant ableism:

[In] his famous “Tomb of Horrors” module, he warns that players who are not clever will not enjoy the module.

Wow. How tyrannical and mean of him.

But what did Gygax actually say? I have Tomb of Horrors right here:

THIS IS A THINKING PERSON’S MODULE. AND IF YOUR GROUP IS A HACK AND SLAY GATHERING, THEY WILL BE UNHAPPY! [Upper case in the original]

So here's D'Anastasio at her most dishonest, twisting an admonition against violence and in favor of thinking, into a rude right-wing (or whatever) attack on non-clever people.

Would "kill everything!" have been more progressive?

She makes a second attempt with a direct quote:

In his Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Gygax again assigns great narrative power to the DM: “Here are the bones of the adventure. You must breathe life into this framework after you flesh it out.”

Well, that's certainly right-wing, almost Hitlerian, even Trumpist, in fact. The DM "must breathe life into this framework." I can just hear the jackboots coming towards me along the dungeon corridor.

I'm joking, of course. Anyone who would object to that statement from Gygax, for any reason whatsoever is clearly insane, or at least as easily triggered as, say, one of those Tomb of Horrors traps.

So I'm going to help D'Anastasio out and give her some juicier Gygax quotes that will serve her purpose better. These are from the Dungeon Master's Guide (1979), written (or approved) by Gary Gygax:

The Dungeon Master (DM) is the creative force behind a D&D game. The DM creates a world for the other players to explore, and also creates and runs adventures that drive the story.

...You're the DM, and you are in charge of the game.

MASTER OF WORLDS

Every DM is the creator of his or her own campaign world...you make that world your own over the course of a campaign...

The world is yours to change as you see fit and yours to modify as you explore the consequences of the players' actions.

So, the players do take actions, but if you (the DM) don't like them or their consequences (or for any other reason), you can modify the world. And it is your world, not the players' world. You created it. You get to run it (and thus drive the story). You get to change it, as you see fit. You are the master. It is your own.

Well, if that's not a tyranny, I don't know what. Personally, I prefer collaborative storytelling. Down with masters! (Yay.)

Actually, I lied.

The above passages weren't written by Gygax. They were written by the Wizards of the Coast team that authored the D&D 5th edition Dungeon Master's Guide (2014), and they placed those words in its Introduction.

And obviously, neither the Gygax quote nor the 5th edition passages have anything to do with anything other than making perfectly reasonable statements about what it is that dungeon masters do and should do (though, Gygax was a much better writer than Team Wizard).

Here's the thing: It's true that D&D certainly can be played in such a way that the players are to some extent puppets, participating in a story, yes, but a story that has already been or is currently being largely determined for them by outside forces.

But this is precisely what Gygax, Dave Arneson and early D&D for the most part did not do. By the same token, it is what modern "progressive" D&D, the kind favored by D'Anastasio, does in fact do, not always, perhaps, but all too often.

The early campaigns and adventures - Arneson's Blackmoor and Gygax's Greyhawk being the most famous - as well as the first published adventures by Gygax and others, were, for the most part, almost entirely "open-ended" (to use D'Anastasio's term). Yes, the DM designed the dungeon (someone had to do it). But the players were then free to, so to speak, roam at will within it, creating their own stories - to use D'Anastasio's language - however they wished. Indeed, back in the day, the concept of a scenario (implying that a scene had already been planned or set up beforehand), didn't even exist.

You are a player in Blackmoor or Greyhawk. If your group wants to skip three levels and immediately fight the vampire on level five, you can. If, as a result, you get bitten by the vampire and want to, in effect create a whole new angle on the thing by just being a vampire in the dungeon, you can. If you and your group want to set up turnstiles at the entrance to the dungeon and then charge admission, you can do it. Or you can just tramp off to the Egg of Coot or wherever and try to induce the Elves to attack the vampire for you. Or not. Or whatever, etc. There is no preset plan or storyline or scenario. The players create it themselves with their actions.

Contrast that with a contemporary 5th edition adventure, Storm King's Thunder - presumably one of the "scenarios" that D'Anastasio recommends that you buy in her How to Get Into Dungeons & Dragons:

Acquire the Materials...An adventure (a pre-made book that contains a story, NPCs and monsters)

But, but, I thought the players created the story?

According to A Guide to Storm King's Thunder by Sean McGovern, hyped by the publishers of Storm King's Thunder, Wizards of the Coast, and available on their friendly Dungeon Master's Guild page, here is the outline of the story that the players will be participating in (when the author addresses "you," he means the DM):

1. Nightstone: The group goes through chapter 1. That's very straightforward. The villagers need help.

2. Pick One of Three Locations: Chapter 2 is trickier. The group will have to pick a hook. If there is one place you like and want to use, just give the group that one hook. For example, I like Bryn Shander. So I would have the group be asked to go to Bryn Shander and tell Markham his sister is dead. I wouldn’t even mention the Goldenfields and Triboar quests.

3. Zephyros: Now we fly in the cloud castle to Bryn Shander.

4. Bryn Shander: In Bryn Shander, we go through the frost giant attack.

5. Sort Out Chapter 3: Then we get to the most complicated part of planning this thing out. Chapter 3 is wide open. Ultimately, the group is meant to meet Harshnag (page 118). How and when that happens is completely up to you! Remember, if you like another of the chapter 2 locations, there's nothing stopping you from using it now.

6A. Winging It: If you are a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of DM, then just let the group go where they want and when it feels like it is time, plop in Harshnag.

6B. Planning: If you are like me and you like to prepare, I suggest that you go through chapter 3 and find all the things that you want to use. Then look at the map on pages 74-75 and see where all these places are in relation to each other. Then just connect the dots - make a reason for the group to go from one place to the next. I have already broken down this chapter into quick little blurbs in my Guide to Storm King's Thunder.

7. The Oracle: Once the group meets Harshnag, then they are off to the Eye (page 121). The group will be asked to go to all those burial mounds in chapter 3. I don't like those, so in my version I changed it. Some people online have said they didn't like the idea of desecrating holy sites, so consider your group before you run this as written.

8. Iymrith: The group gets the artifacts and returns to the oracle. They learn that they need a conch. On the way out, Iymrith attacks and Harshnag makes a heroic sacrifice.

9. Find the Conch: In the book, every giant lord has a conch. The heroes will need to go steal a conch from a giant lord. I liked a lot of these areas, so in my version I changed things a little so I can use Svardborg, Ironslag and the Cloud Giant castle in my campaign.

10. Use the Conch: It takes the group to Maelstrom (page 201). There, the heroes hopefully expose Iymrith and get a clue to Hekaton's whereabouts.

11. King Hekaton: The group tracks down Hekaton and saves him!

12. Final Battle: The adventurers team up with Hekaton to take down Iymrith. As written, there's a bunch of NPC giants with the group. That seems a little unwieldy, so think about if you really want to take these NPCs along.

Most contemporary adventures published by Wizards of the Coast are more or less like this. Of course, people don't have to use them or play this way. But it's pretty clear that Wizards of the Coast wants you to purchase them and D'Anastasio seems to think they're pretty spiffy. (By the way, the idea that anyone would want to purchase someone else's pre-made adventure was looked on with astonishment by the early Gygax).

Control.

The group gets the artifacts and returns to the oracle.

Puppets.

The group tracks down Hekaton and saves him!

Open-ended.

On the way out, Iymrith attacks and Harshnag makes a heroic sacrifice.

The age of the player.

The adventurers team up with Hekaton to take down Iymrith.

Admittedly, the prisoners have a short exercise period:

[T]hen just let the group go where they want and when it feels like it is time, plop in Harshnag.

But even when the players are given a little bit of freedom, it's largely illusory, for the ever-watching and controlling DM is just biding his time before he "plops" someone in.

I mean, what the hell? Seriously, WHAT THE HELL!? This is what "age of the players" means? This is what players creating a story means?

Can I have my revolution back, please?

If there was a revolution, it must have been a fake one. It threw off the alleged evil tyranny of the DM (which never really existed anyway) and replaced it with the rule (in the form of writing your stories for you) of an uncredited collective of author bureaucrats, employed by a multi-million dollar corporation that wants to sell you "scenarios" for $49.95 a pop.

Or so it might seem.

How progressive. Yay, one final time.

When I say that the narrative of D'Anastasio and her friends is the reverse of the truth, I don't mean it's the precise reverse of the truth. Unlike them, I'm not a complete ideologue on the historical question (though I admit my pro-OSR rants may often make it appear so).

The early Gary Gygax was an explicit advocate of making D&D your game - with the "your" referring to both the players and the DM. But the later corporate Gary Gygax was a bit more mixed - "If you want to change the rules, you can, but in that case you just won't be playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons." And, as I understand it, when he ran his own campaign, Gygax was often as much of a Svengail figure as he was a referee, with all of that mysterious rummaging behind the file cabinets, and so on. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing, but opinions differ.

Gygax famously said that your "backstory" was what you did to get to 6th level (or some such). Now, I personally think that that's more of a pro-story approach than anti-story. Or, more accurately, it's simply a philosophy about how stories are or should be created: It's better to make them by playing, instead of by writing them before hand. I happen to agree with that. But if you think D&D is better now because there's a bit more of a focus on backstories, that's okay with me.

And some early TSR adventures or sets of adventures, did have their "railroad" elements. After all, you were sort of expected to go from G1 to G2 to G3 of those Giant Modules (though, I would argue that you still had much more freedom within the modules, and that "railroading" in general was not present to anywhere near the extent that it is now).

As snarky as even I can sometimes be about them, the current Wizards people are not all horrible corporate meanies. The Dungeon Master's Guild, while clearly a vehicle designed to help the brand, is not a bad idea (though, I don't much like the rule system - 5th edition - it is built around).

And, of course, the OSR owes a huge amount to Wizards for the OGL. The irony is that the OGL is often used by OSR people to design products that (as I would put it) circumvent the banality of current Wizards products.

By the way, before I forget, the claim that "Dungeon dimensions are less particular (now), to leave room for players’ whimsies" is just about the stupidest thing I've ever heard - as if caves in Storm King's Thunder contracted or expanded in response to the player-characters holding hands and singing.

Or maybe they do, I haven't read the 256-page thing.

Let me end on a serious note. Cecilia D'Anastasio knows nothing about D&D. Nor is she probably even a "fan" in any meaningful sense. Back in the day, she wouldn't have played the game because it wasn't cool. Now, because the "progressive" version of it - a version existing mostly in the imaginations of a small minority - is cool, or supposedly cool, she gets together occasionally with other like-minded people in that small minority (or whomever else she can cajole) to act out a story someone else has created for her.

Or maybe she just blogs about it.

That's freedom.

Well, it is for her. To D'Anastasio, freedom means imposing her silly ideology on others.

Also, she gets her kicks lying about Gary Gygax.

She does that because she strongly dislikes him and his legacy. I'm sure the fact that he was a white male who started out playing toy soldiers with other white males has nothing to do with it.

Nothing to do with it at all.

What an ignorant and biased person.

On Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthey: He took the tortilla from the Gorgon and ate it.

Yesterday, I was harshly critical of the movie The Road (2009), based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. I didn't mention McCarthy in the blog text, but he did come up in the blog comments. While good movies can be made from bad books, and bad movies can be made from good books, I think it's fair to say that McCarthy casts a long shadow over the movie, for better or worse. I think it's for worse.

Cormac McCarthy is not a very good writer.

It was the critic B.R. Myers who most famously called out McCarthy in "A Reader's Manifesto," a 2001 Atlantic Monthly article, which then became a book. Myers named McCarthy as one of five novelists including Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Paul Auster and David Guterson who represented the "growing pretentiousness in American literary prose." Or, as Myers would also put it, "some of the most acclaimed contemporary prose is the product of mediocre writers availing themselves of trendy stylistic gimmicks."

Myer's critical approach was not subtle or complicated. It was largely to simply take well-known passages from these authors and point out how bad or silly their writing was. The emperor had no clothes.

Here he is on a passage from McCarthy's The Crossing (1994):

He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her. 

...In McCarthy's sentence the unpunctuated flow of words bears no relation to the slow, methodical nature of what is being described. And why repeat tortilla? When Hemingway wrote "small birds blew in the wind and the wind turned their feathers" ("In Another Country," 1927), he was, as David Lodge points out in The Art of Fiction (1992), creating two sharp images in the simplest way he could. The repetition of wind, in subtly different senses, heightens the immediacy of the referent while echoing other reminders of Milan's windiness in the fall. McCarthy's second tortilla, in contrast, is there, like the syntax, to draw attention to the writer himself. For all the sentence tells us, it might as well be this: "He ate the last of the eggs. He wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate it. He drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth. He looked up and thanked her." Had McCarthy written that, the critics would have taken him to task for his "workmanlike" prose. But the first version is no more informative or pleasing to the ear than the second, which can at least be read aloud in a natural fashion. (McCarthy is famously averse to public readings.) All the original does is say, "I express myself differently from you, therefore I am a Writer."

And here is Myers discussing a well-known passage from All the Pretty Horses (1992):

As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy's life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a hangover is something special. 

[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they'd ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. 

It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But "wild animals" isn't epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses' perspective to the narrator's, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds. 

No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense. Although his characters sometimes rib one another, McCarthy is among the most humorless writers in American history.

In fact, Myers's thought McCarthy's bizarre "hangover" passage was so emblematic of his theme that the working title for "A Reader's Manifesto" was The Gorgon in the Pool.

Since the publication of Manifesto, the stars of the other four writers have arguably dimmed, as Myers predicted they would, but McCarthy's star has only grown brighter. These days, McCarthy dislike appears to be a minority opinion. But that opinion is nevertheless held strongly. If you want a few laughs, check out the Selections from One-Star Amazon Reviews of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Clips from the reviews for that violent book are arranged in poetic wave form:

The characters are not really sympathetic 

He is obviously a sick man psychologically. 

all about violence and no plot what so ever. 

if I was a trained geologist I might like it better. 

too many words that are not in standard dictionary 

I guess people think he is cool because he writes so violent. 

This one guy peed on some clay stuff to create a bomb like thing 

murder, slaughter, killing, massacre, beating, stabbing, shooting, scalping 

It consists of a series of almost unconnected scenes of unspeakable violence. 

Esoteric words, eccentric expressions, pedantic philosophizing, arcane symbolism 

I have to believe that he must be embarrassed to have this book back on the market. 

A bunch of guys ride around Mexico killing everyone they come across for no particular reason 

If you’re a fan of babies, quotation marks, and native americans, then avoid this book like the plague.

Now, I know all popular books have their share of one-star reviews. But still. In this case I think they are appropriate. One pro-McCarthy partisan actually had the chutzpa to write, "McCarthy’s use of language is razor-sharp and spare." Actually, I think that's true of those review clips.

I said, "McCarthy dislike," but what about McCarthy hate? In a piece written in 2007, "Cormac McCarthy: Owning My Hate," Levi Asher explains why he feels the way he does about the author's prose. And feels is the operative word here. Many anti-McCarthy people are so insecure about their unpopular view that they've stopped trying to argue for the objective truth of the matter - that McCarthy is a bad writer - but rather are content merely to try to explain their own subjective opinion.

Asher doesn't cherry-pick his bad McCarthy passages but rather chooses the opening sequence of The Road (2006):

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark 

...He watched the boy and he looked out through the tress toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day. The boy turned in his blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he said. 

I'm right here. 

I know.

There's another monster and his pool, again (this is me talking now, not Asher). I'd almost peg McCarthy as an OD&D fan.

I think the above passage is horrid, but to save words I won't explain why. I think the pretentiousness and silliness of it, complete with its humorlessness, faux ponderous tone and grammatical foibles practically croaks out its mediocrity, like a rude beast emoting in a cave. Anyway, Asher nailed it in his piece, which I highly recommend.

But I will quote one passage. Asher claims that he tried to read The Road and, thus, give McCarthy a fresh start. But

[t]he fresh start didn't pan out. The crimes against the English language committed in the first eight pages of this book are so deplorable that I could not reach the double digit page numbers at all. I also feel offended -- yes, offended -- by the mean, miserable view of humanity this book shoves in my face. But my dislike for this book seems to transcend any mental or aesthetic considerations, because as I suffered through these first few pages I felt my body physically rejecting this book like a badly transplanted organ. I would look down at my hands and discover that the book was closed. I'd open it, struggle through a few sentences more, and then look down and discover it closed again. Reading The Road felt like swimming in a pool of thick hard mud, and I tried and I tried but I could not get past page eight.

For the fun of it, I decided to rewrite the above passage in full Cormac McCarthy style:

The man wanted to begin anew but time flowed along as it does and there was no new beginning nor was there an end. The man was reading a book and he imagined that some criminal had bent over the first eight pages and vomited. I am offended and it is mean and it is a miserable view of humanity the man thought in the endarkening light though he could not look away. Above the grey smoke the hatred of the man hung like a grisping cloud while beneath it there were considerations that the man framed with words like mental or aesthetic and he suffered still and his body rejected the book like a badly transplanted organ. He would look down dimly at his coarsish hands and see that the book was closed. Then he would open the book again and close it again and open the book again and close it again until there was no light left to open and close it and he couldn't look down any more. He dreamed that he was swimming in a dark pool of thick hard mud and the pendulum at the heart of the world had stopped over page eight of that accoladed tome. But the mans hatred continued to burn like a glowing ember soundlessly imperched upon his ever beating heart.    

The boy came into the room and turned on the light. Hi, Papa, he said. 

What happened. 

I think you fell asleep on the couch while smoking do you know where the remote control is.

Now, I know you might be thinking how clever I must think I am. But the point is that I am not particularly clever. It's actually remarkably easy to write a McCarthy parody (even I can do it). But the thing is, unlike, say, a Hemingway parody, where the author's stylistics quirks are exaggerated or used to describe a non-Hemingwayish activity like decorating a Christmas tree or whatever, there is really very little difference between a Cormac McCarthy parody and, well, the real McCarthy.

He takes the worst parts of Hemingway, Faulkner and Brett Easton Ellis and combines them. The very worst parts. And he combines them in an unpleasant way.

Cormac McCarthy is not a very good writer.

And I mean that as an objective statement, not merely a description of my own subjective opinion.

You are, of course, free to have another opinion. As I said once on a different subject, though in a similar context, if you disagree with me on this, that doesn't make you a bad person. I hope we can laugh together over a beer sometime...at how wrong you were on the issue.

Crossposted at Mahound's Paradise.

On The Road

This apocalypse shouldn't have been televised

The multi-part review of Tunnels & Trolls will return. I still have a few final topics I want to discuss.

This blog is obviously focused on games and gaming, but occasionally I write about science fiction or fantasy in general. 

Last night, too tired to read or write, I watched the post-apocalyptic film The Road, for the first time.

I couldn't believe how how horrible it was.

The movie is cliched, pretentious, virtually plotless, disgusting, depressing, boring, silly and uninterested in any sort of realism or explanation whatsoever beyond the "stark realism" of, gee, isn't nuclear winter (or whatever it is) rough.

That's quite a profound insight.

There are no names in the movie. There is only Man, Boy, Woman, Old Man, Veteran, Motherly Woman and so on (we know this from the end titles). The post-apocalyptic wherever is so rough that people don't even have names.

Also, even though virtually everyone is dead and there's nothing but old stuff everywhere, there are no shoes nor ammunition to be found. The radiation got it, too, I guess.

Why did the man and his son wait so long (at least as long as the age of the boy - ten years, perhaps) to set out from interior wherever to coastal wherever? Or are they just really slow?

Since all vegetation appears to be dead, and there are no animals or even insects, how did the man and the boy survive for so long?

A few other people seem to have survived for that long through practicing cannibalism, but in order to eat live people, those live people would have had to survive long enough for other people to then eat them. How did they survive for that long? 

Why are the man and his son surprised when they get to the sea and it is not blue? Since everything is gray due to the perpetual cloud clover, what did they expect, Club Med?

Why, dying of starvation but having come across a hidden shelter filled with an almost limitless supply of food, do the man and his son flee after thinking they just might have heard a barking dog?

Now, I suppose some of these questions might have had answers, but the movie makes no attempt to provide them. Such questions and answers are unimportant, the movie makers seem to be saying.

Or, rather, the only answer to these and other questions is that things in this story do not really happen for reasons, nor do people think or behave rationally. Instead, things happen or people think and behave in ways solely calculated to advance the movie's tone. The tone is everything. I got the tone after thirty seconds. But the movie makers wanted to make sure I continued to get it for two hours. Good and hard.

Man and Boy survived for ten years because the movie would have been less compelling if it had been about Man and Infant.

Actually, I think it might have been more interesting and less cliched.

"I love you, son."

"Waaa!"  

The Road is also a deeply immoral movie. Yes, movies can be immoral when they convey immoral messages. Here are a few of them:

When calamities happen, it's a common, rational and even proper reaction for human beings to kill themselves. 

When trying to survive, the most important thing is knowing when to kill yourself. 

If someone you love - your wife, perhaps - wishes to kill herself, do not attempt to stop her. Let her walk away alone into the dark woods.  

When getting ready to make a final stand against bad guys, don't use your gun against them. Rather, point your pistol at your son's head. 

Don't ever try to save kidnapped people from being eaten by cannibals. Put the lock back on the door and run away. 

If you shoot a man (perhaps an innocent man), run away as his wife weeps over his burning corpse. 

If you're one of the last men on earth, don't be kind to strangers, under any circumstances, even if they're old defenseless men who look like Robert Duvall. 

And if you do have second thoughts about the propriety of, say, stripping a man naked in the freezing cold and taking all his belongings, make it up to him by leaving his clothes in a pile, miles away (where it's unclear if he will ever find them), topped with a small can of fruit. Do not include a can opener. 

If you love someone who has died - in this case, your wife - show that love by throwing your wedding ring and her picture into a river. 

And so on. 

Teach these things to your son.

Oh, I know, the movie isn't saying that people should behave this way. It's just showing you how two people - Man and Boy - did behave, because, you know, apocalypse.

Live is tough and then you shoot your son.

As an antidote to this awful film, read any Golden Age or even New Wave science fiction story about people trying to survive an apocalyptic event. True, the heroes of these stories are not always moral paragons (which, of course, in and of itself is fine), and the moral messages are often odd - consider, for example, the creepy pro-incest banter in Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold - but at least these are stories with interesting characters and plots, and the authors try to model actual behavior, or at least interesting behavior.

I recommend Fritz Leiber's short story, A Pail of Air.

Compared to The Road, Thomas Disch's hopeless The Genocides is a joyous walk in a beautiful park.

If you're flipping around on Netflix and encounter The Road, don't do it.

You want a bleak tail of people trying to survive a grueling trek through gray and rainy woods? Watch The Barkley Marathons.

Crossposted at Mahound's Paradise.