Did UK gaming grow differently from the wargaming roots in some particular fashion?
When I listen to the Grognard Files podcast and IRTD I hear more about “ammy drammy” and theatre than I do from most US gamers from that era. I wonder if those drama influences have been synthesized into the hobby in a different way or if that influence had a broader effect earlier.
I was thinking of UK stories rather than games specifically. (I’ve also recently been reading
prompted by Dave Morris – I disagree with many of the author’s opinions and conclusions but it’s still an interesting piece.)
As far as the gaming ethos goes, well, as I said in the episode I think we have a lower proportion of ex-military people. And at least for the wave I joined in, early-teens schoolkids in the early 1980s, the Serious Wargamers who formed the baseline of US RPGers wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with us anyway. So there was D&D, but also there was Call of Cthulhu, and I think that kicked off a taste for non-power-fantasy games that only got reinforced by Warhammer FRP.
I think US comic books are part of it as well.
TSR’s Marvel Superheroes game was my first purchase and serious engagement with the hobby after the classic D&D Holmes red box experience.
A lot of the folks moving into the hobby with me came in as kids whose parents introduced Tolkien but who found comic books on their own.
Particularly the GI Joe comic book that was advertised on television then, come to think of it. The power fantasy has constructive interference throughout all that media.
Call of Cthulhu didn’t come into view until college. It was a joy to run into but White Wolf was also selling big by then.
Disclaimer: my experience is from Arkansas and the satanic panic around D&D was still affecting parents I knew into the mid 1990’s so gaming as a subculture was buried in other subcultures and rarely front and center.
I joined the very tail of the first wave, as a freshthing student in 1979, at a university where the Chess & Wargames society mostly played heavily houseruled OD&D. We had wargamers, but they weren’t uptight about it, and mostly played fairly simple, down-to earth rules systems.
Our influences were those wargames, early D&D rules, and a lot of SF&F books. The Goon Show revival of the mid-seventies had had an effect, too. Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor, with relic high-tech lying around, was at least as much an influence as Greyhawk. We were being post-modern about RPGs, although as a bunch of engineering or science students, we’d never heard the term.
A later generation in the same club in the 1990s decided to be fantasy purists, with no sillyness, or high-tech. We congratulated them on their youthful rebellion, and they wanted to be cross about that, but it would have underlined the point.
I have my doubts about that author’s factual claims, too. For example, “pagan Britain” did not by any means “survive the march of Christianity far longer than the rest of Europe“. On the contrary, Christian Britain sent missionaries to convert the Franks and Germans. Ss. Walburga and Alcuin, for examples, went from Britain to the mainland, not vice versa. And Paul Bunyan is fakelore, made up for a series of advertisements. John Henry was not born a slave, but in New Jersey (a free state) in 1848.
My (UK) based group has one ex-serviceman - but he’s an American ex-serviceman…
True, but it does seem to fit the Western gunslinger myth you referred to.
There’s a Web site (People Sleep Peacefully in Their Beds at Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready to Do Violence on Their Behalf – Quote Investigator®) that attributes the disputed sentence to a critic named Richard Grenier, who offered it as a paraphrase of Orwell’s views.
I’ve also seen it attributed to Edmund Burke, but I can’t find any online evidence for that.
The action hero/gunslinger with blood on his hands, who is necessary but no longer fits into the society he has protected/created… isn’t that a part of many Ancient Greek ‘heroes on a quest’ stories?
This comes from vague memories, because I did science not classics.
Scouts uniforms: I think you know they don’t have one… right?
There are a variety of myths here.
The myth of the Frontier in US culture, which emerged only when the frontier had closed.
The myth of the British underdog, when the Empire was built on overwhelming economic, logistical and military strength. However this may have its roots in a time when we were plucky pirates up against the Spanish Empire.
I think this is Anglo cultural pomposity. Read Russian fairy tales or the expurgated or unexpurgated Grimm. Or the French chivalric tales. Or just settle down with all the Icelandic sagas.
However… much American stories are products of times of great religious fervour in the US, a deeply religious country most of the time, and as Gore Vidal has suggested, almost custom primed for syncretic Gnosticism… how do u like angels and Santa with your Christianity, Sir?
Peter Morwood described the ethos as “The first son goes out on the quest, fails, and dies. Then the second son goes out on the quest, fails, and dies. Then the third son goes out on the quest, fails, and dies. The end.”
The essay? Or my response to it?
Ah, you’ve read The Brothers Karamazov!
The essay. Not you dear chap, scone anyone?
But then the fourth daughter wins through
What happened to the first three daughters? Did they just stay home, or get married off?
Oh no, they failed too
The eldest daughter married a lord, the second a rich merchant, and the third a farmer.
A little higher up than thrall, karl, and jarl . . .