Weird Studies - Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions

Episode 6: Dungeons & Dragons, or the Reality of Illusions

Explicit content warning

03/21/18 • 78 min

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Weird Studies

The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga was one of the first thinkers to define games as exercises in world-making. Every game, he wrote, occurs within a magic circle where the rules of ordinary life are suspended and new laws come into play. No game illustrates this better than Gary Gygax's tabletop RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, Phil and JF use D&D as the focus of a conversation about the weird interdependence of reality and fantasy.

Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons)

WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

Official homepage of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game

Critical Role web series
Another RPG podcast JF failed to mention: The HowWeRoll Podcast

Demetrious Johnson’s Twitch site

Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine (documentary)
Chessboxing!
Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America
Peter Fischli, The Way Things Go
Jon Cogburn and Mark Silcox, Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Raiding the Temple of Wisdom
Lawrence Schick, ed., Deities & Demigods: Cyclopedia of Gods and Heroes from Myth and Legend
Article on Mazes and Monsters, a movie that came out of the D&D moral panic of the 1980s
Phil Ford, “Xenorationality”
Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element of Culture
John Sinclair, [Guitar Army: Rock and Revolution with the MC5 and the White Panther Party](https://www.amazon.com/Guitar-Army-Revolution-White-Panther/dp/1934170003)

Header image: Gaetan Bahl (Wikimedia Commons)

WORKS CITED OR DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

Official homepage of the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game

Critical Role web series
Another RPG podcast JF failed to mention: The HowWeRoll Podcast

Demetrious Johnson’s Twitch site

Previous Episode

Episode 5: Reading Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool"

Phil and JF discuss Lisa Ruddick's "When Nothing is Cool," an essay on the postmodern humanities and its allergy to essences -- especially that personal essence we call soul. Maybe the soul is a heap of miscellaneous notions and influences that I paint a face onto and then call "me." Or maybe there is something under that painted effigy of the self. If so, what? And if there's nothing under there, could it be a nothing that delivers?

WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE

Lisa Ruddick, "When Nothing is Cool"

Elizabeth Gilbert, "Your Elusive Creative Genius"

Judith Halberstam, "Skinflick: Posthuman Gender in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs"

Daniel Chua (the musicologist whose name Phil couldn't remember)

Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Mary Harron, American Psycho (film)

David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return

Next Episode

Episode 7: The Unspeakable Mystery at the Heart of Boxing

For as long as they've been pounding the crap out of each other for good reasons, humans have also been pounding the crap out of each other for fun. Everywhere, in ever age, elaborate systems, rituals, and traditions have arisen to ring in the practice of violence and thereby offer the rough beast that lurks in every soul a chance to come out for a stretch in the sun. In this episode, Phil and JF delve into one of the most scandalous affairs of all: the illicit dalliance of Aphrodite and Ares, beauty and violence.

WORKS & IDEAS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon
James Hillman, A Terrible Love of War
Homer, The Odyssey
Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing
La fosse aux tigres (documentary directed by Jason Brennan and JF Martel; Nish Media)
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Richard Strauss's opera Salome
Gur Hirshberg, "Burke, Kant, and the Sublime"
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense