Deathfest and Existentialism
I have just returned from my alma mater where I attended the latest iteration of “Deathfest.” There were, I was told, over 140 people in attendance all playing a single game of Dungeons and Dragons. The name “Deathfest” refers to the fact that of 140 odd characters, very few of them survive to the end of the game (last night only one). However prizes are also given out for myriad other acts of bravery, cowardice, brilliant decisions, and tremendous follies. This year’s festival also featured a beer garden with a delicious home-brewed stout and a corporate sponsor. One of Hampshire’s more venerable professors even attended with his wife. I am told they both died well. I am very proud of all the planners who have not only sustained this tradition, but taken it to heights that were unimaginable when I was an undergraduate.
This year I got to play a 250 year old religious studies scholar. I got to shout things like ‘I HAVE BECOME DEATH, DESTROYER OF WORLDS!” and “LET MY PEOPLE GO!” At one point, I even damaged an enemy, inflicting 3 points of damage. For my efforts, I was awarded a really spiffy hat and a sensation the next morning as if I had kitty litter in my throat. There is still an award known as the “Benjamin Scott-Hopkins Award for Creative Morality.” I was there in 1999 when Benjamin Scott-Hopkins aka “Funny Hat Ben” earned this award––however, the story had been lost and several organizers had begun to wonder what incredibly heinous act Ben must have committed. In January I ran into a current Deathfest organizer who asked me to retell the story. Deathfest has changed so much, I found that it took a great deal of context to explain what Ben had done and why it was so shocking. Thankfully, the story was retold last night with remarkable clarity.
The Benjamin Scott-Hopkins Award for Creative Morality has been described as “the douche-bag award” but this is not accurate. In fact, I recall one year in which a player won it for literally creating a set of morals––his character woke up in a priest’s habit and suffering from total amnesia, so he proceeded to arbitrarily write a divine law code during the course of the adventure and compiled a list of all of the character’s sins. In meditating on the case of Ben Scott-Hopkins, I realized that his act transformed Deathfest into what it is today––a collective act of existentialist myth production.
Let me back up.
Although the tradition of Deathfest goes back almost two decades, it had completely died out when I arrived at Hampshire College in the fall of 1998. In those days it was known as “The October Ravenloft Tournament.” Hamphire’s literature on student groups referenced the October Ravenloft Tournament and I was excited to play. But there was no tournament to be had. In those days, there were practically no gamers at Hampshire and no gamer culture. No G2. No middle-room. Excalibur––the ancient student club for gaming––existed in name only. They had not been given any funding and the lead signer was a rather depressed goth fellow. For that whole year Excalibur had only one function––they got together to watch the X-Files in Adelle Simmons Hall. It was a sad state of affairs.
I have a vague sense of what happened to the gamer culture before I arrived but it is mostly a guess––older Hampshire alum might be able to fill in the gaps. From what I could tell the previous crop had been a dark, angsty bunch. They wore a lot of black trench-coats and listened to the Sisters of Mercy. There was a copse of trees where the Eric Carlyle museum now stands where several of them had threatened to hang themselves. I heard one story from a non-gamer who tried to sneak into the gamer lounge to use their television: When she opened the door a knife flew her way and lodged itself in the door frame. When she began to complain, they cut her off:
“Of course someone is going to throw a knife at you if you come in here without knocking. What the hell were you thinking?”
The downfall of this group seems to have been a healthy dose of angst and paranoia. I also suspect that incest was a factor. Although the situation has improved exponentially, gamer populations have traditionally suffered from a lack of females. This disparity, coupled with teenage hormones often creates Camelot-like scenarios of betrayal. It’s one reason why I never dated other gamers.
So the other gamer-inclined first years and I put up with this for a whole year. Fall of 1999 brought in a fresh crop of gamers so we said, “Fuck it. We can do the October Ravenloft Tournament ourselves.” Now bear in mind, we had never seen the October Ravenloft Tournament and we didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. It seems silly in hindsight, but I was worried that the few remaining old-timers would show up and say, “You did this wrong. Now we’re all going to throw knives at you.”
We also had some serious inertia to overcome. For one, we had to get Excalibur’s funding restored. We also had to reserve classrooms to run the games in, purchase refreshments, put up posters on five different college campuses, and of course, design the tournament and create characters. While I was doing all of this I had this peanut gallery of older students––not gamers mind you––telling me that I had already fucked up. “They used to put up posters in September—not October. You’re not going to get any people.” (These were the same people who informed me that Hampshire Halloween sucked, and that only a first year who had never seen a proper Halloween would find the present adequate. They advised me not to have a good time, lest I display my ignorance and embarrass myself.)
I also remember one year some students who were not participating in Deathfest showed up, began collecting door-wedges from Franklin Patterson Hall, and tried to jam classroom doors closed trapping players inside. I confronted these people and made them leave. Security had specifically told me, “no running amok” but I really did want to beat the hell out of them. I cannot imagine something like that happening at Deathfest today. Inertia.
We knew we had to construct a three to four hour experience out of three words: October. Ravenloft. Tournament.
OCTOBER
Well, we were pretty sure we got that one right.
RAVENLOFT
“Ravenloft” is a Dungeons and Dragons campaign setting emphasizing “Gothic horror:” vampires, werewolves, gypsy curses, that sort of thing. So we assumed this had be horrific and macabre. That was fine, all of the DMs we lined up were good at that. We used the archetypal Ravenloft plot: A powerful vampire had awoken and unleashed an army of the undead that nearly destroyed a small village. One group was a party of slayers that had been tracking the vampire for some time and managed to infiltrate his castle. (This was Ben Scott-Hopkin’s group.) Another group had set out from the village to launch a direct assault. My group was a lynch mob: they had discovered that certain villagers had aided the vampire’s plans and were out for revenge. Curses are common in Ravenloft, and it turned out that everyone who had betrayed their village now had palms that were permanently wet with blood––making the lynch mob’s job pretty easy. The survivors of the three groups convened at the end for a final battle with the vampire. (Somewhere there is an audio-recording of one of these groups that was being used for a Div III project on psychology and role-playing.)
The last thing we wanted this to be was silly. We had appropriated a tradition from a bunch of angsty goths without permission and we were going to make this scary and fucking brutal. For example, one of the villagers targeted by my players was the town butcher. The butcher had created zombies using whatever was lying around his shop—so the party had to fight the animated corpses of their friends and loved ones mounted which were now mounted with hog heads.
OK so here’s where it gets interesting––if you have never attended Deathfest, you might think this would make for a gruesome encounter. You might even think I’m a sick person for coming up with it. But if you HAVE attended Deathfest, the last paragraph probably bored you. It’s a little like watching The Exorcist. In 1972 every theater that showed that film experienced people vomiting and fainting. But if you were born after 1980, you may not find it scary at all.
I also included an encounter where the party met an old widow with bloody palms. She explained that she had given the vampire information under the condition that her grandchildren be allowed to escape. She begged mercy. There were no consequences to this encounter––it didn’t matter whether the players decided to slaughter the helpless old lady or not. It was simply meant to add some anguish to their mission. (Again, if you have ever attended Deathfest, you know exactly what the party decided to do.)
When we designed characters, we did give out a lot of seemingly useless items. Most of my characters were armed with pitchforks and torches. There was also a character with a hook for a hand and another who wielded a sack full of doorknobs (This was a Simpson’s reference.) Many characters had seemingly random equipment like bags of marbles, flasks of lamp oil, kegs of beer, and so on. We didn’t really see this as silly, we saw it as being sadistic. The worse thing we did in that game was give someone a “potion of placebo.” He finally drank it and asked his DM what happened. Instead of saying, “Nothing,” he said, “You’re not sure. But you definitely have a cooling sensation in your throat. Maybe it will kick in next round.” This was really only funny to us, not the players. However, the bizarre character/bizarre equipment motif is now standard. Last night may have been the first Deathfest ever in which there was not a single conventional weapon: I saw phasers, mutation rays, human tesla coils, a Klingon batliff, etc. But not a single long sword or battle-axe. I predict a future Deathfest will have an entire group equipped only with a roll of duct-tape. It’s the only logical conclusion of this trend.
TOURNAMENT
OK, this was key. “Tournament” connotes competition, sport. When I was about thirteen I went to a gaming tournament at Texas A&M. (Military guys love Dungeons and Dragons.) The tournament meant different teams had the same characters and were going through the same adventure––if your team made it through the adventure in the quickest time you won a cash prize. There, if you screwed around and caused your team to lose, you might actually get beat up. I sort of assumed anything with the word “tournament” in it must work the same way. It was Ben Scott Hopkins who saved us from this thinking.
Here is the story to best of my recollection, but bear in mind I wasn’t actually there: I was one door down pretending to be an old widow begging for her life. Ben Scott-Hopkins was the party’s only priest and as such could both repel the undead and heal injured party members. These abilities were absolutely essential for the party’s success. However, Ben soon made it clear he had no intention of healing anyone. Round after round, when asked what his character was doing, Ben would declare, “I get drunk!” Eventually, Ben opened a door in the vampire’s castle.
The DM intoned: “On the otherside of the door is some sort of zombie. It stands over six feet tall and must have been a powerful man in life. It’s right hand has been modified and fitted with wicked scythe-like claws. Worst of all, is the flicker in the creature’s dead eyes that suggests both intelligence and an unspeakable malice.”
Ben responded: “Oh NO! I grab the nearest party member and shove him towards the monster!”
Dice were rolled and the party’s priest managed to save his own skin by overpowering a fellow adventurer and shoving him in with the zombie. But Ben wasn’t done. In addition to significant quantities of alcohol, he had also managed to acquire a hammer and some stakes––which he used to wedge the door closed sealing both zombie and victim inside. Once this was done, Ben turned to his astonished party, wiped his brow, and declared:
“Whew! That was close!”
There were only two prizes for the October Ravenloft Tournament. One was basically a Barbie head on a stick with pieces of duct-tape hanging off of it. I think that went to the survivor. The other was some generic plastic action figure which was sort of the precursor to “The Total Bad-Ass Award.” However, Erin Snyder decided to create the Benjamin Scott-Hopkins Award for Creative Morality. I can’t remember if there was an actual prize that year, but there definitely was the following year. That was the last October Ravenloft Tournament at Hampshire. The next Fall, Erin Snyder had the idea to call it “Deathfest.”
DEATHFEST
Now when we scheduled the first Deathfest in the fall of 2000, public safety called Erin Snyder and left a message on his answering machine, “Hi. I need to speak to you about. . . . Death. . . Fest? Call me back.” Incidentally, much of the first Deathfest was recorded as part of a Div II film called “Stairway to Hell.” Someone really needs to find that thing and digitize it.
All of the players had been summoned to a mad wizard’s castle in Hell. The legacy of Ben Scott-Hopkins was immediately evident. One of my player’s first actions was to begin making out with a statue. He proceeded to make out with that statue for next 30 minutes before trying to catch up with the party and getting devoured by trolls. Backstabbing other players was now the norm. In fact, the player who had been Scott-Hopkin’s victim the previous year now attempted to perform this maneuver on another player in my game. When my players met the boss of my game––an ogre mage––half of them prostrated themselves before it and begged to be its evil servants. The crescendo of this occurred in the second tier when the surviving players squared off against a demon played by Dan Neff. A mage tried to form an alliance with the demon, so the demon ordered him to slaughter other humans. That player used his last offensive spell to kill another player––that spell would have been enough to slay the demon.
So one year after Ben Scott-Hopkin’s threw his comrade in the closet to play seven-minutes in heaven with a ravenous zombie, Deathfest had been emptied of right and wrong, good and evil, winning and losing. The existentialist philosophy is that God is dead and that the universe is both meaningless and absurd. Deathfest ––particularly in its current form––is perhaps the starkest depiction of a reality that is meaningless and absurd. Not only is most of the plot incomprehensible to players and DMs alike, but it is essentially guaranteed that your character will suffer some grisly and meaningless death. Now if everyone can agree that Deathfest occurs in a moral universe where the players are heroes battling against evil, then the existentialist crisis can be averted. Yes, you will probably die but maybe your death can prevent the vampire from destroying another village. That’s what heroes do. Ben Scott-Hopkins was the voice calling out, “God is Dead!” that ushered in the existentialist crisis. This was not a battle between and good and evil, it was simply a battle. And the poor bastards conscripted to fight that battle may as well act however the wish.
For Existentialists like Sartre, the only meaning in the world is the meaning that we give it. Perhaps the real winner of Deathfest is the one who makes out with the most statues? This year’s Deathfest was especially existentialist because the winner received the ability to remake the world in their own image––literally, the world has no meaning except what the winner of Deathfest gives it. Interestingly, when the winner declared that in his world everyone else is dead, he received a standing ovation from the audience. I could not help but think of the scene in Heathers where the entire school has unknowingly signed a mass suicide note.
Now if you’ve somehow found your way to this blog, you probably think that Deathfest is a dark and fucked up event. You might even think that Hampshire is a dark and fucked up place. That’s what’s so ironic––the people who play Deathfest are nice people. The current organizers seem far more cheerful and pro-social than my cohort was, and my cohort was more cheerful and pro-social than the knife-chuckers that proceeded us. So what is the appeal of Deathfest? What were those 140 people there for? I have also noticed Deathfest taking on an increasingly dream-like aspect. For many years almost all antagonists came from the D&D Monster Manual. By contrast, players at this Deathfest battled against Transformers, A Giant Kool-Aid Man, Chuck Norris, and the boss––a giant mutated cat brain. A player hit the cat brain with a mutation beam, changing it into a giant dog brain. I realized that there was still a sort of logic to Deathfest, but it no longer the mathematical logic on which Dungeons and Dragons was based. No, this resembles the logic of myths and dreams or what anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss called “the savage mind.” This is what leads me to my theory of Deathfest’s appeal.
Levi-Strauss believed that myths expressed ideas that could not be expressed through words. Perhaps Deathfest gains popularity every year because it reflects the increasingly absurdity of the world outside of the game. We all toil away hoping for careers and success while the global economy crumbles all around us. It’s as absurd as. . . well it’s absurd as being murdered by a giant Kool-Aid Man. Deathfest imitates life and life imitates deathfest.
The Whedonverse Part II: Amazons to Echo
Joss Whedon has presented himself as a feminist and his characters are quite popular with women. I once heard a woman opine, “Buffy is totally female power.” I don’t know what “female power” means. I also don’t know what Joss Whedon means when he calls himself a feminist. What I do know is that I am highly suspicious of other men who claim the title of feminist. I think it is very odd that “female power” could be located within a long train of beautiful female warriors all of whom were invented and promoted by men.
I think I speak for most men of my generation when I confess that I find feminism a little bit frightening. In middle school I heard Rush Limbaugh declare that feminists were ruining the economy by getting jobs and devaluing labor. I knew immediately that this was insane: That it wasn’t true and that even if it was, it didn’t matter because working is a human right. What is frightening to men about feminism is the endless clashes between second-wave feminists, third wave feminists, and post-feminists: Camille Paglia compared Gloria Steinem to Joseph Stalin. Molly Ivans simply called Paglia, “an asshole.” As men, all we can do is throw up our hands and apologize for whatever it is that we did or neglected to do. I had a friend in high school who was taught to open doors for women. So, at age seven he opened the door for a woman at the mall. She slapped him and called him an oppressor. I think he cried. Feminism can be some scary shit.
I claim for myself the negative title of “not sexist” but I am sure some feminists would dispute this––particularly my views on the sex trade (see previous blogs.) Furthermore, most wife beaters and rapists also think of themselves as “not sexist.” This brings me to men who describe themselves as “feminist.” Most men I have met who declare themselves as “feminists” seem to be blissfully ignorant of the debate over what this term means. I strongly suspect that when men claim this title, they assume that this will make them more appealing to women. However, I have also noticed that these male feminists seem to have a preoccupation with beautiful warrior women portrayed by Angelina Jolie, Mila Jovovich, and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I think there is an idea among men of the sci-fi/geek persuasion that if you can somehow look past Buffy’s kick-boxing skills and medieval weaponry to her blonde hair and nubile body––that this makes you a feminist. That’s fucked up.
THE WARRIOR BABE TRADITION
Buffy is clearly indebted to a tradition of female super-heroes, and is referred to as a “super-hero” on the show. Wonder Woman, created in 1941, is the matriarch from which all female super-heroes are descended. Wonder Woman is an amazon, which dates the warrior babe tradition back the ancient Greece. (In Buffy, Willow and Tara refer to themselves as Amazons.) Now there may have once been a culture––or more likely a military unit––on which the legend of the Amazons is based. But this is irrelevant. What matters is that the Greeks embraced this legend whole-heartedly. Achilles, Hercules, and Belleraphon all killed their share of Amazons. Greek art has numerous depictions of Amazonmachies––or battles against the Amazons. Notice in this picture how the Amazon’s mini-skirt highlights her pelvis gyrating against her steed.
Why were the Greeks so interested in Amazons? No one can be certain, but it should be remembered that Ancient Greece was one of the most misogynistic cultures in the world. Robert Meagher has suggested that the legend of the Amazons was not meant to empower women but to buttress a culture of misogyny. (One mural depicts Greek warriors dragging captured Amazons by their hair.) The defeat of Amazons seems strangely related to the suggestions of rape that appear throughout Buffy.
Now let’s look at Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was created by William Moulton Marston, a psychologist at Tufts. Marston believed in the educational power of comic books and described Wonder Woman as “psychological propaganda” promoting the new type of empowered woman–that Marston thought ought to rule the world. So Wonder Woman was, in a very literal way, a man’s prescription for how women ought to be. Can that be feminist? I’ll return to this question later.
The comic has been credited with bringing bondage into American popular culture. Wonder Woman, originally called Suprema, was clearly the product of Marston’s masochistic––arguably Oedipal––fantasies. Wonder Woman was a sort of maternal dominatrix causing the world to submit to world peace under the yoke of her golden lasso. Marston is quoted: “The only hope for peace is to teach people who are full of pep and unbound force to enjoy being bound … Only when the control of self by others is more pleasant than the unbound assertion of self in human relationships can we hope for a stable, peaceful human society. … Giving to others, being controlled by them, submitting to other people cannot possibly be enjoyable without a strong erotic element.” And elsewhere “Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to, and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!” Although the themes of bondage and domination have been toned down in Wonder Woman, I think male fans of the warrior babe tradition still harbor Marston’s fantasy of a dominatrix world order. What they call “feminism” seems to include an idealized concept of women as wiser and more moral than men. It also very telling that the Whedonverse is rife with bondage. The pilot of Dollhouse showed us glimpse of a naked Eliza Dushku lashing a man to bed. A detective mentions that the Dollhouse can produce, among other things, the perfect dominatrix. Why were these details included? What is the connection to Wonder Woman?
This brings us to the modern era of bad-ass beautiful women. I am thinking here specifically of Angelina Jolie in films like Tomb Raider and Mr. And Mrs. Smith and Mila Jovovich in The Fifth Element, Resident Evil, and Ultraviolet. It is odd that so many of these films are based on video games. This also seems to suggest that these warrior babes are being marketed to the geek feminist males. What is interesting about this new crop of warrior babes is that, unlike Amazons, they need the support of men. The traditional strengths of men and women have essentially been reversed: the women are the superior fighters and the men heal their wounds, encourage them when they’re down, and check their hubris. This dynamic is particularly strong in The Fifth Element where Bruce Willis is physically weaker but more mature emotionally than the film’s heroine. The modern warrior babes are strong and weak at the same time.
This brings me to Dollhouse, which seems to be the ultimate manifestation of the dependent warrior babe. The show is structured so that in each episode the heroine is given incredible skills and powers. (These powers are bestowed by a male technician, at the request of men.) Then, at the end of the episode, she is once again reduced to a helpless, mindless commodity. Dollhouse will either become the starkest expression of the warrior babe myth as something created by and for men––or it will evolve into a brilliant critique of this dynamic. In a final installment, I will attempt to look at how women have appropriated these warrior babes and try to figure out what it means for Buffy to personify “female power.”
