Orcs are the baddies and fantasy games need baddies

You know where you are with orcs. Slaveringly ugly, utterly evil and just the thing to test to edge of your human paladin's blade or the power of your elf sorcerer's fireball. If you're stuck for some monsters to pad out your dungeon slap in a few orcs, sprinkle on a goblin or two and have them ordered around by an ogre.

The original 1977 Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual has this to say about orcs:

"Being bullies, the stronger will always intimidate and dominate the weaker. Orcs dwell in places where sunlight is dim or non-existant, for they hate the light..."

It goes on...

"Orcs are cruel and hate living thing in general, but they particularly hate elves and will always attack them in preference to other creatures. They take slaves for work, food and entertainment (torture, etc.), but not elves whom they kill immediately."

Pretty clear, orcs are the baddies.

It seems, however, that these simple days are over as the plague of woke-ness spills into the world of fantasy role-playing games:

The publisher of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) says it will adjust the way it portrays some of its “evil” races, such as the “savage” orcs and the “depraved” dark elves, as part of a broader push against racism in the wake of George Floyd‘s death.

For a long while our world of fantasy gaming (and the wider world of fantasy literature) was largely immune to the 'everything is racist' tendency in the wider world. Occasional flares erupted when some English literature professor chasing a headline would say something like "Tolkien “created the blueprint for the troubling relationship between race and fantasy that would govern twentieth-century fantasies.” Now it seems we have to take the bizarre idea that orcs aren't essentially evil and lump it into our games, not because having a lawful good orc paladin is a cool idea, but because some people who don't play the game have decided that the orc is some sort of racist sterotype.

All this - outside infuences pushed onto the game - reminds me of the campaigns by Christian groups to get D&D banned because it normalised witchcaft and satanism. The assumption from the woke puritans (in taking up the battle from their Chrsitian puritan predecessors) is that the presence of 'races' with different characteristics somehow twists the minds of the people, especially young people obviously, playing the game. After three hours slashing, bashing and fireballing we come out worse people because we played a game with different 'races' - I toured a dungeon a week or so back with a man-sized turtle and what amounted to a tin man not sure what to make of that.

Later this week I'll be taking a half-orc paladin on a continuing quest to kill some drow (dark elves that live in a hierarchical society that happens to be a matriarchy) - quite how this sets me on the 'drow and orcs are a negative racial stereotype' continuum I'm not sure. What's clear to me from playing the game is that most players walk round the stereotypes because that makes the role play more engaging. For sure the orc tribe in the mountains are baddies but you might do better negotiating with them to stop the slave raids or the pillage rather than taking the old-fashioned route of extermination.

People outside the game seem not to appreciate its flexibility and the scope to play all the foibles of human psychology. If folk want a woke version - "orcx" as one wag on Twitter put it - there is nothing to stop you doing so right now. If what you want to do is make the game completely different because you (a political activist who doesn't play the game or a literature professor looking for career brownie points) dislike its central concept of 'races', then don't be upset if those of us who play the game - and have done so for over 40 years without turning into fascists - tell you politely to take a running jump.

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Blue Tick Tyranny - how modern government, media and administration is a rennaissance court.

A lot of people are bemused at how the brutal killing by police of a black man in a faraway US city has resulted in a worldwide outpouring of protest badged as 'black lives matter'. It's not that people are unsympathetic but rather that the protests seem to have taken on a life of their own, spreading beyond the spontaneous reaction to the killing to attacks on the police, the destruction of statues and the silencing of old comedy shows. Why, these people ask, did this happen? Most people aren't like that, they proclaim, ordinary and decent people will prevail won't they?

The problem is, and this is shown every single day, that ordinary and decent people aren't the ones in charge. For sure we all get a chance to vote once every few years and we elect a load of politicians who we hope reflect our feelings, views and opinions. We did this in December and elected the current government - I guess that, after further efforts to prevent it, the headline policy of leaving the EU will happen. But on everything else forget ordinary and decent people - social media will determine policy overwhelmingly through the dominant influencer that is Twitter.

But, I hear you say, Twitter isn't representative of people's views, most people don't use Twitter. And this is true, what passes for debate on Twitter doesn't reflect what ordinary and decent people think or say, but this doesn't matter because the people who who make the decisions, are on Twitter and do treat it as if it reflects what people think and say. Or rather the only people who matter - those blue-ticked people and institutions who dominate the medium.

It's telling that, when the supposed evils of social media (fake news, mobs and such like) are talked about by our policy-makers - all, of course, blue-ticked ones on Twitter - it is always Facebook that's in the crosshairs of regulators, Facebook that's encouraging the wrong sort of news, Facebook that targets advertising, and Facebook that is abusing privacy. Never Twitter.

There's a reason (blue-ticked celebrities aside): the ordinary and decent people who "don't think that" and aren't on Twitter, those folk are on Facebook. If you want to reach lots of people in that mass media way we used to use telly for, the best way is using Facebook. And the government, the media and those blue-ticked Twitter policy-makers hate it. Most of all they hate it because, unlike Twitter (which they love), Facebook is democratic, inclusive and makes it hard to crush your opponents through sheer weight of abuse. Facebook provides a place for community groups, for shared interests, for swapping, buying and selling. The great and good with their Twitter blue ticks cannot control this place so they disparage it, sideline it and return to the cesspool of Twitter.

As we've noted already you and me, ordinary and decent people, are not in charge. Even those we elect to hold those policy-makers to account aren't in charge. Those blue-ticked people and institutions (plus thousands who aspire to this exulted status) are in charge and they do not think like you and me. Or rather they are trapped in a world where you have to negotiate round the risks of being accused. Those doing the accusing will, of course, not be ordinary and decent people but other blue-ticked agenda-setters, each with their weaponised following - a sort of online snarling pack - ready to pile into the accused and bring them down. Usually the blue-ticked person then stands back benignly exclaiming shock or distress but "you know, people are angry".

The best way to understand what's happening is to see our political system as a rennaissance court rather than any kind of democracy. All those blue-ticked people are the courtiers and do what courtiers always did, cluster round the powerful barons hoping for advantage and preferment. The advantage comes in the form of jobs, appointments, selections and endorsements meaning that these people control the institutions that adminster the ever more complicated rules and regulations governing our society. And the game is not to have the institution (anything from the Royal Society of Arts through to a local council parks department or a little town museum) improve things for ordinary and decent people but rather for it to promote the interests of sponsoring baronries while not causing offence to other powerful groups or people.

This means that the people appointed to run (and therefore the outlook and ideology of those they set on to help them run) big institutions reflect the dominant ideology of other people within the court not the wider population. And this dominant ideology, if it merits such a grand description for a thing this cynical, is to avoid the risk of being pulled down by a media and social media mob. Therefore the leadership of institutions, at every level of society, falls back on safety first by, for example, endorsing the dominant 'woke' ideology around race and gender. Since falling foul of this idelogy will result in the institution (and the individuals running the institution) being socially excluded and damaged, many of the leaders promote and endorse ever more extreme versions of this "wokeness" so as to secure additional safety from the mob.

All this makes sense because leaders have the interests of the the institution (plus, of course, their own advancement) at heart. But it means that those who actively promote the ideology are given more power and influence than their numbers might otherwise merit. So, while it is true that Twitter doesn't represent the "real world", it does absolutely represent the court of people who actually run everything in our society and their fear of that mob - got up by their courtly competition - pulling them down by accusing them of sins against the prevailing ideology.

If you think of our political, media and bureaucratic system as that rennaissance court with Twitter as the vicious gossip between competing groups and factions then you'll understand that you and I don't run things, our voting makes little difference, and only by changing the prevailing ideology can you change the policies and priorities of the institutions that affect our lives.

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