Traversing Fantasy: Fucking Dungeons

The “World’s Greatest Role-Playing Game” is the model for a nondeterministic indefinite game because of its open interface and its ability to allow players to pursuit their desire endlessly. As described before, Dungeons & Dragons is also a model for a certain structure of erotic desire by this very same virtue. In a 2002 forum post, Gary Gygax said of Dungeons & Dragons that “because of a [biological] difference in brain function [… women] do not achieve the same satisfaction from playing.” On the other hand, he noted, women are more attracted to “LARPing, which is more csocialization [sic] and theatrics and [than?] gaming.”

Although his post was indeed an assertion of biologically-justified sexism against women, Gygax is correct to see a masculine structure of desire inherent to Dungeons & Dragons. The player qua subject desires and pursues object after object, and the game enables the player’s fantasy by ensuring that there is always another dungeon to raid and pillage. Likewise, the masculine fantasy ensures that in the subject’s imagination there is always another woman to fuck.

Another fantasy accompanies Gygax in his endless pursuit of dungeons to fuck: the petit bourgeois fantasy of taming the wilderness, of Law versus Chaos, of economic self-sustenance. All these terms except the last are indicative of any assembly of people with a common pursuit. Ancient Egypt constituted itself as Horus : Set :: Culture : Nature, Horus : Set :: Law : Chaos, and Horus : Set :: Egypt : Asia. Even non-stratified systems make use of Culture versus Nature to justify the gendered division of labor and the exploitation of wives and daughters under the father.

The fantasy of economic self-sustenance however is indicative of the development of capitalism both locally and globally. The European settlement of the Americas was motivated by the avoidance of economic ‘unfreedom’ and proletarianization in Europe. Indeed colonization was construed as a return to a better life, relying partly upon indentured servitude (less fortunate Europeans who could not afford passage overseas but still aspired to the same as their betters) but relying above all else upon massive cartel slavery. This same drive for economic self-sustenance, to own the land and property you work, motivated westward expansion across North America while displacing American Indian peoples. This aspiration was reflected in western cowboy media in the twentieth century, and projected onto sword-and-sorcery adventurers like Conan or John Carter who pillaged and fucked.

Dungeons & Dragons has long been understood as a settler-colonialist fantasy whereby some poor adventurer can create a better life by ravaging the wild and accumulating wealth by their own efforts—or die trying. There have been countless attempts to sanitize the fantasy by making peace instead of war, inventing sufficiently inhuman enemies to slay, avoiding unjust violence (says who?), and so on. These are all concessions necessary for the player to continue to desire without condemning themselves of racism and colonialist aspirations; indeed they make the fantasy itself more palatable by absolving the player. Yet the player cannot be rid of Dungeons & Dragons’ base fantasy because the goals for the player are adventurism and aggrandization.