CAR-PGa: For All Your Role-Playing Advocacy Needs
Posted January 1st, 2008 by Howard TaylerI’ll lead this with a link: At long last, the CAR-PGa now has a public website, so if you find yourself needing to defend tabletop RPGs, you have a good starting point, and the knowledge that there is a group of people out there who want to help you.
And now, the full story: a while back I went looking for materials that promoted traditional pencil-and-paper Role-Playing Games. After quite a bit of digging I came up with only a small handful of sites. I publicized my quest, and received email from a few people in both camps — some insisting that Dungeons & Dragons and all games like it were evil, and others anxious to point out the benefits of those games, especially for kids in junior high and high school.
I also got email from M. Alan Thomas II, a regional director of the Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games (CAR-PGa). This organization had been around since the ’80s, but though they’d discussed it for years, they did not yet have a public website.
Mr. Thomas credits me as the impetus for finally getting the site off the ground. And so today you can find version 1.0 of the CAR-PGa website at www.CAR-PGa.org (though you’ve certainly already figured that out, what with all the linkage thus far in this post.)
If you play table-top RPGs, and you have a website or blog, you, too, should link to the CAR-PGa.
Why? Because when concerned citizens, parents, teachers, and others go searching for information on table-top RPGs, they need to be able to find something besides Jack Chick tracts and articles on Rocket Propelled Grenades.
The best kind of link is something that not only names the organization, but also says something about what it does. Like this: CAR-PGa: In Defense of Role-Playing Games.
You’ll see that link go live on my archive pages here in the next couple of days. I’m putting my money where my (big) mouth is.
If you’re really interested in advancing the cause, you could join the CAR-PGa and contribute to the materials on their site. This is especially true if you don’t think their offering is complete. The best kind of constructive criticism is the kind that is actually accompanied by materials and tools for further construction.
For the record: I play table-top role-playing games at least weekly, and usually five or six times per month. I’ve played with my kids, and will certainly continue to do so. In fact, I’ve got plans to launch a new campaign with them during 2008, and many of the figures I’ve been painting recently are geared towards just that. Most of you know me (from my blog entries, at any rate) as a devoted family man with an active imagination, and table-top RPGs fit that perfectly.
Explore posts in the same categories: Games, Public Service
January 1st, 2008 at 11:11 am
I grew up in the 80’s, when all of the hysteria about RPG’s was hitting the hardest. I remember when one of the local newspapers ran a lengthy article on how the police were being briefed by Patricia Pulling about the dangers of “dabblers,” people who casually played role-playing games and were pulled into The Satanic Underground by this insidious threat.
My older brothers were sucked into this, just like the majority of American culture at the time. They warned my parents that there was “hidden danger” in role-playing games, and they were concerned about where I’d end up. (Being 10 and 12 years older than me, they always have and continue to think I’m the naive little brother.)
My parents’ response to all of this was to buy me the games, read through the manuals themselves, and play the occasional game with me to see what it entailed. I played red box D&D with my parents for a little while before going back to playing with my 6th grade friends.
I’ve read a lot about the various cases. Having grown up in Michigan, the “steam tunnel incident” with James Egbert was firmly in mind the entire time I was gaming. This was a guy that was alleged to have killed himself at the university my father attended. When the movie, “Mazes & Monsters” came out, it reinforced a lot of the same prejudices.
Through it all, my parents stoutly defended my hobby, since they knew what went on with it, and they knew that I was capable of being left alone with it without danger. (And being that the religious conservatism of my hometown had also branded me a Satanist in the process, they also defended me from those slings and arrows as well. They knew I wasn’t a Satanist, they knew that D&D was posing no harm to me, and that’s where it ended.)
And in the end, I think more initiatives like this need to be publicized. Mike Stackpole’s “Pulling Report” was always a great place to start, but this site sounds like it’s another good step in that direction.
In this day and age, it’s not needed the same way it was in the 80’s. People are no longer performing witch-hunts the same way. But there are enough people who’ve vaguely heard of D&D and the like, who are only aware of the negative hype, and something like this would be a great resource to inform the casual.
Those who already hate the concept of RPG’s have already made up their minds. It’s the casual people who need this resource.
January 1st, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Interestingly, in one of my groups, the pastors son never had any problems, but his friend had to hide it from non-religous parents. I haven’t heard any hype lately, I wonder if its more common other places. Hmm… not watching network news probably shields me from it. But it seems like video games get more of this treatment these days.
January 1st, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Question from across the pond: What attacks? The only negative vibes I experienced or even heard about here in Europe were that table-top-RPGs are a somewhate nerdy way to spend your time (that goes doubly so for LARPing), and it doesn’t generelly get you laid. Sure, if RPGing was the hip and cool thing to do, that would be nice, but it hardly classifies as an attack in my book. Am I being oblivous? Am I missing something?
January 1st, 2008 at 2:10 pm
The 1980’s were so long ago, I know in Australia in the last 15 years that no-ones attacked or blamed anything on RPG’s except the low level murmur that games may not be a good influence, probably what remains of the 1980’s attacks on RPGs.
CAR-PGa is an interesting organization, but already their essay on defending RPGs sounds outdated, heavily explaining and defending something already that is well known and accepted in society today, the only stigma as, adhominem said, it is considered a bit nerdy but otherwise harmless.
January 1st, 2008 at 5:43 pm
I know that some parents put restrictions on their kids, that they can’t be evil characters until they reach a certain age, etcetera.
Do you, Howard? What do you think about it?
January 1st, 2008 at 6:47 pm
adhominem:
Where I grew up, it was tantamount to saying that you were an occultist and were out to destroy organized religion. D&D (largely since it was, and continues to be, the largest example of the hobby) was painted as being a recruiting tool for a Vast Satanic Underground.
Police departments were advised on the dangers, school counselors were told that it greatly increased suicide risks for teens involved in gaming, and people like Jack Chick used it as fodder for religious tracts. There was nothing positive to link to Role-playing Games, and that made it weirdly evil in a lot of people’s minds.
These days, it’s worn down to being just harmless and nerdy, much like your experience of it. There are still people who, in their very righteous way, condemn it as evil, but they’re more of a minority. In this day and age, there’s a lot more distrust of books like Harry Potter… (And I currently live about 15 minutes from a place where they burned the HP books…)
Once, I even had a guy nearly assault me when I was reading an RPG book, since he “knew” that it was evil. Weirdly, it was a game that prominently featured a Catholic Priest on the cover.
January 1st, 2008 at 7:44 pm
While the problem of RPG persecution is quite a bit smaller than it used to be, it’s still a problem, especially in some places. Worse, since most of us who play have never encountered anyone who advocates wholesale censorship of all things RPG, when we do run across that occasional well-meaning nutjob, we’ve got no ready source of good information for them.
CAR-PGa seeks to solve that problem.
They are also advocating a host of other things like college courses of study dealing with RPGs and LARPS, for example. In short, they’re about advocacy in general, rather than just defense.
Re: my kids playing evil characters — In games I run I will warn my characters (whether or not they’re my kids) away from evil acts, and I will plague them with consequences should they decide that theft and murder are the paths they want their heroes to follow.
RPGs are excellent morality plays. Refereed correctly, they present players complex questions with real-world applications… often starting with “when is it justifiable to take another’s life?”
January 1st, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Howard wrote: “when is it justifiable to take another’s life?”
I say, when their character hits on your overly endowed female elf character, then they must die! (the character, not the player, must remind self not to kill the player)
January 1st, 2008 at 8:19 pm
I was thinking more along the lines of “It’s okay to use lethal force against the band of marauding orcs, but it’s not okay to go back to their camp and kill the orklings.”
Our party faced a group of mercenaries — honest, well-meaning men — who were hired by an evil man to take possession of a very dangerous artifact. We negotiated as long as possible, and then fought. We were prepared to kill them all, if need be, but we managed to subdue them and only kill 2 of the 10 or so. Had we not be fighting to do subdual damage, we would have won the battle quite handily. As it was, we took actual risks, trying to preserve as many lives as possible.
That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:16 pm
A long time ago (20 years maybe?) I was listening to CBC radio while working at my fathers business. I cannot remember what show it was but they had a woman come on to talk about the evils of D&D. The short story of her rant is she insisted it was evil and compared it to doing the worst drugs imaginable at the time.
While I think she was nuts but she did seem to represent an actual part of society that believes these things at the time. In recent years though the only thing comparable I have seen Is the sort of people that want to Burn Harry Potter books because they teach magic spells.
January 1st, 2008 at 10:58 pm
[Note: I'm Alan Thomas, the webmaster for the CAR-PGa site. As usual, anything with my name on it is my own opinion and not an official CAR-PGa position or statement.]
Tenandys:
Stackpole’s an old ally of CAR-PGa’s, and we keep stuff of his in our library and on our quick-reference list. Pulling’s an old foe, and we’ve got a pretty huge file just covering her activities. Fortunately, she retired many years ago and BADD, her attack group, disbanded. Unfortunately, this was because she became ill, and has since died. (I did not like her position, but an early death is not something that I wish upon anyone; I say this to make it clear that my “fortunately” is not celebrating her demise.)
The “steam tunnel incident” is a case of hype having a life of its own separate from the facts. CAR-PGa has on file a 1989 letter from the author of Mazes and Monsters stating that her novel was not a documentary. This has not stopped some people from taking it as such, however. (I forget how the movie adaptation went.)
As for Jack Chick, I forget what we have on him, but the name’s familiar. It’s the big names like this that CAR-PGa originally fought, so there’s plenty of material countering their claims. (If he’s connected to Chick Publications, we’ve got point-by-point refutations to two items published by them on our quick reference list. Both attacks are by William Schnoebelen.)
adhominem:
Hmm. I’m presuming that you’re in the UK, not Germany or France or some other place where we have coverage. The most recent bit of UK news that I can come up with is the guy who tried using Shadowrun as an excuse for holding up a store. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6425333.stm As always, nobody bought it.
As for the US, we still have problems religious organizations who get upset if their employees (e.g., a teacher in one of their schools) are involved in RPGs, security guards who think that RPG books are a security risk or pornography (I’d have to check, but I think that the ACLU dealt with the last one of those), prison systems that think that RPGs are either a security risk or give one inmate control over another or involve magic (yes, one state bans magic in its prisons, even if cast by a character in a game), and so on.
joeyabc:
Yeah, some of the material is really old. One of the reasons for setting up the site the way that I did was to get members to feel free to improve our out-of-date materials. (There’s a secure wiki engine hiding behind the website.) If you want to help out, you can join up for free, then contact me and I’ll give you wiki access. (See the http://www.car-pga.org/CAR-PGa/Join for details.)
Howard:
You’re quite right about using RPGs to promote a moral viewpoint. I do want to make it quite clear that RPGs are religiously neutral as a medium, but the medium is conducive to teaching social and moral lessons. In other words, the medium has no values but is very good at transmitting them if you deliberately use it to do so.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:33 am
See, everybody? THIS is why I like linking to the experts.
January 2nd, 2008 at 2:09 am
“Why? Because when concerned citizens, parents, teachers, and others go searching for information on table-top RPGs, they need to be able to find something besides Jack Chick tracts and articles on Rocket Propelled Grenades.”
Right, just so long as they can still find the articles on Rocket Propelled Grenades…
If I was running a prison, I don’t think I’d let any of the prisoners be the GM. I’d get someone Neutral Good to do that. (Some inmates may not respect a Lawful Good GM, and there may be some who fail to properly understand Chaotic Good.)
Hey Howard, what sort of consequences are appropriate for an overly-endowed elf who kills everyone who hits on her?
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:08 am
[from "Howard Tayler":]
> RPGs are excellent morality plays. Refereed correctly, they present
players complex questions with real-world applications… often starting
with “when is it justifiable to take another’s life?”
Or “what do you do when you find out you’re on the wrong side?”
Our group was hired to defend a human community being overrun by
Orks and other such. We whipped the huamn forces into shape, and
shoved the Orks back. After a while, we happened upon a valley
which had belonged to the humans a long time back, and found the
remains of a largish facility.
Including Ovens.
Yup, you guessed it — “Orkschwitz”.
A detail our employers had known about, but neglected to mention.
There was peace, eventually — but the human leaders did not live
to see it. (Related to the webcomic: What Would Tagon Do? :) )
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:11 am
Crazydreamer: Actually, I am from Germany.
And now that I think back to when I started gaming at the tender age of 13?, I remember my parents at one point asking me whether we did any kind of satanic rituals or some such. I also remember being rather confused by that question as I coudn’t figure out whatever gave them that idea. However, I instinctively did what I now understand to have been the right thing and freely recounted our gaming sessions in detail to them, and the issue was never raised again.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:46 am
Many years ago I wrote a play for a puppet theatre I had which involved a plot where Pan was invoked. The characters were all animals and I had read Wind in the Willows so it seemed logically to make Pan their god. It was totally innocent and had nothing to do with RPG’s. In fact it predated D&D by a lot. It still caused a ruckus which I, frankly, failed to comprehend at the time. I understand it now but back then it was simply a plot device. Half a century later and I am still sane (well, I think so!), don’t worship Satan (or any other elemental being) and believe in God.
January 2nd, 2008 at 10:06 am
Can I just say that “CAR-PGa” seems like a dumb acronym? Why are you adding the “a” at the end, when “car-pga” is no less pronounceable than “carpg”?
Our advocates can’t choose a decent character name? WE’RE DOOMED!
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:53 pm
The worst bit about the name is that the “C” makes me think of “Computer RPGs”, which is what they explicitly /don’t/ advocate.
And, ironically, that for which the ad system selected a banner to put alongside this blog entry, complete with standard D&D-derivative fantasy “our target demographic is the pathetic single male” female character in useless armour.
January 3rd, 2008 at 1:44 am
I could understand the “a” if it was “CARP-Ga”, but not “CAR-PGa”.
Okay, I see where the hyphen comes from, but really, that’s just as dumb. If you’re gonna include the hyphen and the “a”, you might as well call it CrA-Pname. (Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games)
January 4th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
I’m sure i’ve seen and used CAR-PGa or very similar websites in the past, am i imagining it or is this a revival of the old format?
Howard wrote: “when is it justifiable to take another’s life?”
in terms of killing other player characters i have done so on a couple of occasions, one paladin was collateral damage to my mad wizards fireball frenzy (the character was well known to be a pyromaniac, the fireball didn’t kill the paladin, it just killed the spiders that were attacking him…. and their web which was holding him suspended above a Loooooooong drop (spell Long with 20d6 there)) (strangely every other character in that group developed fire resistance or evasion, i don’t know why…
the 2nd occasion was far more justified, the new player who joined the group introduced himself by robbing my friend and then stating how he hated thieves and how he would kill any thief he met without mercy. My character (a thief) agreed with him completely (until nightfall) and i told the GM “when he’s asleep i’ll cut his throat, recover my friends gold and roll the body into the river”… the GM nodded and the deed was done.
January 4th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
Thanks for the link Howard!
Colorado isn’t quite the Bible Belt of America, but it’s close enough. I rarely need this stuff, but occasionally here and there I meet the “Reason Challenged” that I need a few sources to deal with.
I read somewhere that it’s the computer games and computer RPGs in particular that have dispelled the fear-mongering of tabletop role-playing. It’s become (somewhat) mainstream through that avenue.
Sometimes I am forced to wonder about the whole thing. Gamers tend to be intelligent free-thinkers. Y’know the kind of people who ask too many uncomfortable questions of people in places of power. I wonder how many religious (and/or political) higher-ups of some sort have supported the whack-jobs in persecuting the geeks to maintain positions that they could not justify having.
Maybe it’s too much the 90’s conspiracy theory….
… or maybe thats exactly what THEY want you to think….
(I just find it an interesting exercise in mental gymnastics)
$0.02,
Dauric.
January 6th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Sam:
Some prisons do require a staff member to GM, but I’m too tired right now to look up which. As long as there’s a staff member who’s willing and able, we have no problem with that. (If none of the staff wants to play, it becomes a de facto ban.) Federal prisons let you play RPGs, but you can’t use dice; people generally use spinners instead. Other places the prisoners can’t own books, so it’s a matter of persuading the prison to buy RPG books for the library or recreational supplies. Again, we have no problems with reasonable restrictions like these, so long as they don’t turn into backdoor bans.
adhominem:
Ah! We have better coverage there, I think, but as I do not read German, I’d have to dig up the English summaries. We do get a good long report from the Spiel trade show every year. Unfortunately, several years ago it was reported that most of the local production was shutting down while the games industry went through hard times, so much of what was available was translations/imports. I don’t know if that’s improved; if it hasn’t, we’d certainly do whatever we could to support some advocacy work over there. Let me know if you want me to bug the Chair for a list of our German materials. (Alternatively, check the officers page of the website and bug him yourself.)
Randy:
And, of course, Google converts hyphens to spaces, so it thinks our name is “car pga”. Hey, I was five years old when they founded this thing; don’t look at me. At least it’s still easier to type than “The Committee for the Advancement of Role-Playing Games,” which isn’t very snappy either.
only1doug:
Up until now, CAR-PGa’s only had some background information on The Escapist (http://www.theescapist.com), a good site run by one of our members. I did once run across a list of studies that largely overlapped ours, but it was a one-person job and does not appear to be maintained. Other than those, I don’t know of any others.
Dauric:
We had a discussion about that in . . . November? (I forget) on the CAR-PGa Yahoo! Group. It was generally reported that it aided in safely and easily introducing the concept of tabletop RPGs but possibly lowered overall recognition; anyone who hears “RPG” is going to think of CRPGs and stop instead of thinking about it until they think of traditional RPGs. Unfortunately, this is a case of “the plural of ‘anecdote’ is not ‘data,’” so don’t take that as fact, particularly given how heavily attacked video games in general are.
January 6th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Given how much I’m commenting on this thread, maybe I should change the homepage linked to from my username to the CAR-PGa site. (It’s currently my personal site.) ^_^
January 6th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
You can’t use dice in federal prisons? Huh. Of course, I can understand banning d4s.
January 8th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Any die can be used as a decent projectile.
You could probably also bring an edge of a hard plastic die to a decent level of sharpness by rubbing it against cement. It would only be good for shallow slashes though.
I base the last off an episode told by my psychology professor who had worked in prisons. One inmate had sharpened his toothbrush in such a manner. Unlike a die, the toothbrush handle was quite good at deep piercing wounds.
January 10th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Oh, yes. But they ban dice because they’re gambling implements. (No one thought to specify the number of sides when writing the regulations.)