The Toxic Moral Purity Spiral Among Role-Playing Game Developers

Does THIS explain why so many D&D and other products are so bad lately?

When I first became an assistant professor in the early 2000s, I thought it would be interesting to study video game violence.  Back then, game violence was a hot topic and many policy makers were sure video games caused school shootings (update: they don’t).  Quickly, I realized most of the aggression in that field existed among the scholars themselves.  Between scathing peer reviews and sometimes more active efforts at career assault, I began to dream of greener pastures.  In particular, I envied the folks who designed and wrote adventures for the popular roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons.  How cool would it be to play and develop games and get paid for it?

Well, I’m jealous no longer.  This January, an article began circulating, based ostensibly on numerous interviews, of considerable toxicity, moral grandstanding, and bullying in the game development community.  Both industry leaders and independent developers were named, often both as bullying victims and bullying perpetrators.  Written by Dr. Clio Belle Weisman for the online outlet Medium, the mystery deepened when Weisman soon deleted the article (it mainly made the rounds in archived form).  Had she gotten key facts wrong?  Had she been bullied, just as she’d reported in the article?  Had she, after naming names, been threatened with lawsuits?  Dr. Weisman declined to be interviewed for this article, so we may never know.

Nonetheless, it fits a strange general pattern in the world of role-playing games, where major companies such as Wizards of the Coast (developer of Dungeons and Dragons) or Paizo (developer of D&D’s main rival Pathfinder) appear to be in thrall to woke online mobs.  For instance, Pathfinder removed themes related to slavery from its game development…not slavery of black people or endorsements of slavery mind you, but rather evil monsters enslaving good people of all backgrounds…largely in response to a single anonymous letter.  D&D has, for years, been on the back-foot, struggling with online mobs, often cheered on by technology news outlets such as Wired for its supposed legacy of racism.  In a pattern reminiscent of journalism, academia, or nonprofits, goalposts keep moving, shrill demands seldom subsist, and a self-righteous purity spiral pervades. 

That’s why the Weisman article, despite its murky provenance, seemed to hit a chord with many D&D players.  Outwardly, players have watched their fantasy worlds get woker, even as data suggest only a small minority of players (including non-white folks) want these changes.  There’s the perception D&D (and Pathfinder) are making worse products.  Clear sales data are hard to come by, but the YouTube channel Dungeon Craft crunched some numbers.  While core products such as the D&D Players Handbook tend to sell very well, woker products such as Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel (which is, effectively, a racially segregated book, disallowing any adventures based on white or European cultures) or Candlekeep Mysteries (with a plethora of they/them pronoun using non-binary non-player characters and a wheelchair accessible dungeon…how accommodating of the monsters) have generally sold poorly by comparison.  Although Wizards of the Coast has generally projected profitability for their projects, last December, they laid off a considerable portion of their D&D staff, including some heavy hitters in the field.  This does not suggest a healthy company.

If the trend toward wokeness is a net loser for these companies, why do they seem to be doubling down?  Wiesman’s article appears to offer the answer…one that fits with the direct experiences of many players and game designers.  It was tempting to believe that designers were caving to anonymous online mobs (or letters in the case of Paizo).  But Weisman’s study, based on numerous interviews, suggests much of the bullying and toxicity is coming from each other. To use the cliché, the call is coming from inside the house.  In other words, games designers are competing with each other for moral purity, perhaps sometimes egged on by online mobs.  Yet too often they remain non-responsive to the actual public they’re selling products to, at least those who aren’t screaming on social media.

Many of Weisman’s interview subjects were anonymous, but of the names she named, I couldn’t help but notice most were white and, looking through some of their bios, an unrepresentatively high proportion reported various queer, gay, or trans identities.  To be very clear, this is not a comment about gay or trans people, most of whom are rational, cooperative, and lovely human beings.  However, I think there’s been a growing awareness that there may be some individuals who have significant mental health issues who, particularly if white, may obsess over identity issues and adopt queer or trans identities as this affords them minority status.  In particularly, cluster B (borderline, narcissistic) personality disorder and autism are associated with the adoption of queer identities.  Again, this is not suggesting all, or most queer or trans people have personality disorders or autism.  Rather, people with personality disorders or autism may obsess over identity issues and find themselves confused about them.  They may then enter gay and trans communities bringing with them the chaos and aggression that is typical of cluster B personality disorders.

This relates to a concept in psychology called trait victimhood.  Individuals high in trait victimhood tend to center their identities and self-concept around the notion that they are victims.  As a consequence, they tend to focus on their own moral superiority and are aggressive, even cruel to others as they feel justified given their own self-declared victim status.  In recent years, perceived victims have come to be viewed by society as having particular moral virtue by simple dint of their victimhood status.  Coupled with recent social movements to remove any fact-checking of victim claims via various #believevictims hashtags, we’ve created a ripe opportunity for people with significant mental health problems and aggression to assume cultural power.

This sense that aggressive purity spirals and mental illness have brought other facets of society, such as journalism or nonprofits, to a standstill is well documented.  My observation is that a fair number of such individuals appear to have made headway in gaming development and games journalism and have brought this neurotic pressure to bear on mainstream companies.  In turn, these companies struggled to reply coherently to spurious claims of bigotry and surrendered instead, in some cases joining the bullying woke mob themselves. 

My guess is that some products, and perhaps entire game systems, are designed with moral signaling in mind.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing and giving diverse audiences different ways to play that suit them can be a good thing.  I think the problem for the big companies such as Wizards of the Coast or Paizo is they have indulged in broad, community based moral messaging that has insinuated this is the correct way to play and any players who don’t like it are racist, sexist bastards, etc.  Unfortunately for them, social justice roleplaying is probably a niche, if sometimes aggressive, audience and most gamers aren’t really interested in moral lecturing in their game play.  Most gamers just don’t want to adventure in dungeons that feel like university gender studies departments, nor do they think that conceiving of monsters such as goblins or orcs as inherently evil has anything to do with real-life racism.  Big companies could simply say, “We’re going to market a few products to our woke players, but don’t worry…we’ll also have some completely non-woke dungeons for the rest of you.”  But their broad based “racial reckoning” narrative increasingly feels alienating, cynical, and uninformed, particularly as it becomes increasingly clear that the 2020 moment was largely a social panic.

In that sense, products such as Candlekeep Mysteries or Radiant Citadel have a sense of being more like indulgences than good products.  It’s always interesting to wonder who these were written for.  I imagine they have a certain audience, don’t get me wrong, but they’re so infused with a particular and fleeting moral cultural moment, they feel as if they’re written for the developers.  Look what great, moral folx we are! 

Ultimately, I suspect that this current moment in gaming will resemble the prior 1990s Satan panic over Dungeons and Dragons.  Granted, at that time, Dungeons and Dragons removed demons and devils from the game to appease religious conservatives who didn’t play the game themselves.  This time, as I note, the panic is coming from inside the building.  The lunatics are rather literally running the asylum.  Yet, course corrections appear to be happening in other areas such as politics and journalism and, to a lesser degree, academia.  I suspect a course correction will come for Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder as well, and this current moment will be yet another embarrassment wherein gaming companies caved to moral absolutism.

People are free to play their role-playing games however they wish, of course.  But turning games into moral engines oftentimes removes from them their freedom, their grit, their mystery, and ability to speak to a full range of human experiences.  Making them adhere to a particular moral agenda, right or left, gives them the feel of propaganda films, which are seldom remembered as good art.  We can hope that the big companies such as Wizards of the Coast and Paizo will grow some cojones and learn to tell the bullying mobs to piss off.  At least we can fantasize that they will…