To be
clear, no claim to mythological, let alone historical, accuracy is
made. By way of making this point, Osterman offers this sardonic
explanation of the ex-nihilo “Amber Clan Tritons” in the
game's 294 page manual: “The Amber Clan Tritons mainly frolic,
this has made them powerful. While frolicking, they listen to whale
songs, this has made them magical. When they occasionally do not
frolic they fashion items made out of the amber that is so prevalent
in their special provinces, this has given them the name The Amber
Clan Tritions.”(2) Some of the factions are based on fiction,
and some have (Advanced) Dungeons and Dragons
elements (Early Age R'lyeh, with its Lovecraftian monsters and AD&D
Arboleths, is both), but most factions are grounded in a historical
culture and its myths.

One
recently-added faction is Hinnom/Ashdod/Gath (Early/Middle/Late Age).
This faction of giants and humans is based on Jewish mythology –
and Christian & Manichean mythology about the antediluvian
(pre-flood) world. At first glance, this faction's presentation of
psuedo-Judaic giants is disturbing: the Rephaim (giants) of Hinnom
and Gath (but not middle-period Ashdod) practice Blood Sacrifice and
Blood Magic (use of either in-game requires the player to first
assign units to hunt for sacrificial victims). They also have horns.
The most powerful priest of Hinnom is the Baal, and for Gath it is
the Kohen Gadol.

“Kohen
Gadol” is the Hebrew word for “High Priest,” a
historical, rather than mythical, role of great importance: the Kohen
Gadol was responsible for going into the Holy of Holies in the Temple
once a year to perfom the most important rituals. In Dom 3,
the “Kohen Gadol” unit is depicted as an old man (Giant)
with a long white beard, dressed traditionally complete with Choshen,
a ceremonial breastplate with twelve
jewels on it, one for each tribe of Israel: “You shall make a
breastplate of decision (or “judgment”), [...] Set in it
mounted stones, in four rows of stones. [...] The stones shall
correspond (in number) to the names of the sons of Israel: twelve,
corresponding to their names. They shall be engraved like seals,
each with its name, for the twelve tribes.”(3) This unit can
perform Blood Sacrifices and Blood Magic. And he has goat's horns.

This
monstrous figure bears unpleasant echoes of the Mediaeval European
myth of the old Jew as diabolist. The word cabal for a sinister,
secret group or cult comes from a corruption of “kaballah,”
Jewish mysticism. Some versions of the Faust myth claim that an old
Jew introduces Faust to or teaches Faust how to summon the demon
Mephistopheles. In George Sand's (1st wave, suffragette)
feminist Faust-inspired play The Seven Strings of the Lyre,
Mephistopheles takes the form of an “old Jew,” to
literally bedevil Helen, the heroine of this version of the story –
she finds him to be “a disgusting old man!” and shortly
thereafter he nearly drives her to suicide:“I will kill myself.
It is necessary. This wicked Jew has shown me all my miseries.”(4)
A more contemporary image, of the “running of the Jew”
sequence from Baron Marshall Cohen's movie Borat,
with its grotesque long-faced, bearded and horned masks, also comes
to mind.

Perhaps
the most uncomfortable association is of the Kohen Gadol with Blood
Magic, evoking the old anti-Semitic “blood libel,” the
claim that Jews kidnap and sacrifice gentile children. Second only
in infamy to the Czarist propaganda piece “The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion,” the blood libel is still often reported as
true in the Middle East, often in combination with the
“Protocols.”(5)

It
would be easy, at this point, to condemn Dom 3
and its creators. Easy, but premature. A more considered approach
to the images and tropes in the game reveals it for a layered
appropriation of Jewish, Christian and Manichean mythology, that
accurately echoes historical texts ranging from the canonical books
of Genesis and
Ezekiel, to the
Apocryphal Book of Enoch
(1 Enoch), to texts
only recently reconstituted from fragmentary manuscripts, such as the
Book of Giants and
the Sepher Ha-Razim.
The resulting picture is consistent with Dom 3's
dark and sometimes ruthless tone, but also offers interesting
possibilities in terms of procedural narrative: again, there is no
plot, but the pieces one is given to play with are so fraught with
mythological, historical, and theological significance that the
ethicoaesthetic dynamics of Hinnom, Ashdod and Gath beg further
examination.

Before
I go any further with this specific analysis, a more general
consideration of Dom 3
is necessary for context.

Small
Gods

In
Domionions 3, you play as a “Pretender God.” Each
game begins with the following message: “In the beginning there
was Chaos. [...] The gods fought among themselves, bringing even
greater ruin to those who would serve them. At last there was One, a
Being of great power and enlightenment, [...] Now the Wheel has
turned once more. The supreme God has suddenly disappeared. Prayers
go unanswered and the smoke of offerings rises in vain to the
heavens. [...] The Throne of the Heavens stands empty and only the
strongest can rise to supremacy over all.”(6) If you've seen
Highlander, you get the drift.

Pretenders
are customized by the player from options including the requisite
Wizards and Dragons, but also a great many modeled on specific
mythological and religious figures from Kali to Odin to Bacchus to
John Milton's Sin (herself inspired by Scylla), who “seemed
woman to the waist, and fair, / but ended foul in many a scaly fold /
Voluminous and vast, a serpent arm'd / with mortal sting: about her
middle round / A cry of Hell hounds never ceasing bark'd / With wide
Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung / A hideous peal; yet, when they
list, would creep, / If ought disturbed their noise, into her womb, /
And kennel there, yet still bark'd and howl'd, / Within, unseen.”(7)
There's even an stone Monolith suspiciously evocative of the one
from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

As
this suggests, Dom 3
is dark and well-researched, but it doesn't take itself too
seriously. The Pretenders of this game will remind Terry Pratchet
fans of his Small Gods,
a story about Om, a god with only one believer left. The gods need
belief – it is their food, and without it they will waste away:
“Being a small god was bad [...] but how much worse to have
been
a god, and to now be no more than a smoky bundle of memories, blown
back and forth across the sand made from the crumbled stones of your
temples...”(8) In
any given game, the players (Pretenders) will struggle to expand
their physical kingdom by conquering provinces and their spiritual
kingdom by conversion.

Death
of the Pretender is merely inconvenient: the priests of that god can
call him/her/it back with their prayers – what good is being a
god if you're not immortal? But complete loss of either territory
(provinces) or belief (the titular “dominion”) is the
end. One acquires provinces by military conquest a la Risk
(though with a vast set of options and complications). Belief is a
less-familiar dynamic to gamers. Thankfully, given
the right incentives (a new temple here, a little inquisition there,
maybe a miracle every so often), people are very willing to believe.

Life Goes On...

This
brings me to one of the most remarkable aspects of the world of Dom.
For most of the people (serfs, villagers, etc.), life goes on.
Strategy games tend either to leave the civilians out entirely, or
else treat them as replaceable/disposable. Dom is similar to the
Civilization
games in how it handles populace, but it goes further. Population is
the primary determinant of everything from tax revenue to resource
production to whether a province produces enough food to feed your
armies, but you don't get to shuttle around “units” of
population from job to job or place to place. Nor do you have city
building trees to climb. You can build a temple, a (magical)
laboratory and an appropriate fortification in any given province,
and that's it. If you want to decrease unrest, reduce the tax rate
or assign units to patrol the countryside. If you want to increase
faith (dominion), build a temple or assign a priest to preach the
good word.

Because
you can only do things to them, and neither simply ignore them nor
tell them that they're moving to Barnard's Star tomorrow and giving
up their work in the high tech sector to be farmers, populations
behave in a more human and more civilian manner in Dom
3
than in most such games. Most people in any society are neither
soldiers nor sages, but they do
pay their taxes. Given that you play as a god and a warlord, and
that the “average person” is implicitly a serf or a
peasant, they're not going to give you much trouble. Despite being
literally a “god” game, this is not a “god game.”
You can set the tax rate so high that people begin to starve to
death. You can't tell them all to go to war or even to move to the
province with the iron mine. On the level of worldbuilding (rather
than game mechanics), one starts to wonder why the mayor (player) of
Sim City doesn't get impeached or arrested, and why technologically
advanced, spacefaring and sometimes explicitly “democratic”
nations don't just elect a less arbitrary and tyrranical “president”
(again, player).

...Until It Doesn't

There
is no graphic representation of the “common people” in
Dom 3.
They appear in text messages and as numbers associated with
provinces. This makes it easy to have a certain distance that
balances against their more-human behavior. A calculus of
(fictional, electronic, abstract) human life is the result. Random
events and hostile spells can drive away or kill 20% or more of a
province's population in a single turn. That's at least hundreds and
more likely thousands of “common people.” Patrolling a
province to reduce unrest kills ten population per point of unrest
reduced. Sometimes, you have to dan eal with unrest of over one
hundred.

On a good turn, a blood hunt might
turn up six to ten appropriate sacrifices (“blood slaves”).
6-10, when patrolling for brigands (and malcontents) might kill 100
in that same province that turn, and a tidal wave (which could be bad
luck or bad magic) might kill 1000 or more. Unfortunately for
Pretenders who use blood magic, every blood slave found produces at
least one unrest, increasing the cost of blood magic at least
tenfold. Even so, life goes on for the population as a whole.(9)

One can inflict substantial casualties
on a province's population by use of spells that produce (un-)natural
disasters. One can also order an army to pillage the province it is
in, producing a little gold and a lot of dead peasants. This makes
it possible to break the production capacity of an enemy-held or
hotly contested province. It is very difficult, however, to entirely
empty a province.

Inhuman Ends

The
are exceptions. Three, to be precise, that completely break the
general durability of populaces in Dom
3.
All three will turn the Pretender's dominion into a dead zone, with
zero population in every province. Only a few nations in the game
are capable of such havoc: Late Era Ermor and Late Era R'lyeh do so
by their nature, and Pangaea can choose to research and cast a very
high-level spell that does so. I'm going to bracket out Pangaea,
precisely because its devastating Carrion Woods spell is optional.

R'lyeh is one of a few nations based
on fiction rather than myth, though H.P. Lovecraft's Cthullhu mythos
has acquires the status of modern mythology in gaming and occult
circles.(10) Lovecraft's stories are generally categorized as
horror, and frequent themes include hideous, fishy, squiddy, and/or
amorphous monsters, ancient “gods” and creatures entirely
beyond human understanding, forbidden books and knowledge, and the
idea that encounters with any of these things will drive anyone
insane.

In Lovecraft's stories, the return of
these inhuman gods and the triumph of inhuman forms of life is
generally inevitable. Lovecraft's writing is often seen as
xenophobic, anti-immigrant and even racist, but it is my contention,
as I have argued elsewhere, that this masks an obsessive xenophilia
that wants to embrace change and become the other but is thwarted by
a paranoid fear of loosing oneself, and one's class privilege with
it.

R'lyeh, especially Late Era R'lyeh,
allows a Dom 3 player to indulge in his or her xenophilia.
Belief in the Pretender of R'lyeh (“dominion”) empties
provinces of inhabitants, and drives units and commanders insane
(they may act randomly). This emptying out doesn't represent death –
no unburied Corpses are produced,(11) but instead a change of
consciousness occurs. In provinces controlled by R'lyeh where faith
(dominion) is also strong, the decrease in population creates a
proportional number of dreamers, madmen and cultists who will serve
the Pretender (in aproximately a ten populatuion to one unit ratio).
In provinces controlled by other players but under the sway of
R'lyeh's dominion, the population just vanishes. After most of the
humans are gone, Lovecraftian monsters start appearing without
explanation.

Since the goal of a game of Dom 3
is to spread one's influence over the entire map, and as this
represents the ascension to godhood, the success of R'lyeh means a
complete overturning of “human” ways of thinking and
doing – “the end of the world as we know it,”(12)
but not the end of the world. Xenophilia triumphs: the world shall
be the domain of dreamers, the insane, tentacled monsters and things
that look like six-foot sea cucumbers floating perpendicular to the
ground.(13)

Late
Nation Ermor is similar to R'lyeh, in that its dominion also depletes
population. The principle differences are that the Pretender of
Ermor's influence kills off population more quickly than R'lyeh's,
and that it actually kills them. Ermor is an empire of the living
dead, in the vein of George Romero's zombie movies, and especially
Sam Raimi's Army of
Darkness, with
“intelligent” undead generals leading armies of mindless
reanimated corpses into battle.(14) This is at least as profound a
transformation as with R'lyeh, but with a certain irony: for the
serfs and peasants represented by population, death is no longer the
end of their labors, but the beginning of a grimmer and more absolute
servitude from which even death is no longer a release.

Late
Era R'lyeh and Ermor represent more than competing gods and nations,
they represent exactly the
kind of threat to civilians and to life (“as we know it”)
that otherwise doesn't exist in Dom
3. This makes them,
appropriately enough, horrifying to other players. Not only are
their dominions destructive, but, even if you defeat them, you're
left with blighted, useless provinces. Other human players are
therefore likely to gang up on these nations. This is the context in
which Gath, the Late Era nation of semi/psudo/crypto-Judaic Giants,
and its blood sacrifices, exists. In Dom
3, no-one is objectively
“good,” but, by comparison to R'lyeh and Ermor (and
Pangaea), it is at least life-affirming.

Last of the Giants

Gath is a historical city of the
Philistines, as is Ashdod, from which the Middle Era nation of Giants
in Dom 3 takes its name. Gath is the Biblical home of
Goliath: “his name was Goliath of Gath, and he was six cubits
and a span tall.”(15) Shortly after he kills Goliath, it is in
Gath that David and his army seek refuge from King Saul: “So
David and the six hundred men with him went and crossed over to King
Achish son of Maoch of Gaul.”(16) Gath is, therefore, home to
both Goliath and David, if not simultaneously.

The same might be said of Gath in Dom
3, as most of its troops are modeled on the tribes of Israel,
including Benjaminite Slingers who get a bonus to Pillage “Benjamin
is a ravenous wolf [...] in the evening he divides the spoil,”
well-equipped Asherite Soldiers “Asher's bread shall be rich, /
And he shall yield royal dainties,” and Levite Zealots and
Priests.(17) At the same time, it has Goliath-like giant soldiers
and its most powerful leaders are Rephaim giants. Early Era Hinnom
consists of giant Rephaim and demi-giant Avvites, and Middle Era
Ashdod of different tribes of Rephaim with some human slaves, but
Late Era Gath (subtitled “Last of the Giants”) suggests a
“Post-late” Era in which the human tribes make their way
alone, and the last Rephaim Kohen Gadol would be succeeded by a
Levite High Priest.

Further anticipation of this coming
change is furnished by the Abbas (Hebrew “Fathers”),
recutitable heretics who reject human sacrifice and the superiority
of giants to humans, as they “find the bloody cult of the
Kohanim despicable and have sworn their life <sic> to aid the
meek. They tend to the human population of Gath.”(18)
Unprecedented in Hinnom or Ashdod (Early and Middle Era Giant
nations), these patriarchal figures are Gittites (lesser giants) and
so lack the horns of the Rephaim. The Abba's simple robe, unkempt
white hair and beard, are congruent with (Western, Christian)
traditional images of Abraham not
sacrificing Issac, and thereby rejecting human sacrifice.(19)

Moreover, Abraham is often painted
wearing blue and sometimes with a blue sash belt, as in József
Molnár's “The Match of Abraham.” A blue sash belt
is one of the standout details in the image of Dom 3's Abba,
contrasting with the red sash belts of the Kohenim. As both blue and
red are sacred colors in mediaeval and rennaisance Christian
iconographic painting, the implications of this difference are
limited. Nonetheless, we may hypothesize a Post-Late Gath in which
an Abrahamic figure, a “father of a multitude of nations”(20)
is produced when the fathers' (Abbas') heresy becomes law and human
sacrifice is banned.

This kind of hope for the future is
contrary to the general trajectory of nations in Dom 3. The
aforementioned nation of Ermor starts off as a Romanesque nation
recently converted to a monotheistic mystery cult that promises
eternal life. The game describes it thus “Old syncretistic
faiths and spirit worship were banned by a Prophet dressed in white
shrouds.”(21) The similarity of this Prophet and his holy
shroud to Lazarus and the Shroud of Turin, respectively, are further
parallels between Ermor's “New Faith” (Early Era Ermor)
and the Christianization of Rome. The takes a dark turn in the
Middle Era, where “In one cataclysmic event, Death was let
loose,” and by the Late Era, as mentioned above, Ermor is a
nation of the living dead.

The Book of Giants

What, then of the Giants? The
processual narratives players create with Hinnom and Ashdod are their
stories, and even Gath is unplayable if one eschews them. So far, we
have redeemed “Israel” at their expense. It would be a
mistake to dismiss the Rephaim and the lesser Giants as boogeymen,
but explaining their place in Dom 3 requires a digression into
apocryphal texts: the Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) and the Manichean and
Jewish Books of Giants.

Mention of Giants in Genesis is brief
and equivocal. Genesis 6:2&4 states that “the divine
beings (or 'sons of God') ”saw how beautiful the daughters of
men were and took wives from among those that pleased them. [...] It
was then, and later too, that the Nephilim appeared on earth –
when the divine beings cohabitated with the daughters of men, who
bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men of
renown.” This passage has historically been interpreted as the
mating of angels and humans, producing giant offspring, partially
because elsewhere the word “Nephilim” is associated with
great strength and size.

The “divine beings” or
“sons of god” it mentions have also been interpreted as
noblemen, and their children as larger than life in deeds (“the
heroes of old”) and not physical size. This interpretation may
be sensible, but its plausibility requires what Charles Fort calls a
“damnation” of contrary evidence. In this case, the
evidence is in extended versions of this story that can be found in
the Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) and the Book of Giants (or “Book of
the Nephilim”). There are also 2nd and 3rd
books of Enoch, of more recent provenance, but they are not relevant
here.

The Qumran fragments, better known as
the Dead Sea scrolls establish the historical importance of 1 Enoch:
“The caves at Qumran have produced twenty manuscripts of Enoch
– as many as the book of Genesis”(22). The Qumran
community existed from some point in the middle 2nd
century BCE until about 70 CE, so the scrolls are at least that
old.(23) The oldest functionally complete version of the Book of
Enoch is the Ethiopian text, from somewhere in the 4th-6th
century CE.(24) No complete text of the Book of Giants exists, but
both the Manichean fragments and those from the Dead Sea Scrolls seem
to be an expansion of the the first part of the Book of Enoch, the
Book of the Watchers. J.T. Milik, who first translated the Enochic
Dead Sea Scroll fragments, argues that the Qumran Book of Giants was
the original beginning of the Book of Enoch, and was later censored.

The origin of the Nephilim in 1 Enoch
starts nearly identical to that in Genesis, but soon diverges by
naming “the angels, the sons of heaven [...] Semyaza, who was
their leader, Urakiba, Ramiel, Kokabiel, Tamiel, Ramiel, Daniel,
Ezeqiel, Baraqiel, Asael, Aramos, Batriel, Ananel, Zaqiel, Samsiel,
Saratel..., Turiel, Yomiel, Araziel. These are the leaders of the
two hundred angels, and of all the others with them.”(25) This
listing of angels will later be repeated in a litany of skills taught
by these rebel angels, and is similar to the listing of angels for
magical purposes in the Sepher Ha-Razim.

These
angels, called Watchers, or Grigori, after the Greek word for watcher
(ἐγρήγοροι
or Egregori)
“took wives for themselves, and everyone for himself one each.
And they began to go in to them and were promiscuous with them. And
they taught them charms and spells, and showed to them the cutting of
roots and trees. And they became pregnant and bore large
giants, and their height (was) three thousand cubits [a cubit is the
distance between elbow and thumb – about ½ m or 1½
ft]. These devoured all the toil of men, until men were unable to
sustain them. And the giants turned against them in order to devour
men. [...] and they devoured one another's flesh and drank the blood
from it.”(26)

This
may (or may not) be the end of the Nephilim, but not of the Watchers'
sin: “Azazel taught men to make swords, and daggers, and
shields and breastplates. And he showed them the things after these,
and the art of making them: bracelets, and ornaments, and the art of
making up the eyes and of beautifying the eyelids, and the most
precious and choice stones, and all (kinds of) coloured dyes. And
the world was changed.”(27) Other angels proceed to give their
Promethean gifts, including magic, astrology, and herbology.

Initially it seems that it is the
Nephilim's hunger that drives them to destroy one another, but part
of the judgment against the Watchers is that their sons will destroy
each other. “And the Lord said to Gabriel [...] send them [the
Nephilim] out, and send them against one another, and let them
destroy themselves in battle.”(28) This, like the two creation
stories in Genesis, creates parallel and incommensurable events: in
this case, of the descruction of the Nephilim. Either their hunger
compelled them to it, or they were set up by Gabriel. The Book of
Giants offers a third explanation: that the giants fought the
(unfallen) angels and lost. “with the strength of my powerful
arm and with the power of my might / ... (a)ll flesh, and I did
battle with them, but I (am) not / able to prevail for us(?), for my
adversaries / sit (in heaven), and they dwelt with the holy ones, and
no / ... (the)y are stronger than I.”(29) This creates an
image of the Nephilim that is more tragic and human than that of the
cannibalistic monsters who ultimately devoured each other.

The Watchers are punishment more
harshly than their children, and their punishment is cruelly ironic:
“When all their sons kill each other, and when they see the
destruction of their beloved ones, bind them them for seventy
generations under the hills of the earth until the day of their
judgment and their consummation.”(30) They were tasked to
watch and not interfere, and because they became involved, they are
forced to watch one last event, the slaughter of their children
before being deprived of their function (watching) by being buried
alive. The importance of being denied the ability to watch is
emphasized in the fate of Azazel, who is singled out for especially
harsh treatment: “And further the Lord said to Raphael: 'Bind
Azazel by his hands and his feet, and throw him into the darkness.
And split open the desert which is in Dudael, and throw him there.
And throw on him jagged and sharp stones, and cover him with
darkness; and let him stay there for ever, and cover his face, that
he may not see light.”(31) Azazel is covered twice, once with
darkness and once explicitly to deny him sight.

Azazel's fate sets the stage for the
“scapegoat” rite of Leviticus 16, in which two goats are
prepared “one marked for the Lord, and the other marked for
Azazel.”(32) The Lord's goat is sacrificed, along with a bull,
and the temple is ritually clensed, after which “the live goat
shall be brought forward. Aaron shall lay both hands upon the head
of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and
transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them
on the head of the goat;” after this, Aaron is to “send
it off to the wilderness for Azazel.”(33) In the notoriously
error-ridden Tyndale Bible and the King James version, “Azazel”
is mistranslated as “(e)scape.”

All
of these concepts are reflected in Dom
3's
Giants, especially Early Era Hinnom. Hinnom, Ashdod and Gath have
access to a unique Pretender: “The Son of the Fallen is the
last of the Nephilim, ancient giants of godlike power. When the
other Nephilim lost purpose, he began to hunt them down and devoured
them all.”(34) This is a logical transformation of the story
of the Nephillim devouring each other – someone has to be the
last once left standing. The image of the Son of the Fallen evokes
carnality and appetite. He is depicted wearing only a cape, and his
stance is wide, leaving his genitals and pubic hair in full view. He
is shown leaning forward, emphasizing the large pair of golden bull's
horns that crown his head. There are other, mostly female, nudes in
Dom
3,
but none are as anatomically explicit.

In
game terms, the Son of the Fallen consumes fifty times as much food
as an elephant, and is naturally skilled at Blood Magic. The Son of
the Fallen, if made the Pretender of Hinnom (Early Era nation of
Giants) can perform a sacred ritual to free one of the Grigori.
Doing so requires a lot of research, high skill in Blood Magic, and
the largest sacrifice of Blood Slaves in the game. This rite, called
“Release Lord of Civilization” requires the sacrifice of
177 slaves. By the calculus we provided before, capturing 177 Blood
Slaves will produce so much unrest that keeping the civilian
population in control (though military patrols) will result in the
deaths of two thousand or more civilians. Despite the high cost of
“Release Lord of Civilization, the spell describes the Watchers
in positive, Promethean terms: “The Grigori, or Watchers, were
angelic beings who taught the forbidden lore of civilization,
warcraft and magic to the Avvim.”(35) The Avvim, a Canaanite
tribe mentioned in the Torah, have no Biblical connection to the
Grigori or Nephilim, but in Dom
3,
the “human” women the Grigori married are Avvim, and the
children of the Nephilim and the Avvim are the Rephaim. In the
Torah, the words “Rephaim” and “Nephilim” are
not directly connected, though both aretranslated as “giants.”

Cult of Ba'al

It is hard to read the nation that can
summon the Grigori, Hinnom, as in any way virtuous: the name itself
is the Hebrew form of “Gehenna” and it's home province
contains the infamous city of Gomorrah. This leitmotif of Biblical
horror carries through to the Melqart, a horned Rephaim warrior and
skilled Blood mage with an appetite that almost rivals the Son of the
Fallen's hunger. Melqarts “have gruesome appetites and many of
them feast on their smaller kin.”(36) This is more than flavor
text: each Melqart requires 20 times as much food as an elephant,
and, if supplies run short, they making up the difference by eating
people (population). There is also the magician-priest, the Ba'al,
similar in appearance to Gath's Kohen Gadol, but his robes are of
red, black and gold. In Hebrew, baal is an honorific similar
to lord, and it is often used in the Tanakh to designate a foreign
god. One such deity, Ba'al Zebub, lends his name to the Christian
demon Beelzebub. Moreover, the word “Ba'al” has a
particular resonance in the backhistory of the Dom games.

Karlsson and Osterman have released
Conquest of Elysium 2, their first game together, as freeware
to promote Dom 3. Among the playable characters (each the
leader of a faction) are two opposed religious leaders: the Cardinal
of El and the High Priestess of Baal. The Cardinal's faction has a
neomediaeval Catholic feel, complete with an unpredictable
inquisition, and Baal, described in the game's manual as “the
hungry god” demands human sacrifices.(37) Unlike it's darker
descendant, Dom 3, in Conquest of Elysium 2, only
factions practice human sacrifice: that of the High Priestess of
Baal, and that of the Demonologist. Conquest of Elysium 2 is
also more “High Fantasy” in style, with Tolkeinesque
Elves, Dwarves and Orcs as playable factions. Despite this, the use
of “El” as the name of the psuedo-Catholic faction's god
is significant, as that is a Hebrew title meaning “Lord”
and one of the names of god (ex. “el shaddi,” usually
translated as “the Lord your God”).

Ba'al (or “Baal”) is, as
mentioned above, properly a prefix, and is still used in Hebrew to
indicate that someone is the lord or master of something, for
example, founder of Hasidic Judaism Rabbi Yisroel ben Eliezer, known
by the honorific Baal Shem Tov (“good master of the name”).
The golden calf of Exodus 32 might be an icon of a Ba'al also known
as Hadad, a storm god sometimes depicted as a bull.(38) The golden
calf has become part of the Christian syncretic demon “Baal.”
Thus, the golden bull's horns of Dom 3's Nephilim Pretender
as connect him with the golden calf and Ba'al/Hadad as well as
Christian demonology. Furthermore,
Ba'al has been associated with human sacrifice in Karlsson
and Osterman's games
since Conquest
of Elysium 2, so connecting
Ba'al with the maneating Nephilim is a logical step.

The
Melqart in Dom 3
is named after the patron deity of Tyre, also known as Ba'al Sur, and
is more likely to be the Ba'al of 1 Kings than is Hadad.(39) Like
the magician-priest Ba'al, this bloodthirsty warrior giant is named
after a rival god to that of the Jewish people. In this
context, the disappearance of the Ba'al and Melquart after the Early
Age, and simultaneous with them any possibility of freeing the
Grigori, can be read as moral progress.

Chariot of Fire

Middle Era Ashdod does not practice
Blood Magic or Blood Sacrifice. More than that, it has access to new
spells that summon angels, culminating in the Merkavah, or Chariot of
the Lord, which appears in Ezekiel 1, and also in the H'aggada about
Enoch. 1 Enoch and the H'aggada expand upon Genesis 5:24 “Enoch
walked with God; and then he was no more, for God took him.”
In these texts Enoch practically commuted to heaven and back, at
least once by Merkavah “Enoch was carried into the heavens in a
fiery chariot drawn by fiery chargers.”(40) In 1st
Enoch as well as in the H'aggadah, the approach to the throne of god
is described in a panoply of fire, ice, and lightning that culminates
in “And I looked and I saw in it a high throne, and its
appearance (was) like ice and its surrounds like the shining sun and
the sound of Cherubim. And from underneath the high throne there
flowed out rivers of burning fire.”(41) A more “chariotlike”
description is given in Ezekiel: “I could see that there were
four wheels beside the cherubs, one beside each of the cherubs [...]
and when they moved, each could move in the direction of any of its
four quarters [...] Their entire bodies – backs, hands and
wings – and the wheels, the wheels of the four of them, were
covered all over with eyes. It was these wheels that I heard called
'the wheelwork.' Each one had four faces: One was a cherub's face,
the second a human face, the third a lion's face, and the fourth an
eagle's face.”(42)

The Merkavah in Dom 3 is
described in similar terms: “In a blaze of otherworldly
splendor, four wheels covered by four wings move the Merkavah in four
directions. Above the four wheels, at the center of the solar glory
is a living being with four faces, four wings, four colors and four
lives. Above the living being is a sapphire dome of stellar might,
beyond which the unbearable might of the Celestial Thrones is
visible.”(43) The in-game effect of this is to give the player
the powerful Tetramorph (“four forms”), also called the
Chayot (“chariot”) and four Ophanim (“wheels”).

The
Tetramorph is an important mystical figure, sometimes called the
Tetrazoa (“four animals”) that is associated with the
Tetragrammaton, the four-character/syllable unpronounceable name of
god. The Tetrazoa appears throughout Jewish and Christian mysticism,
including as the four holy animals of Revelations 4:7“And the
first creature was like a lion, and the second creature like a calf,
and the third creature had a face as of a man, and the fourth
creature was like a flying eagle.”(44) The Dom
3 interpretation is neither four-sided and four-faced nor
four separate creatures, but of four eye-covered winged wheels
(Ophanim), and a single Tetramorph that is humanoid in shape, but has
four forms, one human-headed, and one each with the head of an eagle,
lion, and ox. The game explains it thus: “The divine might of
the Chayot is so vast that it cannot be contained in a singular
physical body and only one form of the Tetramorph is manifest at any
time.”(45) This may be a random result of an appropriate list,
as names usually are in Dom 3 but the only Tetramorph I have
successfully called was named “Ezekiel.”

This has powerful symbolic
significance: in 1 Enoch, the Grigori ask Enoch to carry their
petition for mercy to god, because they cannot enter his presence,
whereas the Merkavah is associated strongly with the presence of god,
and one has to be worthy to see it and live – in the H'aggada
about Enoch, after he was carried up in the chariot, “They
found snow and great hailstones upon the spot whence Enoch had risen,
and, when they searched beneath, they discovered the bodies of all
who had remained behind with Enoch.”(46) The inhabitants of
Hinnom, who are still tied to and revere the Grigori (see earlier
analysis of “Release Lord of Civilization”), cannot call
the Merkavah.

Ashdod is different. In Ashdod the
Ba'al and the Melquart, along with their cannibalistic appetites,
have been replaced by the Talmai Elder and the Adon, Rephaites
inspired by the Nephillim of Numbers 13: “They went up into the
Negenb and came to Hebron, where lived Ahiman, Shesai, and Talmai,
the Anakites. [...] All the people that we saw in it are men of great
size; we saw the Nephilim there – the Anakites are part of the
Nephilim – and we looked like grasshoppers to oursleves, and so
we must have looked to them.”(47) “Adon,” like
“Ba'al,” means “Lord” in Hebrew and can be
the title of a god, but unlike “Ba'al” it is not reserved
for foreign gods - in the form “Adonai,” it is a
speakable substitute for the Tetragrammaton (and other taboo names of
god).

In Ashdod, the giants who were denied
a chance to repent in 1 Enoch and The Book of Giants can be
“redeemed” and made right with the heavens. After
extensive preparation, including disciplined frugality by the player,
as the spell requires 222 astral pearls, the Merkavah will descend
and (literally) bless the giants of Ashdod. This all despite the
fact that they have not given up the teachings of the Grigori “The
Anakim adorn themselves [with] jewelry and practice the cosmetic arts
of the Watchers.”(48) This reinforces the Promethean aspect of
the Watchers, as they were punished for giving their gifts to
mortals, but the giants of Ashdod (and Gath) are not punished for
using the Watchers' gifts. Simultaneously, this remaining link to
the Grigori produces an ambivalence about the virtue of the Anakim,
suggesting that their messianic redemption is a possibility, but not
an inevitability.

The Lost Tribe

Ashdod combines a number of different
cannonical and apocryphal Biblical themes: the Anakites, a Cannanite
people descended from Nephilim who somehow survived the destruction
of the Giants, only to be (eventually) supplanted by the Israelites;
the aforementioned messianic theme; and, because the Anakites have
human slaves, the captivity in Egypt. Given that Late Era Gath will
be nearly overrun by human tribes named after the twelve tribes of
Israel, the human slaves of Middle Era Ashdod are logically their
ancestors. Gath, where human sacrifice has reappeared, seems to
follow from an Ashdod that either failed to redeem itself, or
suffered a second fall from grace before the Late Era. We can infer
that Gath is not as depraved as Hinnom from its inability to summon
the Grigori, as well as from the fact that, like Ashdod, it can call
the Merkavah.

In the Post-Late Era Gath I posited
earlier, the Abrahamic Giants of Gath, the Abbas, have put an end to
human sacrifice. Whether a repentace comes in the Middle, Late, or
hypothetical “Post-Late” Eras, these gentled Giants then
slot into place as the “lost tribe” of Israel. Joann
Sfar posits just such a lost tribe of Giant Jews in the 2nd
volume of his series The Rabbi's Cat. In it, the titular cat
accompanies the titular Rabbi, an Algerian Sepharidic Jew, his Muslim
cousin, a blonde, blue-eyed Russian Ashkenazi Jewish artist, and his
black ex-slave African bride, on a quest to find a hidden city, home
to the lost tribe. After a great many confrontations with prejudice,
including the patronizing attitude of a young Belgian (a Tintin
parody) and a lascivious older European artist who tries to convince
the Ashkenazi painter that giving black people monkey-like features
is anatomically correct, to which the painter replies, in the French
his wife has been teaching him, “In country of me, they make
same drawing on Jews.”(49) This prepares us for the ambivalent
encounter with the Lost Tribe of African Jews that concludes the
book.

In the end, it is only the cat, the
artist and his wife (all of whom are unnamed) who find the city, and
it is populated with giants, dark-skinned Jewish giants dripping with
golden jewelry. They are “Blacks whom nobody ever enslaved.
Jews who never left the land of their ancestors. Happy, balanced
people who radiate self-confidence.”(50) Unfortunately, these
happy, balanced people are unable to perceive these smaller, less
happy people as their kin, and take offense when tells them that he
is Jewish, like them. The cat, who understands the giants' speech,
translates their answer as “He says there's no such thing as a
white Jew. He says they are the real Jews. He says you've offended
them and we have to leave.” in an ironic echo of the Rabbi's
words of much earlier “nobody's ever seen such a thing as black
Jews [...] look: blacks, they have slavery; Jews, they have pogroms.
It's a lot to bear. Now imagine a people that has both at the same
time. It just can't be.”(51) The Lost Tribe of black, giant
Jews is a fantasy of absolute freedom from those oppressions, which
is the real reason the artist and his wife can't stay there: they are
living contradictions to the fantasy these giants represent. Dom
3's Rephaim are deathly-pale skinned, rather than black, but a
player can enact half this fantasy, processually creating the story
of a proud, unoppressed Jewish people.

Mythic St. Christopher “the
Christ Bearer” is another such apparition. John Mitchell, in
his speculative art history The Earth Spirit, says of St.
Christopher that “in his person the old giants of the earth
returned to infiltrate the Church.”(52) Though accounts of St.
Christopher are highly inconsistent, he is often described as a
Giant, said to have been a cannibal and a man of war before his
conversion, depicted with a dog's head (mainly in Greek Orthodox and
Coptic North African images), and said to have served as a living
ferry, wading a raging river while transporting travelers on his
back, including an impossibly heavy child who turned out to be an
apparition of the Christ-child, who was in turn bearing the world on
his back. The conflation of Giants and gods here is amazing:
like the Nephilim he was ravenous and cannibalistic (prior to his
conversion), like Atlas he bears the world on his shoulders (albeit,
through an intermediary), and he shares traits with gods of the dead,
including the Egyptian dog-headed Anubis and the Greek Charon, the
ferryman, who themselves were conflated after the Roman conquest of
Egypt, in accordance with the Roman practice of assimilation of local
gods to their pantheon, an assimilation preserved in Christianized
Rome through the cult of the Saints.

St. Christopher is a “survival”
of the giants, but also an incident of the good giant as the
exception that proves the evil of giants in general. Thankfully,
this is not the only way to read the giants of Dom 3. With
typical disregard for comfortable interpretations, William Blake
writes of the Antediluvian giants thus: “The Giants who formed
this world into its sensual existence and now seem to live in it in
chains are in truth. the causes of its life & the sources of all
activity, but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds,
which have the power to resist energy. [...] Thus one portion of
being, is the Prolific, the other, the Devouring; to the devourer it
seems as if the producer were in his chains, but it is not so [...]
Messiah or Satan or Tempter was formerly thought to be one of the
Antediluvians, who are our Energies.”(53) If we consider the
Grigori, Nephilim and other Antediluvian giants in this context,
their legendary appetites become projection: we live off of the
giants of the earth, and so must see them as dangerously consuming
and in need of containment. We send out a scapegoat bearing our sins
for Azazel to consume, because we devour his excess carnality and
must do so to live.

For Blake, “Messiah, or Satan,
or Tempter” are not identical, but they can be
indistinguishable, as in gnostic theology where which is generally
perceived as “god” is really the imprisoned and
imprisoning demiurge and the divine is external and elusive. The
difference is that, in gnosticism, the true divine but can be
directly experienced and known, whereas in Blake, there is no
absolute knowability and no consistent alternative to the “demiurge”
- absolutely constancy is imprisoning, the more absolutely constant
the more absolutely imprisoning. Thus he writes not of the good of
the Prolific or the evil of the Devouring, but of the necessity of
both: “whoever seeks to reconcile them seeks to destroy
existence. Religion is an endeavor to reconcile the two.”(54)
Blake is not rejecting faith, belief, or tradition: it is more useful
and accurate to see this as a rejection of the bounding and defining
of the Prolific by dogmatism. Such binding denies the Prolific its
essential character – excess.

Gameplay as Intervention

It is excess and inconsitency that
ultimately defines the giants of Dom 3: however deep the
references run and whatever their implications are, the act of
gameplay unsettles them. The very premise of the game – that
the god over all has gone awol, and that one of the Pretenders will
rise to the empty throne – demands that any post-game narrative
be incommensurable not only with any other, but with the “general”
history of the “world” as given by in-game description.
That narrative is possible only if no game is played and the balance
of power between the different factions in the game remains in rough
balance.

Even if one imagines the narrative of
Dom as constant struggle between deities with clear losers, but never
a categorical winner (more like Small Gods), gameplay is still
an intervention that creates a narrative of a people and their
struggles.

More precisely, it is the player's
imaginative investment in the game that creates this narrative: the
game engine churns out randomized results, but the player's relative
inability to see the game in strictly symbolic, abstract terms, and
his or her identification with a people who aren't “really”
there (of course, no-one is “really there” in a novel or
even on a movie screen) creates a narrative out of the player's
gameplay decisions.

So, the Kohen Gadol has horns. But
there's nothing simple about that inconography, nor need there be
anything simple about what a player makes of it. That's not to say
that games can't be inherently offensive, nor that basically
inoffensive games can't be played in an offensive way. But Karlsson
and Osterman have produced something rare in Dom 3: a
gameworld rich in reference and interpretability, but without plot,
except as the player narrates through the process of play.

(1)
There are a great number of faerie creatures, including the Sidhe,
but no Tolkeinesque, Elfquest-esque, or generic High Fantasy elves.
There are also no Dwarves in the High Fantasy tradition –
though factions based on the Nordic Aesir and Giants have Dwarven
smiths, after the strange, inhuman Dwarves who made the Ring of Das
Niebelung – a principal source for Tolkein's “one Ring.”

(2) Dom
3: The Awakening manual, p.
4. Except for a few brief passages like that above, the manual is by
Bruce Geryk

(3)
Exodus 28:15a, 17a &
21 – cited from The New JPS Translation of the Tanakh. All
further citations from the
Tanakh) are
also from the New JPS, unless otherwise noted.

(4)
George Sand, qtd. from A Woman's Version of the Faust Legend: The
Seven Strings of the Lyre by George Sand,
trans. George Kennedy, pp. 58-59, 65

(5)
For example, Mustafa Tlass' 1986 The Matzoh of Zion

(6) Dom
3, message displayed at game start.

(7)
Paradise Lost, Book 2,
lines 650-659.

(8)
Small Gods
p.247 (HarperTorch, New York, 2003)

(9)
High unrest (for any reason) increases greatly the chances of people
abandoning the province (effect the same as population death of same
amount). Also, Pretenders who have blood slaves sometimes get a
random event in which a hero kills your guards and frees many of your
slaves.

(10) For
examples of Lovecraft in contemporary occultism, see The
Necronomicon by Simon, which
claims to be the authentic text of the book of the same title, and
Phil Hine's Pseudonomicon,
which approaches Lovecraft's mythos as fiction that nonetheless has
occult signigficance. For examples of Lovecraft in gaming, see
Chaosium's Call of Cthullhu
RPG books, the videogame of the same title, and innumerable others,
from Eternal Darkness
to the Penumbra
series to indie game Night of the Cephalopods.
Night of the Cephalopods
shares with Dom 3 a
kind of “procedural” narrative, where gameplay creates a
narrative structure, as opposed to unlocking prescripted “episodes”
in a pre-plotted story.

(11) Dom 3
keeps track of the number of unburied recently-dead in each province
(“Corpses”), because some spells make use these corpses
(mainly by reanimating them as “Soulless” zombies).
Corpses are the results of natural and magical disasters, pillaging
and other effects that kill civilians too quickly for prompt burial.

(12)
R.E.M., “The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),”
Document, emphasis mine

(13) The
best short description I've been able to come up with for Lovecraft's ultimately-sympathetic
Elder Things (from In the Mountains of Madness),
and one of R'lyeh's monstrous inhabitants in Dom
3.

(14)
Admittedly, the legions of the dead in Army of Darkness
aren't so much mindless as really stupid, in a Three Stooges-esque
vein.

(15) 1
Samuel 17:4b

(16) 1
Samuel 27:2

(17)
Genesis 49:27 & 20

(18) Dom
3, Abba unit description; in
Dom 3, “heretics”
are commanders who preach an alternative to the dominant religion and
therefore reduce the populace's faith in the player's Pretender
(reduce dominion).

(19)
Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Issac is, for my purpose here,
entirely secondary to the resulting prohibition against human
sacrifice.

(20)
Genesis 17:5 “And you shall no longer be called Abram, but your
name shall be called Abraham, for I make you the father of a
multitude of nations.”

(21) Dom
3, Ermor (Early Era)
description

(22) The
Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, p.
481, ed. Martin Abeg Jr., Peter Flint, and Eugene Ulrich. Despite
the prevalence of 1 Enoch fragments, they do not include it in their
Bible “Because the text is available elsewhere, and because of the admittedly speculative
nature of including it even in a Dead Sea Scrolls Bible” (also
p. 481).

(23)
Abeg, Flint and Ulrich give “about 150 BCE to 68 CE” (p.
xv) as the lifespan of the Jewish community at Qumran.

(24)
According to Michael Knibb's The Ethiopic Book of Enoch: A New
Edition in the Light of the Dead Sea Fragments, vol. 2, p. 22\

(25)
I Enoch 6:2 & 7b-8; this, and all other quotations from 1 Enoch
are from Knibb's translation, except as noted otherwise.

(26)
I Enoch 7:1-4&5b

(27)
I Enoch 8:1

(28)
I Enoch 10:9

(29)
The Book of the Giants, qtd. from John Reeves' Jewish Lore in
Manichean Cosmogony: Studies in the Book of Giants Traditions p.
65

(30)
I Enoch 10:12

(31)
I Enoch 10:4-5

(32)
Leviticus 16:8b

(33)
Leviticus 16:21-a, 16:10b

(34)
Dom 3, “Son
of the Fallen” description

(35)
Dom 3, “Release
Lord of Civilization” description

(36)
Dom 3, Melquart
description

(37)
Conquest of Elysium 2 manual (digital file), par. 50

(38)
Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East
(electronic pre-pub.), “Baal” p. 3

(39)
Iconography of Deities and Demons in the Ancient Near East
(electronic pre-pub.), “Melqart” p. 1

(40)
Legends of the Jews (H'aggada), ed. and trans. Louis Ginsberg,
elecronic version, Ch. 3, par. 52
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/loj/loj105.htm>

(41)
1 Enoch 14: 18-19a, for a fuller account see 1 Enoch 14:9-23

(42)
Ezekiel 10:9a, 11a, 12-13

(43)
Dom 3, “Call Merkavah” description. This is one
of a very few instances where the graphical economy of the game is
regrettable: after all of the work that goes into researching and
casting this spell, the summoning itself is marked only with a text
message, like any other ritual spell.

(44)
American Standard Version Bible

(45)
Dom 3 “Chayot” description

(46)
Legends of the Jews (H'aggada), ed. and trans. Louis Ginsberg,
elecronic version, Ch. 3, par. 52
<http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/loj/loj105.htm>

(47)
Numbers 13:22a, 32-33

(48)
Dom 3 “Adon” description

(49)
The Rabbi's Cat 2, p. 122. This form of racist caricature has
also been applied to, among other groups, Indians and Pakistanis
(thus the slur “macaca,” after the Macaque monkey), and
the Irish (through the 19th century). It is also the
origin of the persistent terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow”
to describe more and less intelligent and sophisticated people and
culture.

(50)
The Rabbi's Cat 2, p. 126

(51)
The Rabbi's Cat 2, p. 128 and p. 84

(52)
The Earth Spirit p. 56

(53)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plates 16-17. All citations
of Blake's work are from the Thames & Hudson William Blake:
The Complete Illuminated Books

(54)
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 17

Before
I can get into Battle for
Wesnoth
(Wesnoth)
specifically, I need to establish a baseline for racial and
postcolonial issues in fantasy fiction, including games. This is the
part that would be least controversial in a purely academic setting,
but that I expect will be most controversial on-line.

The short version is this: fantasy, and
especially the subgenre of “Epic” or High Fantasy,
contains colonial, racial and eugenic assumptions, and Tolkien's
work is no exception: quite the opposite, it is the prototype for
other Fantasy in terms of race relations just as it is in terms of
everything else.

Lord of the Rings

There
is an absolute notion of racial superiority in LotR:
Elves are superior in every way, Hobbits are morally superior to
Humans, themselves divided into a variety of races from the superior
High Men of old to the debased (and Orientalized) Southrons, Dwarves
are literally children of a lesser god,(1) and Orcs, the descendents
of corrupted Elves, are intellectually and morally impovrished.
Dungeons and Dragons
(DnD), which
shifted over time from imitating Tolkien's oeuvre to competing with
Middle Earth for the role of standardbearer for the genre, obscures
this “great chain of being”(2) in the name of game
balance. On a tangent, MMORPGs like Everquest
and World of Warcraft
(WoW) are now
competing with DnD
for the role, as is evidenced by the MMORPG-like DnD
4.0.

One
of the most important, and generally unquestioned, assumptions of
Fantasy is in the word “race.” In Science Fiction, most
“aliens” are, implicitly or explicitly, a different
species,
a modern scientific term that presumes an independent origin and
genetic incompatibility. This is not the case in fantasy, where
“race” means very nearly the same thing it did in
colonial English: it describes different “human” peoples,
who are (mostly) sexually compatible and capable of producing
offspring and differentiated by bloodline or pedigree rather than
heterogynous origin. Good breeding retains its old meaning:
capability and manners are inherited and can be diluted though mixing
with inferior bloodlines. One potential is determined by one's
breeding: Aragon is of the lineage of Kings, whereas Boromir and his
father, Denethor, are stewards and the descendants of stewards –
when they seek to rise above their station, they become corrupt.

As
noted, Tolkien's Dwarves, derived from the Dwarves of Teutonic
legend, have an explicitly separate origin from Humans and Elves and
thus may be a different “species,” but fantasy and
especially DnD
abounds with Half-Elves and other mestizo races such as Half-Orcs and
Half-Dragons. Tolkien's Orcs are explicitly of Elvish stock, an idea
which Peter Jackson explicitly worked into his adaptation of the
books (3). Also in accordance with the old racial and eugenic model,
it is possible to fall (there is no shortage of evil or low men in
Middle Earth, and Elves and even the semi-divine Wizards are not
immune to tempatation; but it is
not
possible to rise. There are no redeemed Orcs in Middle Earth, nor
even any Southrons who see the light. Virtue as well as strength is
in the breeding, and while it can be lost, it cannot be regained.

This
is the root of a certain illogic that persists in Fantasy Gaming:
Orcs, and other sentient but debased creatures are explicitly not
“people” and are generally killed on sight by players,
often preemptively. Even
in games like the Warcraft games, where Humans and Orcs are balanced
and equally playable, they are morally opposed, and it is the Humans
who are associated with virtue. You can play the bad guys, but an
Orc can't be a good guy, almost without exception.

The importance
of all this can be summed up in a simple question: who (not
what) is an Orc? In Jackson's movies, Orcs are primative, bestial,
tribal, simple-minded, easily fooled, ferocious, even fearless in
battle but also cowardly, treasonous and feckless. Visually, they
have sloped foreheads, jutting jaws, irregualar but sharp teeth,
narrow eyes, wide slits for nostrils, pointed ears (their only
Elf-like feature) dark braided or dreadlocked hair, and dark skin.
Jackson resisted the displacement (common in games) of giving them
green skin, which makes the parallel to the colonial view of
indiginous peoples, especially Africans, more obvious. Except for
their High Fantasy weapons and armor, they are the very picture of
the native savage: subhuman, apelike and dangerous, but obviously no
match for the white adventurer.

Saruman's
“perfected” Orcs, the Urok-Hai, die like flies at the
white hands of Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and even Boromir, at the
climax of The Fellowship of the Ring.
They are marked with another white hand, that of Sarumon, whom they
obey slavishly. In The Two Towers,
the Elf and Dwarf make a game of war by competing for the most Orcish
kills at Helm's Deep, anticipating deathmatch computer games like
Quake and Halo
by over fourty years.

After
my last post, I was criticized for pointing out that, in Roach
Toaster, all of the player's
soldiers are white and the enemy is uniformly black or brown –
black anthropomorphic cockroaches in Roach Toaster,
brown giant roaches in the sequel. In Middle Earth, and in most
fantasy, everyone
is Caucasian in complexion except for the Orcs and other inherently
evil races. The only non-white Humans we see in Jackson's films are
the composite “Oriental” Southrons, who combine a
Carthaginian military (in the form of their trained “Oilaphants”),
Moorish North African complexion and dress, and a peppering of far
eastern style. The are the very picture of Edward Said's
Orientalized other: exotic and intriguing while also morally debased
and decontextualized. There is more wiggle room between the words of
Tolkein's original descriptions of these low men, but not much.

The broader conclusion one can draw from this is that, in
Tolkienesque fantasy, Orcs acquire all the traits that colonial
Europe projected onto native peoples. Perhaps the visual power of
Peter Jackson's Orcs is derived from the pan-Australian (Jackson
being from New Zealand) cultural imagination of the aboriginal
peoples of the region. In any case, he creates an almost Shaka
Zulu-like figure in the Uruk-Hai general, who becomes more of a
character in his own right than any of the Orcs in Tolkien's text,
though no effort is made to make him sympathetic.

Battle for
Wesnoth

Wesnoth
is an open-source Fantasy strategy game. The standard scenarios that
come with the game fall loosely into the racialization described
above, though there is an Orcish campaign that is much more
Warcraft-like than Tolkienesque in its racialization, viewing Orcs
and Humans as in constant and perhaps necessary conflict, but with
the humans being clearly more civilized and less bloodthirsty than
the Orcs, who enjoy fighting and are Machiavellian in their politics.
That said, I haven't played very far into the “standard”
Orcish campaign, “The Son of Black-Eye,” so it may yet
surprise me. If so, I'll make a follow-up post on the topic.

For
now, I want to consider to user-created scenarios that make a radical
break with fantasy racialization. Each of these scenarios has an
primary creator, but, unlike the single-creator games I considered
in my last post, creation of an original campaign for Wesnoth
tends to be highly collaborative, with many contributors who do
everything from playtesting to creating original art to suggesting
major changes to plot or level design. All the more reason to
consider these campaigns (and of Wesnoth
as a whole) in terms of their content alone, without regard to
authorial intent (my general methodology, and standard practice in
most literary study).

From here on, this post gets more scholarly and theoretical. I will
explain the terminology as I go, but non-academics may need to refer
to Wikipedia or even a dictionary of philosophy.

“Flight to Freedom”

Like nearly everything else in the open-source Wesnoth, the
creation of “Flight to Freedom” was made possible by
voluntary, unpaid collaboration. That said, “Flight to
Freedom” was originated by MadMax (forum handle), who is also
the principle creator and designer of the campaign.

The
protagonists in “Flight to Freedom” are Drakes, flying
lizard men who are most similar to DnD's
Draconians. Their racialization in “Flight to Freedom”
is that of the colonized native people, though in a symapthetic
“postcolonial” sense, as they are neither the
intellectual nor moral inferiors of the Knights of Wesnoth, and their
vulnerability to invasion, enslavement and literal colonization is a
result of the greed of humans and not a failing of the Drakes. Even
as they are treated sympathetically, they are not idealized, to the
campaign's credit: the “noble savage” is just as
colonized a figure as the slave and the headhunter.

The basic premise for “Flight to Freedom” is a shock: in
the opening narrative of the campaign, humans land on the Drakes'
island, and a tribal leader, Malakar, sends his daughter to parley
with them. She is killed out of hand, and the first scenario
consists of the humans overwhelming the player-controlled Drakes.
The player is expected to lose, though a campaign fork allows
the player to retreat into the swamp and ally with another tribe,
which only postpones defeat – the humans always conquer the
Drakes.

Either way, the surviving Drakes are captured and sold into slavery,
their young held captive to ensure their compliance. When Malakar
leads a slave revolt (this occurs in the second scenario of the
original campaign) the young Drakes are whipped and, if the player
does not move quickly enough, killed.

By this point, anyone familiar with High Fantasy can see a few
familiar tropes, and a number of departures. As many posters on the
forum for the campaign noted, the deposed king or surviving heir who
must recover his (nearly always his) kingdom is a common theme
in Fantasy, being, for example, the plot of “Heir to the
Throne,” a classic Wesnoth
campaign to which others are inevitably compared. Being sold
into slavery, usually in the Romanesque form of gladiatorial or
galley slavery, is also a common theme in pulp fantasy like that of
Edgar Rice Burrows and Robert E. Howard.

However, the narrative of “Flight to Freedom” undermines
the individualism and egocentrism of that scenario. The figure of
the rightful heir to the throne is not only mediaeval, it is
fundamentally patriarchal and oedipal: his battle cry is “my
people need me” which is just a reformulation of “le
etat c'est moi.” The “people” are infantilized
and oedipalized by this claim: only the great man of state can save
them. The absolute war of these scenarios amounts to a scorched
earth campaign: “if I can't be king, no one can,” a
notion so selfish that it can only be justified by the demonization
of the enemy (the party in power). In High Fantasy, the false king
is usually literally demonized as a figure of supernatural evil. In
LotR this is true, if one degree removed: it is the diabolical
evil of Sauron that forces Aragorn to reclaim the throne of Gondor
from its inferior Stewards.

“Flight to Freedom” deviates from this model: Malakar is
neither deposed nor separated from his tribe. His status as chieftain
is not only of no concern to the Knights of Wesnoth, it is
impercerptible: they see all Drakes as interchangeable. In fact,
they are semi-interchangeable, with Malakar serving less as the
exceptional Drake than as an “icon” of Drake life (3).
The collective identity of the Drakes is singularized (made into a
single instance) in him. When Malakar broods over the murder of his
daughter, that is our window onto the loss of family that all of his
tribe has suffered. His slow coming to acceptance of the human
pirate, Kogw, is analogous to the Drakes' experience of a suddenly
broader world, one that can never resume its precolonial shape. This
analogy is not complete, as it suggests that, if Malakar were to die
,another Drake would take his place, whereas, if Malakar unit dies in
a scenario, it's game over (in the Wesnoth engine, this is
normal).

The
experience of the Drakes in “Flight to Freedom” is almost
unheard-of in fantasy: they are captured en-masse and shipped oversea
to serve as plantation slaves. In early posts to the campaign forum,
there is concern that plantation slavery is “inappropriate”
and some posters complain that the scenerio is “un-Wesnothish.”
This discomfort may have its roots in the “Human”-centric
thinking common to High Fantasy (albeit absent in LotR,
where the “English” Hobbits steal the show). Early in
“Flight to Freedom's” development, turin posts: “Wesnoth
belongs to the humans. Drakes should not take over wesnoth.”(4)
Wesnoth's
Humans are typical fantasy Humans: that is to say that they are are a
white, feudal, “Arthurian” race. Dark skin is reserved
for non-human races, as are non-european styles, such as curved
swords and loincloths. After a while, these concerns cease to be
points of debate and
the parallels between the campaign and American history (and thus an
implicit rejection of the norms of High Fantasy) are generally
accepted.

Forum poster DavidByron is the first to justify the campaign in terms
of American history: “Slave
revolts are an interesting feature of US history. They usually don't
go well because the ruling class has all the advantages. As I
understand from reading the comments in this thread you have the
Drakes becoming something of a criminal mob, (beating up a caravan,
teaming up with pirates) as they attempt to flee back towards home --
a basically sound approach to an impossible dream. What else could
they do indeed?”(5). This kind of reasoning makes the text
narrative of “Flight to Freedom” morally complex, with
Malakar's decisions more often pragmatic than noble.

It is not merely the scripted story of Flight to Freedom that is
atypical: the nomadism,(6) morality, and pragmatism of the Drakes
are reflected in gameplay (“ludology”). In general, war
games are about taking and holding territory, and this is built into
the Wesnoth engine: units are recruited at “camps”
or “castles” by a singular “leader” and
conquer “villages” to increase a player's income. A
typical scenario for the game pits two or more players in a “war
of all against all”(7) to conquer all of the villages and kill
all other leaders. Though some of the scenarios in “Flight to
Freedom” follow this model, in many of them the goal is simply
travel: a pure nomadology, a line of flight.(8)

The Drakes are well-equipped for this: almost all of their units can
literally fly. In-game, this smooths out the striation of space
created by different kinds of terrain. This metaphor is carried
through ludologically: when the Drakes are enslaved, they loose the
ability to fly, and they only regain this ability after they kill
their master. Impeded travel scenarios are the most common challenge
in “Flight to Freedom.” The organized retreat is a
strategy game trope, but it is usually used sparingly and early on in
fantasy games, the prelude to a triumphal conquest. In “Flight
to Freedom” there are no classic fighting retreats (e.g. “hold
line X for Y turns, then fall back to Z”), but the player must
do all the following: flee superior forces, escape from a flanked
position, fall back on one front while advancing on another, contain
(rather than destroy) enemy forces, and maneuver through dangerous
and/or hostile territory as unobtrusively as possible.

In one scenario, while at sea with a pirate flotilla, the player must
pass through pea-soup fog (literalized fog of war) and evade sea
serpents and other monsters. It is impossible to win by fighting
though: instead, careful exploration and maneuvering and the
judicious sacrifice of your ships is necessary to get your flagship
through. Much later in the campaign, you have to sail though someone
else's warzone. Both sides will attack you, given a chance, and you
can't hold against either side, let alone both, so you must slip
through. But the most interesting scenario, and the one both most
commented on and most hated on the forum, was “River of
Skulls.”

The scenario is this: the Drakes are forced to flee undergound,
pursued by the Knights of Wesnoth, with no idea of where to go from
there. The Dwarves who live in the caves react with anger, and the
player must survive while trying to figure out what to do. Game
mechanics make it impossible to negotiate with the Dwarves, but
narrative text makes it clear that the goal of the scenario is to
find an exit, not to annhiliate the Dwarves, and defeating all
“enemy” groups, though possible, is not sufficient to win
the game (unlike most strategy games, where more specific goals can
be ignored if one wipes out the opposition). As escape is the goal
of many of “Flight to Freedom's” scenarios, “River
of Skulls”isn't unusual in that aspect.

What makes “River of Skulls” unique is that, to a degree
unequaled in any other scenario in the campaign, the Drakes' freedom
of movement is negated. Not only is the map a set of twisty little
passages (9), but the Drakes cannot fly in these small spaces, so
their movement is reduced greatly. The only advantage they derive
from having wings is that they can cross the occasional rift or pit
in the cave floor. In DeleuzoGuattarian terms, this is a highly
striated space (10). Striation is not evenhanded: in the caves, the
Drakes and Dwarves alike can only move along existing “paths,”
but the Drakes do so slowly and awkwardly (11), whereas the
archetypically slow Dwarves negotiate the caves with ease (perhaps
because they are too short to hit their heads on the stalactites) and
enjoy a high defense (dodge) rate. The final injury is that the
Drakes get a bonus at day and a penalty at night, and in the caves it
always counts as night. As a result, fighting through the Dwarves is
slow and difficult, bottleneck to bottleneck, with every unexplored
passage a risk of being flanked and every open space a risk of
encirclement.

The goal of “River of Skulls,” when it is eventually
revealed, is to move Malakar to a position on the bottom of the map,
so the “default” tactic for most strategy games (and
nearly all RTS games) of gradual expansion and resource accumulation
doesn't work. Nova, a poster who became a major contributor to
“Flight to Freedom” says of this part of the campaign
that “These next couple of missions are a Drake
deathmarch.”(12) This comment evokes the Bataan deathmarch
and, more interestingly, the trail of tears.(13) While the Drakes
are going home rather than being forced from it, playing “River
of Skulls” confirms the narrative and ludological truth of
this.

To successfully navigate the “River of Skulls,” the
player must recognize that that this scenario rewrites rules of the
game, as played up to this point. Instead of fighting against the
restrictions imposed by this highly striated space, one must figure
out how to take advantage of them. One possible strategy is to use
the bottlenecks to contain and bypass the Dwarven Lords and their
soldiers, rather than besieging them. This requires two changes in
the player's behavior, however. The first is the shift from thinking
of the Drakes as highly mobile, tough (high HP) units to thinking of
them as slow and vulnerable. The second, more difficult shift
requires that the player choose not to explore and conquer the
entire map. The second shift in thinking is the true “line of
flight” for the Drake war machine, because exploration and
conquest are basic components of Wesnoth and the entire genre
of strategy gaming. Deterritorializing strategy gaming in this way
necessarily throws the other conventions of the genre into question.
The ludological feeds back into the narrative, giving new meaning to
the game text in which Malakar claims that the Dwarves are not his
people's enemies and that the Drakes should only fight them where
necessary.

As a result, “River of Skulls” raises the question of
whether we, as players, should take pride in wiping out the enemy in
any videogame. This question of in-game violence, usually raised
only by the mainstrean media and only in terms of graphic 3-d
violence, is a nonstarter with most gamers. The common response is
“it's just a game.” And it is just a game, but I am far
from the first to suggest that we are trying to have our cake and eat
it too: if nothing one does in a game matters outside the game, then
games cannot be meaningful or useful in any way; but if games can be
meaningful, their meaning can be objectionable.(14) In my last post,
I praised Remar's Iji for offering narrative rewards for
keeping one's body count low in a genre (platform shooter) when
carnage is the norm. There is no narrative reward for sparing the
Dwarves in “Flight to Freedom,” but there are several
strategic rewards: a “contain and bypass” strategy not
only speeds up play, but it allows the Drakes to gain experience and
level up (necessary to success in future scenarios) with less risk of
getting pinned down and killed.

A slower, but viable and more conventional strategy is to work
cave-to-cave, keeping one's strongest units close together, putting
low-level (expendable) units first when entering open areas, and
making sure that no Dwarves, and especially no Dwarven Lords (who can
recruit new units) are left in one's wake. This leave-no-survivors
strategy makes the turn counter one's real opponent: extermination is
easy, but extermination in a hurry is hard. The image of one Drakes
scouring the Dwarves' subterranean home their fire breath evokes
unpleasant images of 20th century brushfire wars and
ethnic cleansings. Of course, “ethnic cleansing” is the
goal of many strategy games and CRPGs, whether one is cleaning out a
cave full of Orcs or nuking a Zerg hive. At the same time, the
“bypass” strategy I've described is similar to the
Rumsfeld gambit in the drive to Baghdad. It might be a good way to
pass through a hostile space, but its a lousy way to start an
occupation.

The darkest part of “Flight to Freedom's” narrative
unfolds after“River of Skulls.” The “river”
is of lava, and following it's path is too much even for the
descendants of Dragons. We are told that many Drakes die in the
journey, but all of your soldier units survive. This may be a
concession to playability, but it also makes a sad kind of narrative
sense: soldiers may die in battle, but civilians are more likely to
die of hunger, disease or exposure resulting from shortages war
damage and the necessity of procuring for the soldiers. This
tragedy prepares the player for the first scenario after the Drakes
finally return to the surface. As soon as they are out in the open
air, Malakar's chief lieutenant,
Theracar, rebels. The player is forced to put down the
uprising in an easy scenario: apparently, all of one's experienced
units remain loyal, and fighting Theracar's low-level rebels feels
less like a battle than a purge. That ugly aftermath of colonial
rule, ethnic cleansing, lurks under the surface of this scenario as
well as in “River of Skulls.” The horror is mitigated by
narrative text telling us that Malakar forgives the surviving rebels
after Theracar's death.

In military terms, Theracar commits mutiny, but the Drakes are a
tribe, and the rebellion is an issue of tribal identity: the
Drakes had to flee underground because they refused to give Kogw up
to the Elves, who promised safe passage away from the Wesnothians in
exchange for the pirate (15). Malakar justifies this decision by
adopting Kogw into the tribe. As all members of a Drake tribe are
Drakes, this also makes Kogw a Drake. Theracar claims that he has a
legitimate claim to challenge Malakar not only because of the deaths
of tribe members, but because Malakar broke the law in admitting Kogw
to the tribe. His case is that Kogw is not a Drake, so his admission
to the tribe was not just a mistake but an abomination.

This is more complex than it seems. Once again, it is important to
remember that this is fantasy and that Drakes, like Humans and Elves,
are races. The concept of species does not exist in this
contex. Since before history, human tribes, nations and family
groups have adopted individuals of other ethnic groups into their
society. A slave captured in battle may remain an outsider, but
someone (almost always a woman) who marries in becomes a member of
that group in every way. This was certainly true in colonial
America, where white women were sometimes taken captive by Native
Americans in raids: some were ransomed, but others married into the
tribe, becoming members not just of that family group but also of
that nation. In this context, Theracar is saying that Kogw cannot be
a member of the tribe because of the color of his skin (and his lack
of scales). The most morphologically distinctive traits of Drakes,
wings and the ability to breathe fire, are not possessed by all
Drakes, and so cannot be considered integral. We do not even know if
Drakes and Humans are sexually incompatible: if the anthropomophic
Drakes are “half-Dragons,” the other “half”
is implicitly human.

Thoughout the campaign, Kogw is engaged in a “becoming”
Drake,(16) a motion that can never reach it's goal. In The Ritual
Process, anthropologist Victor Turner described rites of passage
as involving a period of “liminality,” in which one's
former status is lost but no new status has been established. When
Deleuze and Guattari speak of becoming (becoming animal, becoming
woman, becoming imperceptible), they are talking about something
similar, but entirely “positive,” which is not to say
entirely good, merely that, like a line of flight it is a motion
towards, not a motion away from. Considered this way, some of the
apparent contractitions resolve themselves: Kogw never ceases to be
Human, he is just moving towards a Drake identity, which never
requires him to grow scales or breathe fire precisely because
it is never complete. In short, Kogw's becoming Drake is like
Turner's state of ritual liminality, only without its defining
characteristic, as the previous state is never (fully) lost, and the
“result” is never fully achieved.

Similarly, as Drake units level up, they are engaged in a becoming
Dragon, which reaches its highest degree in the Armageddon Drake, the
most powerful Drakish unit, described in-game as follows: “Were
it not for the armor they wear, some drakes might be
indistinguishable from true dragons.” What marks them as still
(and forever) becoming rather than being Dragon is a matter of
clothing: a “human” trait (in the general rather than the
High Fantasy sense), the icon of that which they cannot leave behind
. In “River of Skulls” there is a more unexpected
becoming Dragon: there is a statue of a Drake, and when one moves a
unit in front of it, that unit is lost only to be replaced by a
Skeleton Dragon.(17) Narrative text explains that the unit died in a
rockfall which woke the undead Dragon, but the gameplay effect is one
of becoming. Even here, the process of becoming Dragon is not
complete, though perhaps in the opposite direction: the the Skeleton
Dragon is not a complete Dragon (lacking organs and skin) because it
is becoming dead: that is to say, it cannot fully die.

In a scenario that comes shortly after the defeat of Theracar's
rebels, Kogw convinces Malakar that the Drakes must destroy the Gate
of Storms, a supernatural portal whose opening threatens the entire
world. This influence is made possible by Kogw's status as an
(incomplete) Drake and a member of the tribe, an shift singularized
in Malakar opening up to Kogw for the first time. By this point, the
Drakes' efforts to return home have earned them the emnity not only
of the Knights of Wesnoth, but also of the Elven, Dwarven and Oricsh
nations.

Narratively speaking, the Drakes don't have to lift a taloned finger:
there are four other armies in the area who could be left to deal
with the problem. Moreover, as those armies are hostile and in
pursuit of the Drakes, this would be strategically practical.
Instead, the Drakes give their pursuers a chance to catch up by
stopping to fight the storm demons and destroy the gate. One might
expect the campaign to end here, with the other races thanking the
Drakes for saving them, but “Flight to Freedom” is not so
melodramatic. Upon completion of this scenario, nothing changes.
Not only are the Drakes are not honored as heroes, but their good
deed goes not only unrewarded but apparently unnoticed. This strikes
another postcolonial note: as the Drakes are a “lesser”
race, their accomplishments are below the notice of the “civilized”
Elves and Wesnothians. This makes them subaltern in Gayatri Spivak's
sense of the word (18), albeit not fully, as the player sees things
from the Drakes' perspective.

When Malakar's Drakes get home, they find that their island has
literally been colonized, and the rest of the Drakes enslaved and
forced to work in mines. There is even a new unit representing the
children of the slaves, described as “suffer[ing] from stunted
growth and other deformations.” Metaphorically, these “Cave
Drakes” read as the victims of malnourishment and child labor,
physically and psychically scarred: “their internal fire never
burns as intensely” as it should.

In the end, “Flight to Freedom,” is nuanced and
“realistic” enough that there is no possibility of
justice and no point in retribution. However, it would be wrong for
me to conclude by giving the impression that this campaign is
intended to be didactic or depressing: gameplay is challenging and
enjoyable even as it breaks with High Fantasy conventions and raises
doubts about the in-game good of in-game violence. Doubtless some
players will feel that I am “reading too much into it,”
the perennial argument against attention to detail. To them I can
only say that it is not my goal to set MadMax or anyone else up as a
hero, or to demonize Tolkien, Wesnoth or High Fantasy: these
things are what they are. It is merely important to recognize the
history and assumptions that undergird any work of any genre,
especially those we consider to be “innocent,” “escapist”
or “fantasy.” “Flight to Freedom” seems to
be more aware of its own “ancestry” than most games, and
to do more with it. Minimally, it injects a little ethical decision
making and moral complexity into a typically ruthless genre, and,
contrary to the conventional wisdom, that makes it more, not less,
fun.

I may follow this post up with one considering another user-designed
campaign for Wesnoth, “Ooze Mini Campaign,” which
upends the concept of “monster” in a way somewhat like
“Flight to Freedom” does to fantasy “Races.”

(1)
JRR Tolkien, The Silmarilion.
(2) The “great
chain of being” is connected to the mediaeval Christian
justification of the “divine right” of kings to rule: the
basic idea is that there is an absolute hierarchy to reality, with
angels above kings, kings above nobles, above commoners etc. This is
a common theme in Shakespeare.
(3) In Peircian
semiotics, an “icon” is a sign that represents something
else by possessing the same traits as the thing it represents:
computer icons are not icons in the Peircian sense.
(4) “Flight
to Freedom” Forum, p. 1
(5) “Flight
to Freedom” Forum, p. 24
(6) I take the
term “nomadism” from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
along with several other key terms used here. In A Thousand
Plateaus, the nomad and the war machine are associated, as both
operate by ignoring or overcoming “territorialization” -
that is, they do not respect boundaries. The “war machine”
in this context is separated from the military organization (army) of
a nation-state, as the latter is a structure designed to direct and
contain the functioning of the war machine. The state operates by
capture and negotiation, which create boundaries: e.g.
“territorialization.” The war machine
de-territiorializes, breaking boundaries. Thus, being arrested by
the police for trespassing is illustrative of the behavior of state
power, whereas being swept away by a flash flood is illustrative of
the operation of the war machine.
(7) Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan
(8) A line of
flight is an escape from control: an act of “deterritorialization”
(see note 6). In A Thousand Plateaus, lines of flight are
associated with thought that reaches for the unthinkable: this is
most emphatically not “thinking outside the box” because
that presupposes an already known inside and outside: a simple
dichotomy of confinement and freedom. A line of flight is not an
escape from something (it is not reactionary), but an escape to
something, that is, an act of discovery. All lines of flight, if
successful, end in reterritorializations, that is in reestablish a
new set of boundaries and norms (the Drakes' flight is aimed at the
impossible: the recovery of the past; but that is not to say that it
is unsuccessful as a “line of flight”).
(9) Twisty
Little Passages by Nick Montfort is the definitive work on
interactive fiction (IF), or “text adventure” games. The
relevance of this to Wesnoth is twofold: one, that it shares a
common ancestor with IF in DnD; and two, that, from my perspective,
the narratology/ludology divide in games is useful but also a false
dichotomy and that videogame narrative is produced by the process of
play. This may be the subject of a later post.
(10) In “The
Smooth and the Striated” from a Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and
Guattari describe how a space (physical, social, or psychological)
can be relatively smooth or striated. These are not opposites: one
might speak of perfect smoothness as a striation “value”
of zero, and absolute striation as having an infinite value. To the
degree that a space is striated, it resists lines of flight (new
ideas or unexpected behavior). Moreover, what is not permitted is,
to some degree, unthinkable (moving through the cave wall, for
example, or “up” off the map and off the computer
screen). In a purely smooth space, any motion would be a line of
flight.
(11) In this
context, “awkward” means unable to dodge attacks.
(12) “Flight
to Freedom” Forum, p. 33
(13) The trail
of tears refers the forced march of several Native American nations
to reservations west of the Mississippi in the 1830s, especially the
particularly brutal treatment of the Cherokee, about a third of whom
died in concentration camps or along the way.
(14) For
example, Mitch Dyer voices a similar concern in his “To the
Front Lines” (from The Escapist issue 167: “Boot
Camp”)
(15) The player
knows, though Malakar does not, that the Elves do not intend to honor
the deal, because the Drakes are monsters – e.g., they are not
“people.” The denigration of a race, ethnicity or
culture as sub-human or savage has been the justification for
everything from the breaking of treaties with indiginous peoples to
the horror of the Holocaust.
(16) “becoming”
specifically in the DeleuzoGuattarian sense (explained in-text)
(17) In an
earlier version of the game, the Skeleton Dragon was hostile.
(18) Deleuze and
Guattari write about “becoming imperceptible” in much the
same way they write about “becoming woman” - in both
cases, it is motion toward something that is not “supposed to
be” part of middle-class, white, male, western identity. The
Drakes, as a colonized people, have been made imperceptible:
individual Drakes do not matter to the Wesnothians, and everything
they do will be read in terms of their perceived inferiority. In
Spivak's sense of the subaltern, the truly oppressed are those who
are denied the opportunity for self-definition or even to speak
against how they are defined by others. From the player's
perspective, the Drakes are anything but subaltern: one experiences
them in their own words, but if one imagines a Wesnothian perspective
on the Drakes, they are fully defined before they do or say anything,
and, as a result, anything they do or say will be interpreted as
conforming to that definition.

The article is short and the study focused on one MMO, Everquest II; however, it does offer some positive stats:

• "Adult gamers have an average body mass index of 25.2, compared to the overall American average of 28"
• "The average gamer also engages in vigorous exercise once or twice a week, which the researchers say is more than most Americans"
• "Although fewer women played the game, those who did typically played for longer than men"

The negative findings:

• "Gamers reported more cases of depression and substance abuse than their compatriots"

The article doesn't go into details about how the researchers qualify "substance abuse" and "depression," which does leave room for debate. However, I think this study is another example of how negative perceptions of video games and the people who play them are being challenged and proven incorrect. The article cites the study as being published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol 13, p 993, but neglects to add that it is in issue 4. After some digging, I was able to find the study here.

*Also seen on pauseponderplay.com