Bruce Campbell, rhetoric, and Afrocentricity

I remember the first gaming convention I ever attended…and I wasn’t even there for the games. After high school a couple of friends and I drove to Columbus, Ohio because Bruce Campbell was the headliner at the con. While wandering the convention, my friends and I stood alongside a table playing some Star Wars roleplaying game.  One player made a wide slashing gesture with his arms, “And I cut him with my lightsaber!” The other players looked impressed. We looked askance. At the time neither my friends nor I had ever played a tabletop rpg and it seemed so…weird.  Our sense of what was “normal” was challenged watching those players. According to theorist Molefi Kete Asante, Western society is a little like my friends and me, failing to understand that our culture has deeply and powerfully shaped what we regard as normal.  Asante’s scholarship of Afrocentricity presents a worldview contrary to Western norms which seeks to offer a powerful alternative worldview.

Watching a table of roleplay gamers might feel like observing a foreign culture.  If the players have had a lot of time together, the norms, rules, and expectations are held in common. The language choices could appear like jargon to an outsider but make perfect sense to the players and dungeonmaster. Those norms are probably not thought about consciously very often-and may only become salient when a new player joins or when the players know they’re being observed by a nosy teen. Watching those people play that Star Wars rpg in 1997, I looked down on those players as odd-balls, strange and not nearly as normal as my friends and me. 

The tendency to judge from our own limited cultural frame is commonplace. However, if we want to understand African and African American customs, we must understand the cultures which produced them. Asante’s work foregrounds African and African diaspora culture to counter Eurocentrism. I see this as a key theory to think about as we build our home games and homebrew fantasy worlds. Many roleplay games, including Dungeons & Dragons, include a variety of character backgrounds and cultures which may be more or less dominant in your home setting. How might a culture (or group’s) value, intellect, and contributions perhaps be minimized by another culture dominated by others?

The kind of domination Asante sees is less overt, a kind of hegemony which invisibly serves to allow one group to dominate another. Perhaps, in your campaign, Elves are the most long-lived. Their architecture is beautiful; their food is more delicious and fulfilling than any other; their aesthetics are the hallmark of attractiveness. If all things elven are highly valued, does that not serve to devalue the culture, art, and food of dwarves and orcs? Additionally, if the beauty of elves is presumed to be the norm, it would seem that dwarves and orcs would face at least some pressure in this dominant elven culture to conform, assimilate, and (if only tacitly) agree to the deliciousness of lembas bread and the beauty of Galadriel. 

For scholars of Afrocentrism, there is a focus on liberating people from Eurocentric ways of thinking and knowing that unconsciously place legitimacy within a Western frame. First, the value of communication scholarship directed toward liberation and utility is a core assumption of Afrocentricity. A second core assumption is that life’s nature is primarily spiritual rather than material. Western scholars tend to make primary the physical, material world. For a scholar studying African culture and communication, emphasis may be placed on knowledge gained from the spirit realm. Thirdly, identity is crucially sourced from culture. Thus, a fully formed sense of self must include a rich amalgam of historical, cultural, and biological perspectives, lest one feel dislocated. For example, if the texts under study, the schools, the lists of scholars, and the spells are all elven…the dwarves and orcs are forced to live their lives through the cultural eyes of another.

For a roleplay game to be immersive, it may need to be freed from the sourcebooks and DM notes in which it is held. The heart of rpgs is in their communal, cooperative, and simultaneously lived and played experience.  Unlike many Western products which prioritize the written world, roleplay games prioritize more impromptu oral communication. From my perspective, the Dogon people of Mali’s term Nommo (meaning the spiritual power of the spoken word to be both generative and productive) holds an interesting implication for roleplay gamers and dungeonmasters. Nommo introduces a spiritual element to speaking that is absent in Eurocentric assessments of rhetoric. One way in which Nommo makes itself known is in the often improvisational speaking style characteristic of African communication. Frequently this style of delivery means that the message is only partially prepared. The audience members help to shape and co-create the speaker’s message as the presentation continues. Thus, a speaker needs to be prepared to respond to a whole variety of responses and outcomes to their words and actions. This sounds just like being a DM.  

In my experience, it does little good to fully prepare for a gaming session by writing out every contingency, or by preparing dialogue, descriptions, and backstories for every NPC. To me, this has often proven to be a waste of time. Players go left when you want them to go right. They kill the NPC you wanted them to befriend and befriend a goblin you thought they would kill. They suspect traps where there are none and don’t look for traps where you’ve placed them. In truth, part of what makes roleplay gaming so fun is that improvisational nature. 

Indeed, much like the call-and-response communication style common in African communities and in Black church communities, players will often give the DM plenty of both verbal and nonverbal feedback on the story, the message, and the NPCs throughout the gameplay. Thus, if the DM is paying attention and wants to honor the interests of their players, then this kind of participatory table allows for on-the-fly adjustments to the game that make it feel responsive, alive, and at times spiritual.