Our Second-Greatest Gift

Art from the 'American Kingdoms' project by Vincent De Nil, an alt-history designer and developer. You can see the finished Medieval American Flag design in his shop, or read more about Kaiser Cat Cinema and the project behind it.

    

"For this end, wee must be knitt together, in this worke, as one man. Wee must entertaine each other in brotherly affection. Wee must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of other’s necessities. Wee must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekeness, gentlenes, patience and liberality. Wee must delight in eache other; make other’s conditions our oune; rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, allwayes haueving before our eyes our commission and community in the worke, as members of the same body. Soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace." — John Winthrop, "City upon a Hill" speech, 1630. 

    

"I will have my own kingdom." — Conan the Destroyer, 1984.

        

We didn't plan this—AlphabeticalAnonymous began writing his entries for The Search for Freedom almost a year ago—but it seems fitting and proper that the game is on the "active" list (and coming to its pinnacle—just as America celebrates its 250th birthday. AA has drawn all of his subtitles from the document that inaugurated the new nation, written by a brilliant but flawed man, one of the founding fathers of a brilliant but flawed nation.

   

Today we celebrate a quarter millennium of that nation's existence, now the oldest alive under the same written Constitution, and there are times that we seem more flawed than ever. And yet I hoisted my flag this morning with pride. That pride is in some ways defiant; the kind of pride that says yes, there are many ways in which we suck and have continued to suck, but come and show me another country with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning. But it's also a pride borne from what I see as the first great American virtue: a firm belief in the inevitability of both national and personal progress.

    

Or, to use another term, leveling up.

       

       

My country was born at the dawn of a new era for humanity—an era in which life started to steadily get better for most people. The job of the farmer plowing his field barely changed between ancient times and about 1800, and then all of a sudden farmers had the cotton gin, the mechanical reaper, the steel plow, and the gasoline-powered tractor. In 1800, the average person rarely strayed far from home; a century later, people rode on steamboats, trains, and automobiles (with vulcanized rubber tires) and were about to get wings. Communication with distant places in 1800 was an expensive and lengthy process that was out of reach for the average person; a century later, they had telegraphs, telephones, and phonographs. The drudgery of daily life in that period was made easier by electricity, sewing machines, typewriters, fountain pens, and refrigeration. Not all of this progress was American in origin, but we were the standard-bearers of it, the nation that inspired much of it and reflected all of it. If some other nation invented it, America probably reverse-engineered it, improved it, and mass-produced it.

        

During the same time, we made progress on our sins. We ended slavery, ended segregation, ended legal discrimination, and elected a Black president. We stopped making territorial acquisition the object of our wars. We expanded democracy, expanded the franchise, funded arts and sciences, kicked off the New Deal, and legalized gay marriage. We welcomed immigrants. With a 300-foot statue. Sure, we gave them a hard time for a generation, but then we embraced them and added their distinctiveness to our ever-evolving culture. We took the lead in establishing the United Nations, the body that will perhaps someday help bring our excesses into check. We have much work still to do still, but no end to the line of individuals willing to carry the flag even against stubborn resistance.

     

       

Americans level up. We get better. We get stronger. We grind. We atone. We apologize (sometimes dragged kicking and screaming). Even when the majority of us are doing something wrong, there's usually a group shouting and pleading for us to start doing it right. That minority becomes the majority. We invent. We learn from our mistakes. We don't just dream of a better future; we make plans for it. We go to the moon.

   

We still have many, many flaws—many sins for which we have not atoned. But like any patriot, I love my country despite those flaws, perhaps even because of them. What a boring country we would be if we had no flaws! What future would we look to if we had already arrived? What chance would there be for any of us to be pioneers of progress? American patriotism—indeed, patriotism everywhere—means not loving your country uncritically, but loving it enough that you want it to do better, that you want to help it move forward. 

            

Progress is rarely a straight line, alas. We hit roadblocks, bumps, obstacles. We get busted down a level or two by a vampire. An intellect devourer makes us all stupid for a while. Afraid of change or at least disliking the pace of it, people resist the inevitable. They secede; they lynch; they gerrymander. They march Japanese citizens to internment camps. They plant themselves in front of the doors to schools in Little Rock. Their tactics sometimes work to delay the march of progress, but not to halt it. (I think it's insane that they don't see how futile their efforts are even as they're doing them.) Many people in my country today will not be hoisting their flags, will not be enjoying lobster rolls and cheeseburgers and fireworks, because they believe that we're so deep in one of these setbacks that the nation is no longer worth celebrating, even on its birthday. I feel sorry for them. I believe that in the not-so-distant future, when all the woes of today will seem like a bad dream, they will regret having squandered this chance.

       

                 

Equal to our commitment to societal progress is our belief in the virtues and possibilities of individual progress. Our society is awash in literature, entertainment, speakers—propaganda, to some extent—that encourage us to "level up." Our holy trinity is Dale Carnegie, Charles Atlas, and Tony Robbins. We even bent old-world religion to it, in the form of the "prosperity gospel." It's in our DNA, the idea (oversimplified but not entirely false) that a mail-room clerk can end up as CEO, that talent and hard work is all you need to go from rags to riches, that the only royalty is earned royalty. It is our origin myth, the defining separation between the new world and the old world, where emphasis on clan and caste served to suppress the primacy of the individual. If such things are increasingly untrue of the "old world," I would suggest that America's example had a lot to do with that. 

    

Although I'd probably wax about the virtues of my country on such a momentous birthday anyway, all of this does have relevance to my blog. I don't think it's a coincidence that RPGs are an American invention. I'm not talking about the concept of "role-playing," which goes back to ancient times, nor the thematic nature of most RPGs, which we owe to a Brit. (Although let's not forget American Robert Howard!) I'm talking about the character sheet. I'm talking about experience points. These are the ultimate expression of self-improvement, of progress, of leveling up, in ways that we can measure and quantify. I first encountered this dynamic in a game where a peasant from Geraldtown, irrespective of any existing nobility, becomes a Baron. It is very American to say: start grinding against rats and eventually you'll be able to beat anyone. It is American to ignore thousands of years of history and to see kingship as something you can earn through effort. Look at the way we interpret "role-playing." We insist that it involves making choices consistent with our desires. We think of a game as offering a lot of "role-playing" if it maximizes the character's agency. The term could equally be interpreted as fulfilling one's role rather than defining it. If the RPG had been created in some other cultures, that peasant from Geraldtown would spend the entire game trying his best to be a good peasant.

      

        

It is also very American to focus on the goal and not the means. Sociologists have observed this in anomie theory, a distinct illustration of which is the RPG hero who triumphantly hoists the grail amidst a pile of bodies. Most RPGs, both tabletop and computer, including the earliest, allow the characters to be good or evil, or even to vacillate between the two, in their pursuit of certain objectives. Most players will choose good, and many plots assume that they do, but we still want that choice. We bristle at the idea of having that agency taken from us. And to the extent that we choose to behave virtuously anyway, we want it quantified. We want to be able to visit Hawkwind. We want a karma meter.

       

It took a long time for this approach to RPGs to be understood by the rest of the world; we've seen how many of the early European games just didn't really "get it" when it came to experience and leveling. The nation that grabbed hold of the RPG concept most vigorously was of course Japan, a subject worthy of a much more thorough discussion, but there's an extent to which Japan in the post-war period and through at least the 1980s was consciously trying to emulate American values. It fits.

   

Ah, but I digress into details and lose my original purpose. If you don't agree with my thesis that the RPG as we know it had to be invented in America, you must at least concede that it was. And thus, on the day of our 250th birthday, I ask you to tip your hat, raise your glass, and shout "huzzah" to this magnificent bastard of a nation, this nation that you have at times despised and at times admired, that sometimes has you shaking your head in disgust and sometimes has you dropping your jaw in awe, that for all its flaws at least gave the world RPGs. I'm going to continue to do my patriotic duty to analyze this American-inspired art form and make its virtues and vices known to the world at large. And in support of this mission, with a firm reliance on the patience of Irene, I solemnly pledge to you my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor.

        

         

P.S. To answer the question suggested by the title: Jazz, of course. If there is a God, he created America to make jazz. Everything else has been a side quest.