Six years ago, I was asked to bring my insights as both a social scientist and avid player of tabletop role playing games to a University of Calgary project that was researching the use of computer games as mental health and life skills interventions for children and youth living with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, autism and other neurological disabilities. At the time, they were considering expanding their study to examine in-person, tabletop games. After I did some initial work on the project interpersonal and academic politics caused the team and me to part ways. Now that I am out of the formal academy, it is one of the projects I am dusting off. This essay is the first step in doing that.
We live in a society that denies that etiquette is important, that we do not have hard and fast rules for communication and social organization. But this denial is just one reason our society’s system of etiquette is one of the most challenging ever to exist. Not only are our rules of interaction not codified or explicit; we deny they exist and instead ask people to act based on their innate talent and social intuition.
We are not exactly being dishonest when we emphasize the role of unconscious intuition in our systems of etiquette. Intuition and innate social talent are important because our etiquette is so faddish and requires a great deal of guesswork because no person can successfully amass all the necessary information to execute it correctly.
And with each passing year, etiquette grows more occult, more faddish, changes more rapidly. And we are not always conscious of the strategies we use to cope with the burden each of us bears in keeping up with all the new rules that we must learn to avoid offense, ostracism, professional demotion or even loss of work.
I think this helps to explain the continuing importance of the situation comedy in our cultural life. Beginning with Seinfeld and Friends, a long parade of both mainstream and off-beat sitcoms have functioned only secondarily as exercises in humour and primarily as etiquette pedagogy, constructing narratives around breaches of novel etiquette practices and their resolution. Curb Your Enthusiasm exists at the margins of this discourse because it routinely questions whether these etiquette fads are positive social developments, rather than treating them as inherently good, or amoral, like the weather.
This increasingly volatile and opaque direction our etiquette has taken since the end of the Second World War has had profoundly adverse effects on those with average or below average social intuition.
And they can be measured in what can only be described as the mass pathologization of fairly ordinary folks. Autism is now a spectrum inclusive of millions of people who are really just a bit obtuse and quirky, Asperger’s Syndrome now a disease; Tourette’s syndrome is increasingly expanding into a spectrum inclusive of all people who struggle with social restraint and conversational impulse control. We have also seen an expansion of mood disorder diagnoses as our faddish systems of etiquette make social situations both increasingly difficult to navigate and increasingly consequential. “Social anxiety” was once descriptive of an inappropriate fear of the consequences of mismanaging a social encounter; now it also describes accurate and reasonable fears.
To make matters worse, more and more jobs have come to include a sales or human interaction component. Corporations route hostile customer communication through telephones precisely because telephonic communication is more fraught, more arduous, more exhausting, more dependent on follow etiquette rules and keeping one’s cool in the face of provocation. That results in fewer product returns, fewer maintenance calls, fewer refunds and exchanges. And all sorts of jobs have had a sales component appended to them.
There have traditionally existed certain kinds of jobs set aside for people with significant social disabilities but these are increasingly under threat as “sales” becomes a duty incorporated into more and more jobs. Shelving jobs in retail space, for example, now almost always include a customer service component and usually a sales component too.
What this means is that an ever-increasing portion of the population is now understood to suffer from neurological disabilities affecting social interaction; and, at the same time, the need to mitigate or overcome these disabilities has never been greater.
For those of us who are just a little quirky and unintuitive but who are now understood to occupy the top of the Tourette spectrum or the autism spectrum, there are some proven strategies that have worked for us: we can often learn social competence and even develop a significant degree of intuition through practice in less hostile environments.
For me, that environment was Dungeons and Dragons. For those who have never played the game, each player (except one) plays a “character,” a fictional person both like and unlike them whom they operate in the game, whose intentions and speech they narrate. D&D is a cooperative game, which means that even if one’s character dies, one has not lost the game but instead must imagine a new character into being. Characters are described on “character sheets,” which list and quantify the character’s innate talents, learned skills and other proficiencies.
While physical combat in the game is resolved solely by rolling dice, the social interactions, both among player-characters (PCs) and with non-player characters (NPCs) (other people one encounters not represented by one of the players) are resolved by acting-out the social interactions and then rolling dice, based on the character’s in-game social apititudes, to determine how well-received these words have been.
D&D is also soothing because it is full of measures of status. Characters gain “levels,” commensurate with their powers in the game and as they experience more success, there are steady incremental rewards. Furthermore, characters specialize into classes, with warriors wielding swords, clerics healing wounds, warlocks incinerating foes with eldritch blasts. Having clearly quantified hierarchical ranks with transparent criteria for attaining them and areas of specialization allowing everyone to be the master of something is not just soothing.
D&D creates a social microuniverse that is fairer, more transparent, better quantified, more clearly ordered than the chaos of modern social interaction. Furthermore, the game makes that micro-universe just consequential enough. Screwing up at D&D is still a screw-up. Your character may even die but none of those consequences leave the table.
My childhood D&D table, like so many others, consisted of a bunch mildly autistic kids practicing social interaction governed by a stable set of rulebooks, hour after hour after hour, week in, week out. It worked. And it continues to work.
It should not surprise us, then, that when Canada and the US unexpectedly invaded Afghanistan in 2001, many of us were hit up with a subcultural “support the troops” request: with the new edition of D&D (third) coming out, could we spare our first and second edition rulebooks and scenario packs for the troops? Because of course D&D players are well-represented in the military; because, in a way, the military is a gigantic tabletop RPG that never ends. As you gain levels, you get access to cooler and cooler, more expensive weapons, just like in D&D and there are even names for the different class levels like “admiral,” just like those tables in Gary Gygax’s original Player’s Handbook.
More than any D&D group or military battalion, the organization that truly epitomizes this kind of intervention is MENSA. A superficial observation of any MENSA chapter board tells us that MENSA is not an elite organization for the super-intelligent; it is a self-help group for people with Asperger syndrome. In fact, I learned recently from a former MENSA director, that their conventions include a set of coloured badges to indicate each delegate’s level of tactile defensiveness (coded as receptivity to hugs), one of the most common Asperger’s comorbidities.
But what would happen to MENSA, to your average D&D group, if they understood themselves to be self-help groups for the disabled? What would happen if MENSA activists began to explain their struggles to get into romantic relationships as arising from their status as disabled people and not because they are “too smart”?
I would argue that a great paradox of autism and Tourette’s self-help projects is that they use the lack of social intuition of participants to conceal the true function and purpose of the group. Essentially, we are coping with our disabilities better and working more industriously on them because we have hidden from ourselves the fact that we are disabled.
It has saddened me, the past decade, to watch similar movements, like Deaf Culture and Mad Pride, wither when the positive effects of transforming one’s disability into something other are so clearly evident in my corner of the world.
Because it is my view that ordinary, decent people would rather be a screw-up than a cripple any day of the week. I have a couple of friends whose lives are severely circumscribed by neurological disability whom I watch make that choice week-in, week-out, even though it brings shame and a sense of failure because that all those screw-ups are a lighter burden than a permanent, crippling brain defect.
Ordinary, decent people want to be heroes; they want to focus on helping others, not asking for help for themselves; they want to feel like their unique ideas and perspectives come from a rare intellectual talent, not brain damage.
The white failures of Trumpism, who blame affirmative action, reverse racism and the International Zionist conspiracy for their lack of a mate or a job are of a piece with the progressive failures furiously pathologizing their personalities and appropriating minority sexual and racial identities to explain their failure. What both groups need is more D&D. It is not natural or healthy to build one’s identity around victimhood or disability, even—nay—especially when one is genuinely disabled or genuinely a victim.
In other blog posts on this issue, I have emphasized neurodiversity themes and talked about how many disabilities, like restless leg syndrome, produce personal ill health and population-level good health. But that is a well-ploughed furrow these days.
So in this piece I am making a case that is supplementary: if we want to actually benefit from the neurological diversity of our population and unlock the potential within the human race, we need to begin de-pathologizing our quirks and others’ quirks. And, in my view, a key early step in that must be to resist more strongly efforts to change and complicate our systems of etiquette, investing that energy not in making new social rules but in more transparently explaining and documenting those we already have.
Because not everyone is lucky to have grown up at a D&D table.
This blog post is dedicated to Jens Haeusser, Kenneth Lieblich, Michael Airton, Oscar Bot, Steve Lyons, Tara Fraser, Philip Bot and Terrence Willey, the best damn D&D group a guy could have.
