Gary Alan Fine
After the controversy surrounding several of the Examiner articles about Gary Alan Fine's book, Shared Fantasy, I decided to go straight to the source. In Shared Fantasy, Gary immerses himself in several different gaming systems, offering insightful details on the nature of the games and the patterns of interaction among players—as well as their reasons for playing. Gary graciously agreed to speak with me about his work and field some questions around the state of gaming in general.
Gary is currently a professor at Northwestern's department of sociology. His areas of interest include social psychology, sociology of culture, sociology of science, qualitative sociology, social theory, and collective behavior. Before coming to Northwestern, Gary was on the faculty of the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation. His current research has three distinct streams. First, he is interested in the development of reputations of individuals with "difficult reputations" by means of reputational entrepreneurs (Warren Harding, Benedict Arnold, John Brown, Henry Ford). Gary's recent research on reputations deals with reputations and memories of the American left and right during the 1935-1955 period, including McCarthy era and the way that Adolf Hitler is remembered in the United States. As an ethnographer, Gary is currently examining the multiple social worlds of chess as a leisure and competitive activity, examining the role of technological change and changes in global-political politics (e.g., the breakup of the Soviet Union) on chess as a community.
MT: Are you still involved with any gaming?
GAF: I don't currently game. Shared Fantasy was a project I did back in the 70s, so I was gaming from '77 to '79 and the book was published in '83. The only other time that I really gamed was when my kids were between ten- to fifteen-years-old in the late 80s early 90s. I've never gamed online.
MT: In Shared Fantasy, you mention how fantasy is distinctly American. When I published an article about this topic it caused quite a stir. Has American fantasy changed? Are American biases still prevalent in fantasy gaming?
GAF: My basic argument was that the fantasies we have shared or even personal fantasies are linked to our communities, are linked to our social structure, our belief structure, our politics, our culture and so forth. And that's true in our gaming fantasies and in our sexual fantasies. I think the kinds of fantasies that we have connect peoples' experience.
If I were doing this research now—and I'd be doing it online—one of the things that's very striking is that when you play World of Warcraft or you play Second Life, the other people who are in your party may come from anywhere around the world. There's a lot of gaming in South Korea and Japan and throughout Europe, Eastern Europe, and so forth. So you have a combination, a collection of fantasies, and people have to work these out in various ways.
Over-the-table fantasies are somewhat different than online fantasies; there are a lot more interpersonal negotiations that go on because you're right in front of each other and you can take breaks and you can talk about other things. I realize you can do that to some extent with the off-line comments, but I think it's easier when you're face-to-face because you have that additional layer of sensory knowledge.
MT: So gaming is moving towards a global youth culture.
GAF: Yes, exactly. It is fascinating how popular these games are in a global context and it suggests that in many ways we probably have a global culture. Now of course the people who play D&D or Second Life or World of Warcraft are not random South Koreans and random Ukranians and random Italians and so forth. They're all part of that same MTV culture, the Lord of the Rings culture, the culture that transcends nations. So there are a lot of things in common just by virtue of being a seventeen-year-old boy or a twenty three-year-old girl. It doesn't matter exactly where they are, but they still share similar kinds of needs and similar kinds of fantasies.
MT: The other controversial topic was MAR Barker’s comments on Tolkien’s “gentlemanly evil.” Many readers felt that this was simply untrue, and that Tolkien had a much more malign evil than he was given credit for. You didn’t go into too much detail on this topic in Shared Fantasy, so I’m curious as to your thoughts on the matter.
GAF: If we're talking about Tolkien, we're not talking about something that's distinctly American, obviously. Barker is Muslim himself, American by ethnicity but Muslim by religious choice, and he's a professor of South Asian languages, so both authors bring in their own personal experiences to their writing.
American kids, at least the ones I've studied, weren't particularly religious, so evil didn't have the theological meaning that it would have in various communities. In fantasy, evil is the opposing side of heroes, so where you have heroes and there must be villains. In role-playing games, you can play a villain without being morally smudged yourself.
MT: So early RPGs made evil characters palatable enough so that we would be willing to play them?
GAF: Exactly, that's why you can clearly choose an ethos in D&D, like "evil" and "lawful". You don't want to be uncomfortable and you don't want your fellow players to be uncomfortable. So you have to figure within your group what's an acceptable shared fantasy, including how "evil" you want to be.
This ties into gender too. If you're a guy, can you play a woman? Can a woman play a male? Gay? Straight? What can you choose? That was part of Shared Fantasy's focus when I wrote in the last chapters about how your character relates to your identity. Are you playing yourself? Are you thinking of yourself, what you would do in this situation? Or are you truly role-playing, and thinking what would this character do in this situation?
MT: And this applies to online gaming as well?
GAF: Yes. You can see that in Second Life. There are some people who play themselves in Second Life while other people create new characters. I've sometimes thought the transgender or transsexual movement is somehow connected to all this that is.
MT: The transgendered movement could be interpreted as the next step in role-playing a different role by physically inhabiting another gender.
GAF: Right. At what point do you say "I am a different person and I have to be biologically a different person"? And so I physically change my gender, as opposed to just saying "I think of myself this way but this is who I am biologically." The fact that we have civil rights for people who are transgendered is an indication of this sensitivity, of this right to be who you think you are. I'm not dismissing that, I'm just saying that it's fascinating that we have a culture that permits us to do that, and that you have gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender labels.
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