I hadn’t done anything for the last few Fourth of July’s. After I moved to L.A. I checked out some local fireworks and parades, but decided the parking and the crowds made it more hassle than it was worth. This year I still didn’t see any fireworks, but heard them popping outside while I was trying to take over Middle-Earth.

I was at a house shared by some Mennonites, see, playing the Lord of the Rings version of Risk. I had never even played regular Risk before, but the game requires four players, and I was available. At church the day before I was talking to a young woman about it who said that she never played Risk either, but left it to her husband and his buddies. “Should Mennonites even be playing that?” she asked. “It’s about war!”

I brought this up with my competitors while we were setting up the game, and was told that it was an outlet. A nice Menno has gotta let off some steam. I’ve been wondering about that. In fact, I was already wondering about it when we saw Star Wars last month. Back when I was in grad school I took a course on the media and children, and this is what they called the “catharsis” theory: if kids enjoy violent entertainment they’ll get it out of their system and be able to go on peacefully the rest of the time. It is, not surprisingly, a popular idea with makers and supporters of violent entertainment. Trouble is, there’s really no evidence to support it. In fact, the various studies we looked at it that course offered a consistent connection between violent entertainment and aggressive behavior.

I don’t think it’s really going to make a difference on these adult Mennonite guys. But it reminded me of a comment A.K.M. Adam made about pacifism:

The pacifist’s opposition to war becomes operative only at the extremity of human behavior — whereas the real work of pacifism takes place day by day. Margaret’s going to argue that Augustinian truthfulness provides a model of how we can envision pacifism as a way of life, inasmuch as Augustine both prohibits deception and discusses how people can live in a world where deception prevails. We noted that our family’s commitment to pacifism has affected our relations with one another, our behavior relative to neighbors and co-workers, our involvement in church and other spheres, much more than it has affected our attitude toward (for instance) the ongoing conquest of Iraq. Someone who says that pacifism is cheap when you don’t actually have to participate in war or face harsh consequences for your refusal, may not have considered sufficiently the cost of trying to live a life characterized by aiming at harmony and cooperation in a culture overwhelmingly defined by competition, rivalry, and conflict. That’s all the more true to the extent that anything we say or do risks supplying the grounds for an accusation from a hostile inquisitor (of whom I find a surprising number).

Pacifism is more than not serving in the army: it’s living as an emissary of peace in exile in a land of contentiousness. When you begin with treating your spouse and children, your neighbors and students in a way governed by the blessing of peace, of course war is unthinkable — but there’s so much more to be done before the question of war even comes up.

They’re challenging words, but true, I think. Even many non-pacifist Christians regard the Sermon on the Mount as guiding personal behavior, even if the state operates under different rules. Just War theory, as Nate explained, is meant to make war exceptional. So where does this put entertainments like Star Wars or Risk?

It actually reminds me of the pornography discussion that was going on last week. One of the constant unresolved arguments about porn — whether between religious people or not — is the exact relation between fantasy and reality. American society generally deals with its decadent tastes in amusement by making a strict division between them. When I used to read women’s magazines, sexual advice articles generally endorsed any fantasy that worked for you, no matter how disturbing or politically incorrent, because hey, it’s just make-believe. People who enjoy violent entertainments hew to the same line.

Certainly there’s often a difference between what people fantasize about, and what they’d actually like to happen. I once knew (slightly) a young woman who had a lot of sadomasochistic fantasies from a young age, including fantasies of being raped. Then in her late teens, she actually was raped. She hated the experience as much as any other rape victim, but this didn’t end her fantasies. In fact, she said afterwards they got even rougher. I can’t begin to disentangle the psychology of this, but obviously, the relation between fantasy and reality was neither simple nor clear.

At the same time, though, we have Jesus telling us that if we even look on someone with lust we’ve committed adultery already. This seemed to me, upon first reading, like an impossible demand (in fact, I recall that one of my first blog discussions with Telford was on that very passage). It does to a lot of other people too, which is why even a lot of Christians ignore it. The woman I described in the last paragraph described herself as a Christian, for instance, and in real life was a faithful wife, but figured her fantasies didn’t count because they weren’t real.

I wonder, though, if the problem here is this whole mentality of “counting.” Like God is up there keeping score, giving merits and demerits as we go along through life. Yet the New Testament seems to reject that legalist approach and emphasize personal transformation, so that the Law is no longer a matter of scorekeeping but “written on your heart.” That is also fairly impossible in this life, at least in a total and permanent way, but it somehow seems more helpful to me than thinking of God playing “gotcha” with every stray thought you have.

But there’s a larger question behind all this: what is fantasy? Modern society seems to assume that we have this ability mainly for our own amusement. Sure, there are important practical ways to apply imagination, in terms of inventing new technologies, creating strategies, and so on. Risk itself emphasizes that type of imagination. But what of a complete narrative, like the epic on which our game of Risk was based?

As it happens, I just read J.R.R. Tolkien’s essay/lecture on the subject, called “On Fairy-Stories.” In it he argues against the general degradation of fantasy in modern culture (he goes on for quite a while about the fact that fairy tales are really for adults), and says that creativity is essential to the human being:

Fantasy can, of course, be carried to excess. It can be ill done. It can be put to evil uses. It may even delude the minds out of which it came. But of what human thing in the fallen world is this not true? … Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

To think of fantasizing as part of our imago dei is quite different from thinking of it as a way we can mentally do things that don’t count. But Tolkien was speaking of fully realized narratives like his own, which he calls “Sub-creation.” Where does Risk fit into this? Or porn? Or idle daydreams?

I don’t know. (Hey, this blog is called Musings & Searchings, not Definitive Conclusions.) But certainly fantasies have certain effects on their creators and participants. Tolkien identifies the effects of fairy tales as Recovery, Escape and Consolation. Porn’s effect is obvious. What about Risk?

In terms of a mental exercise, Risk is all about strategizing. But another thing playing with these three guys reminded me of is the role that friendly combat plays in male bonding. I mentioned in the comments to the last post how friendly insults, called capping or signifying or various other names, seem to function in male relationships. (My sister said she had a discussion with her female co-workers once about how all their husbands affectionately call their pets things like “shithead.”) The Risk game likewise entailed a fair amount of agreeable trash-talking and smiling threats.

Like all gendered traits, this habit exists in a sort of recessive form in the other sex. My mother and sister and I like to play Scrabble when we’re together, and when I’m with male friends I can “cap” with the best of them. But on some fundamental level I don’t really understand it. I don’t understand why it’s as necessary as it seems to be to a lot of guys. And so I’m reluctant to over-analyze it or pass judgment on it, as part of the male imperial mindset or something. But I wonder where this fits into the idea of Christian transformation. Is this an artifact of the violent world passing away? Or is there something else to it, something redeemable?

(By the way, since this is a post about games, I should warn commenters not to write about poker. I’ve had spam trouble and have set WordPress to nuke any comment that mentions poker-related terms.)