The Fifth World is an open source vision of the future. It’s our latest MediaWiki-based project, but instead of developing an encyclopedia with it, we’re trying to use it to develop an anthropology of the future.  Users are completely free to use, edit, and add to the wiki as they see fit, creating a uniquely realistic, changing world.  The name refers to the shared belief from the Maya and the Hopi that we currently live in the Fourth World, with three preceding worlds that were destroyed by humans losing sight of their relationship with the rest of the world. In each world, there was a small group that did remember their relationship with the world, and so survived to populate the next world. On 12 December 2012, according to the Maya calendar, the Fourth World–our world–will end, and the Fifth World will begin. But to fully explain what our Fifth World Project is, and why we’ve poured so much into it, a good bit of background is necessary.

Primitive Games

Foragers have a good deal more free time than we civilized folk. For the most part, this time was spent divided between three primary leisure activities: sleeping, storytelling, and gambling. The latter two are those that concern us presently.

Storytelling may be the most basic cognitive process of the human mind. The Story of B by Daniel Quinn reiterates a theory in physical anthropology that human intellect emerged from the tracker’s need to string data–tracks, signs, scat, etc.–into a coherent narrative: a story. In “Psychiatry and the Human Condition,” Bruce Charlton notes:

Consciousness is so compulsive a storyteller as to be a master confabulator - consciousness will always invent a story in terms of cause and effect relations, even when it has no idea what is going on, and available data are inadequate or contradictory. Young children will interpret abstract computer images that ‘pursue’ and ‘flee’ and ‘hit’ one another in terms of exactly these social behaviours - they will give the abstract shapes personalities and intentions even though they are merely shapes moving on a screen. Seeing faces in the fire, or animals in the clouds, is another instance of the same kind of nearly automatic meaning-generation.

Science itself is a form of storytelling; like a Paleolithic hunter, a scientist collects data, forms a hypothesis, and tests that hypothesis. What is the scientific method if not a formalization of the tracker’s art–and by extension, a rigorous form of storytelling? Whether the story is true or not is irrelevant to the fact that it is a story.

The other activity one finds commonly among foragers is gambling. Hadza men spent most of their days gambling. As we have seen elsewhere, though, foragers share what they have–so what is at risk in all this gambling? The simple answer, of course, is that among foragers, gambling is stripped down to its barest essential: a human being challenging his fate, an attempt to assert one’s own mastery, or at least relevance, to a seemingly uncontrollable and chaotic universe. In that sense, gambling begins to resemble one of the primary functions of storytelling: making sense of the disparate information we receive about the world around us, and stringing it all into something we can understand. This is a common theme in literature, brought to particularly impressive fruition in Pushkin’s short story, “The Queen of Spades.” Throughout history, gambling has been a means of contact with the divine, entering into the realms of probability and chance where the gods love to play. Runes, lots and other methods of divination have most commonly been adapted from games of chance. In The Way of the Shaman¹, Michael Harner includes an appendix describing the “Hand Game,” a game of chance found among the Bitterroot Salish, which, by his account, shamans were forbidden from playing–because they enjoyed an unfair advantage. The shaman was the gatekeeper between tribal life and the spirit world, an ambassador to the spirits–the liminal realm of which he was master was the very same realm of chance and probability that the “Hand Game” played in.

“The Great Lie” makes a point that tribal games are cooperative. Anthropologically, this is simply not true–many hunter-gatherers played competitive games. However, the story the character in that film relates is true: many Native American tribes, when taught soccer by Christian missionaries, would play a cooperative version of the game, stopping once the scores were equal. The missionaries did everything they could to make the children play until there were winners and losers–because the game was a model of the universe, and in their vision of the universe, there always had to be competition.

Tellingly, with the loss of their way of life, the Hadza are also apparently gambling less and telling fewer stories, as Harvard’s Frank Marlowe reports in “Why the Hadza are Still Hunter-Gatherers” [PDF]:

There is less gambling by men nowadays. I have seen Hadza men play their gambling game, lukucuko, only at one camp in one season. According to Woodburn (1970), in the 1960’s they often played. My impression is that there may be less storytelling nowadays than in the past since all men can tell stories (for examples see Bala 1998), but only rarely do I observe them doing so.

Games create a microcosm to one degree or another, a social space in which we explore ourselves and our society. They can do this consciously or unconsciously, in a shallow fashion or in a deep fashion, but it always happens nonetheless. This is why you will see that already, our discussion of forager leisure has had a recurring theme of spirituality.

Shamanism

We have discussed shamanism here before in some depth, particularly in “The Shaman’s Vision,” but for our present purposes, it will serve merely to remind readers of some of the shaman’s basic functions. In his comparison of psychoanalysis and shamanism, Levi-Strauss suggested that they both operate by “stimulating an organic transformation which would essentially consist in a structural reorganisation by inducing the patient intensively to live out a myth–either received or created by him–whose structure would be, at the unconscious level, analogous to the structure whose genesis is sought on the organic level.”

Shamans are able to negotiate the symbolic and cultural constructions of healing in a profound way, as means of activating the very neurobiological healing processes that Dr. Winkelman discusses in his work on “neurotheology.” Thus, seen from another perspective, the shaman’s primary role is to weave the individual imaginations of his tribe into a single imaginal reality–a reality of its own, because it is shared and therefore takes on importance to those who participate in it. The shaman helps to guide and focus the imagination of others, so that imagination can be used in powerful, and directly beneficial ways. Our own biomedicine agrees that imagining oneself to be healthy is one of the most powerful methods of making it so. Rather than denigrate the placebo effect, shamans embrace it, encourage it, and bring it to levels that seem fantastic to us.

Our dismissal of our own imagination is very much to our detriment. We have cut ourselves off from one of the strongest powers we have in our possession, and we cannot afford to neglect any longer the most potent assets that evolution has bequeathed to us. But to understand how all of this relates to The Fifth World, we turn now to the role-playing game and its history over the last 30 years.

A Short History of the Table-top Role-playing Game

The history of the modern table-top role-playing game, or RPG, begins in 1974 with Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and a new take on wargaming they titled, Dungeons & Dragons. In “A Hard Look at Dungeons & Dragons,” Ron Edwards sums up what D&D did for role-playing:

Rob MacDougall stated it best: we are talking about Cargo Cults. Everyone knew about “this new great game.” Everyone had on hand a hodgepodge of several texts, which in retrospect seem to me to be almost archeological in their fragmentary, semi-compatible but not-quite, layered-in-time-of-publication nature. Also, although newly-available texts obviously modified local oral traditions, they also arose from them, generating a seething hotbed of how-to-play instructions in print in other locations. Everyone had to shape, socially and procedurally, just what the hell you did such that “role-playing” happened. How did you know it worked? What did you do it for? All of it, from Social Contract right down to Stance, had to be created in the faith that it worked “out there” somewhere, and somehow, some way, it was supposed to work here.

Dungeons & Dragons grew out of Chainmail: Rules for Medieval Miniatures, as a variant on wargaming, where players controlled individuals rather than armies. As such, it placed a strong emphasis on combat. To this day, the modern d20 system that provides the rules for Dungeons & Dragons v3.5 is much more combat-oriented than most contemporary role-playing games. In Shared Fantasy: Role-playing Games as Social Worlds, Gary Fine pins down the “ethos” of D&D:

1. The Principle of Unlimited Good. Success is open to all, and one person’s success does not imply the failure of another.
2. The dichotomy of Good and Evil. There is no middle ground.
3. Evil as any action outside the moral boundaries of a given society.
4. The thematic importance of Courage.

In “Therapy is Fantasy: Roleplaying, Healing and the Construction of Social Order,” John Hughes writes:

The earliest published roleplaying games were closely related to their wargaming antecedents, focusing on combat and strategy and ignoring the subtleties of characterisation and drama. Dungeons & Dragons for example, the original roleplaying game, is also narrowest in its construction. It was designed as a strategy combat game, pitting good against evil, and not as a sociological simulation. The structural restraints of the rules system (which provided resolution systems only for combat-related activities) encouraged an ethos of male power-fame-virility fantasy, centring [sic] on values of masculine aggressiveness, confrontation and objectification. Plots usually consisted of “dungeon bashes,” fighting monsters to obtain loot. Not surprisingly, most players were teenage males, and few women participated.

As the hobby grew in popularity, other games systems entered the market which placed a much greater emphasis on the acting and dramatic aspects of the hobby–true roleplaying–rather than strategy and “power gaming.” Historical, ecological and sociological backgrounds became more important as GMs led their players out of the dungeons and into the realms of politics, exploration and social interaction. The introduction of “skill-driven systemsâ€? allowed non-combatant characters to be played - a game character could now specialise in anything from accounting to zoology. In some game systems, the ethos became one of nurturance and human relationships (Call of Cthulhu) or peaceful exploration (Star Trek) rather than power fantasy. With such developments–which I typify as the “second wave” of roleplaying–more and more women were attracted to the hobby, and with many groups concentrating solely on the characterisation, storytelling and atmospheric aspects of roleplaying, the stage was at last set for an exploration of the psychological and symbolic potential of collective fantasy.

In 2000, Dungeons & Dragons second edition was beginning to flag, and Wizards of the Coast, a company that had enjoyed a sudden, meteoric rise tied to its Magic: The Gathering game, came into possession of a classic brand that had seen better days. Ryan Dancey, then brand manager for D&D, spear-headed the move to make D&D open source. For Dancey, it was purely a tactic to make a better game:

The curious should look at www.gnu.org, www.opensource.org, and should seek out Eric Raymond’s essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” via a lookup on any capable search engine.

There is now a new, viable model for creating complex systems, using standardized protocols and interfaces, that are shared by many people, with many independent sub-components that have to work together.

Like roleplaying games.

That brings us to Open Gaming, and why we’re pursuing this initiative inside Wizards and outside to the larger community of game publishers.

Here’s the logic in a nutshell. We’ve got a theory that says that D&D is the most popular roleplaying game because it is the game more people know how to play than any other game. (For those of you interested researching the theory, this concept is called “The Theory of Network Externalities.”)

[Note: This is a very painful concept for a lot of people to embrace, including a lot of our own staff, and including myself for many years. The idea that D&D is somehow “better” than the competition is a powerful and entrenched concept. The idea that D&D can be “beaten” by a game that is “better” than D&D is at the heart of every business plan from every company that goes into marketplace battle with D&D game. If you accept the Theory of Network Externalities, you have to admit that the battle is lost before it begins, because the value doesn’t reside in the game itself, but in the network of people who know how to play it.]

If you accept (as I have finally come to do) that the theory is valid, then the logical conclusion is that the larger the number of people who play D&D, the harder it is for competitive games to succeed, and the longer people will stay active gamers, and the more value the network of D&D players will have to Wizards of the Coast.

In fact, we believe that there may be a secondary market force we jokingly call “The Skaff Effect,” after our own [game designer] Skaff Elias. Skaff is one of the smartest guys in the company, and after looking at lots of trends and thinking about our business over a long period of time, he enunciated his theory thusly:

“All marketing and sales activity in a hobby gaming genre eventually contributes to the overall success of the market share leader in that genre.”²

With the third edition, the OGL made Dungeons & Dragons open source. John Kim takes an interesting look at RPG history in “A Brief History of Fashion in RPG Design,” by looking at “the development of RPGs as an artistic history–where there are trends which may die out, or classic fashions which may revive.”

The Psychology of the RPG

The role-playing game is been a powerful tool for psychological improvement. In the same article cited above, John Hughes provides the following typology of character possibilities.

Hughes provides the following key:

• CHARACTERS AS PLAYERS typify a class of gamer who, in effect, play their own personalities - “Themselves with weapons onâ€? as one interviewee described them. Typically, such players are young and/or beginners, and so set competitive goals for themselves, wanting to “winâ€? and willing to sacrifice character consistency in order to do so.
• Those who invest their characters with meaning, CHARACTERS AS SYMBOLS, can be typified into two possible types, aesthetic and personal symbols. These categories are not necessarily contradictory.
  • Some characters are created simply for creative effect as AESTHETIC SYMBOLS. Such characters may be humorous, wistful, dramatic, a parody of a literary or film character, or simply possess a good deal of savoir faire appropriate to the gaming milieu. If such characters do take on aspects of their creator’s personality, they are not consciously manipulated.
  • PERSONAL SYMBOLS fall into three broad categories. It is possible for a single character to combine elements from all three categories.
    • COGNITIVE SYMBOLS are in effect symbols of opposition, for they are created by players to explore some aspect of personality that they themselves do not possess. Such characters are answers to the question “How does a royalist/ anarchist/ man/ woman/ elf/ blind dwarf/ alien/ minor god think, feel and act?” They are constructed as exercises in empathy, posited around perceived oppositions to the players own concept of selfhood.
    • EXAGGERATED SYMBOLS are characters created to amplify characteristics or skills that the players believe they possess. Thus, intelligent players create genius characters, sports-minded people create super athletes etc. Such characters are a way of building up a players self affirmation, for such characters are a source of uplifting emotional feedback when the particular skills or characteristics bring success. Such identifications may extent into the ideological realm, for as one interviewee explained:
      

      “I always play rational characters because I’m a rationalist.” (Jamie)

    • COMPENSATING SYMBOLS are characters created to explore a characteristic or skill that the player believes they do not possess. … Thus, shy players attempt to play forward, confident characters, cerebral bookworms create bare chested barbarians, impatient players create silent, meditative monks etc.

Hughes further suggests:

It is compensatory characters that demand the greatest investment on the part of players, not only in terms of roleplaying ability but also in terms of emotional energy and risk. While the rewards of playing such a character can be great, the associated risks mean that any failure will be taken on a very personal level. Because such characters demand a high level of conscious investment, risk, and energy, it is compensatory characters that have the greatest potential to become transformatory symbols - symbols and vehicles of healing.

Hughes’ article relates the story of “Malori,” who through her Call of Cthulhu character, “Jack,” was able to come to terms with deep-seated emotional issues she had to face. He writes:

In the creation and game life of Jack, Malori was able to pull out individual components of her psyche and examine them in a new light. By placing them onto a male character, she could examine each characteristic for its actual worth without having to worry about the values that conflicting role expectations placed upon them. Paradoxically, many characteristics - nurturance, sensitivity to others emotions - took on a very positive light when seen as part of a male personality, yet these same characteristics caused Malori great distress as components of her own personality because she equated them with the passive role model of Woman that she was trying to discard. In exploring the oppositions and cultural dichotomies that comprise gender role models, Malori is slowly reconstructing the balance of her psyche and consequently of her self image. She is able to judge her own personality in a new, more positive light. Through the personality of Jack, she is beginning to understand that characteristics such as assertiveness and sensitivity are not polarised oppositions but can in fact peacefully co-exist within the one person. Malori is reconstructing her models of masculinity and femininity, creating models that do not threaten or accuse her.

And later:

Because of her intense emotional involvement with the Jack symbol, Malori was also living out a myth on another level–within the roleplaying game itself. With the cooperation of a small group of friends, who provided a structure of support and encouragement, Malori emotionally explored the implications of the Jack symbol, and gradually came to realise that Jack was an extension of herself, a symbol of self, and a symbol of both her condition and cure.

RPG-as-myth helped Malori come to terms with parts of herself she had long denied. We should remember Levi-Strauss’s comparison of psychoanalysis and shamanism, above; both the psychoanalyst and the shaman heal through the creation of such personal myths. Likewise, the RPG creates the context of personal and small group mythology.

As powerful as roleplaying can be to help train us to be who we want to be, it can just as easily help us come to terms with what we don’t like about ourselves–what C.G. Jung called our “Shadow.” Dr. Wayne Blackmon’s account in, “Dungeons and Dragons: The Use of a Fantasy Game in the Psychotherapeutic Treatment of a Young Adult,” relates how D&D helped save a suicidal young teen who had nearly succeeded in killing himself.

The feelings this patient expressed in therapy were all threatening to him initially. The game provided a vehicle for the safe emergence of feeling within the context of organizing rules. As he first expressed them in a displaced way and got used to them in fantasy, he could feel safe with his feelings and begin to direct them more directly to another person. Slowly this man has been able to emerge from his isolation. He has developed self-esteem, made friends, lost his virginity, and has been able to date fairly regularly. He continued in therapy with me in more traditional ways, off and on, over a period of ten years after his suicide attempt. He is now a more openly emotional person who does not need to displace his feelings. Fred terminated therapy appropriately when his career required a move and was married about nine months later.

The rules that Dungeons & Dragons introduced were very important, even if only to standardize the game. Blackmon notes:

Dungeons & Dragons is a form of group-related, organized, controlled waking fantasy. It has all the elements of free fantasy and encourages free fantasy as there is no board or movable pieces to provide inhibitions to imagination. Players are encouraged to become their characters in the course of the game, which is to say, to become their own fantasies. Juxtaposed to this active encouragement of the merge of the player’ fantasies is the ever present structure of the rules that provide a vehicle for how one is to fantasize. This further offers reassurance that when needed, there are rules to provide structure for the wanderings of one’s imagination. For the patient, the game served as an organized vehicle to become familiar with his own unconscious. The use of this material in therapy, the questioning of motives and emotions allowed these underlying unconscious thoughts to come to awareness and be worked through.

The combination of the freedom of imagination, grounded in a set of rules to provide a touchstone of reliability, provide a powerful psychological context for the exploration of self, as these two cases clearly demonstrate.

As Blackmon notes:

Freud described dreams as the “road to the unconscious” and pointed to the value of discussing dreams and a patient’s associations to his dreams in conducting therapy. As the century progressed, the principles were expanded by various authors to both waking fantasy and to play in children for their projective value and revelation of primary process. Thus Freud discussed the relationship between fantasy and dreams but also described how play could be used as a repetition-compulsion to re-experience events that overwhelm the ego and thus to master them. This observation was modified and expanded by Erikson to demonstrate that play could be used to gain mastery. Waelder saw play and fantasy as: “Instinctual gratification and assimilation of disagreeable experiences,” in other words, mastery. Freud also suggested that fantasy provided immediate wish-fulfillment. Thus there is much to suggest in these observations that there is a relationship among play, dreams and waking fantasy. This relationship has been shown to be closer than analytic writers may have realized. Thus Cartwright demonstrated that the need for Rapid-Eye-Movement (REM) dreams could be decreased by waking, drug-induced hallucinations. Cartwright and Monroe showed that REM deprivation could be fended off by encouraging waking fantasy. In a study of WREM dreams, Pivik and Foulkes demonstrated that: “waking story telling ability correlated with NREM dreamlike fantasy.” Klinger describes them as functionally interchangeable: “REM sleep suppression is reduced by permitting the substitution of waking dream description and related fantasy-like ideation for the dream loss.”

With this, we see that storytelling and fantasy are very much part of the same whole that includes the dreams, visions and hallucinations that are the more well-known shamanic provinces, bringing us back, once again, to the shaman.

The Noble Art

The “second wave” of RPG’s that Hughes mentions has cultivated a deeper capacity for the RPG as a communal vision. In that article, Hughes attempts to delineate an “ethos” for Call of Cthulhu analogous to the ethos Fine suggested for Dungeons & Dragons:

• Survival as Triumph.
• Survival through the nurturance and support of others.
• The arbitrary nature of moral labels.
• Knowledge as Power, Knowledge as Danger.
• The Futility of Physical Effort.
• Inconsequentiality of human striving and human values when measured against the universal scales of Time and Space.

White Wolf markets its games not as role-playing games, but as “storytelling games.” Rather than a “Dungeon Master,” they have a “Storyteller.” In the introduction to Werewolf: The Apocalypse, they write:

In a storytelling game, the players use the game’s rules to create characters to serve as alter egos of a sort. They then take those characters through dramas and adventures called stories (a game term that means pretty much the same thing as the word’s common use). Each of the players describes his character’s actions and speaks as the character would speak, thus guiding the character through the plot established by the group.

To keep track of all this activity, one person acts as the Storyteller–a role more like that of a movie director than an author. The Storyteller describes the setting of each scene, roleplays the actions and speeches of the various people the players’ characters encounter and generally guides the story’s plot. However, the Storyteller’s control isn’t absolute. Since the players control their characters, each scene in a story is the product of the entire group cooperating to tell the story in a way they enjoy. What’s more, the rules in this book provide a common ground to gauge the characters’ chances of success impartially. The players generally try to help their characters accomplish their goals, while the Storyteller provides opposition and obstacles (in the form of the possibility of failure) to add tension.

The ultimate goal, of course, is for everyone to have a good time. Whether the characters succeed or fail is irrelevant. The ‘only thing that matters is that everyone is happy to have played a part when the story ends. For that reason, the rules in this book are useful only as a means to provide a framework for the story. If the rules conflict with the story, the story wins every time.

First, an RPG of this kind is a cooperative game, as we discussed earlier. In the RPG, we have an excellent model of the cooperative game: a social game that creates relationships, where all players–even the GM–win together. In a regular online column on design & development for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, D&D developers Jesse Decker and David Noonan wrote:

The most essential, glorious, wonderful aspect of D&D is this: It’s a cooperative game. That cooperation among players—and between players and DM—is what separates D&D (and by extension all tabletop roleplaying games) from almost every other kind of game out there.

In their greatest expression, RPGs form a culture. Hughes writes:

Roleplaying games create cultural systems as their avocation–worlds of imagination formed by the participants, given the constraints of their knowledge and the structure provided by the rules. Such creation works on all levels–material culture (architecture, fashion etc), ideology (politics, theories of power, gender constructions) and cultural themes (what religion is, how magic works, the nature of good and evil, theories of destiny, ontology and epistemology). Fantasy roleplaying games have social structure, norms, values and a range of cultural artifacts which are as real as such constructs can ever be - that is, they are real to those who participate in them. Each gaming group interprets, defines and transforms elements within its society. Their gaming world is a transformation of mundane, shared realities. It stands as a caricature of social life, a simplified and exaggerated reflection of mundane reality. This cultural system expands as the game progresses the participants building and synthesising through their experience, just as in real life at any given time an individual never has access to a culture, but only to a rendering of that culture.

The RPG combines those two basic human pastimes we spent so much time discussing earlier: storytelling, and gambling. Each roll of the dice is a challenge to fate; and this is not unconscious. All the ritual activity one would expect of such an undertaking begins to accrue. Hughes writes:

Secondly, a GM will usually disguise a decision that he or she makes behind the pretence of a die roll. As the result of such a roll will not be seen by players (though the action of rolling the dice will), a GM can justify any occurrence as being according to the dice result. Not surprisingly, dice beliefs occupy a highly visible part of gaming subculture, with notions of “killer dice,” “lucky dice” and “lame dice” abounding. Dice throwing is often accompanied by ritualistic elements such as blowing on the dice, warming them between the hands, or “throwing them high.” GMs have their own dice ideology. “The dice,” they say, “don’t lie.”

Ultimately, the results of all these challenges represent mere data points, like the data points a scientist uses to assemble a hypothesis, or the signs and tracks a tracker might use to find his quarry. To tie those data points together into a narrative–to weave a story with drama and pathos and deep characters–that requires storytelling. And it is not only the GM’s story; the players are impromptu actors who take on the leading roles. The story is woven collaboratively; what emerges is very much a communal vision. The GM facilitates it and guides it, but it is not his own.

This is precisely the same function a shaman serves in his tribe. Hughes observes:

A GM is akin to the “powerful ritual elder” described by Moore in that he or she formulates and controls the group contract, gives the players permission to behave in certain ways and guarantees the continuing communitas of the group.

In the discussion following Steve Thomas’ “The Face of Anarchy,” Felix noted:

A good DM can bridge the natural to the supernatural, blur the line between imagination and reality, and push the limits of human conciousness [sic]… just as a shaman does.

Chuck expanded on that observation.

God, I’ve spent the last 15 years of my life being a GM, being the proverbial bass player for the only form of interactive art in existence, and never once did I ever make the shaman/GM connection. Metaphor extended into a shared (and projected) reality, and the GM makes modifications, guides the others through it. The GM has walked these paths before, you see, initiated as he was by another GM, far in the past. He can walk in these realms of created reality, pulling back the veils for those exploring the world…

As we have already seen, the waking fantasies and communal vision of the RPG provides the kind of powerful symbolic context to explore one’s most intimate emotions. It is an arena rife with the potential of truly profound healing–the kind of healing so often ascribed to medicine men.

With its combination of the two primary forager pastimes into a cooperative whole, and such powerful, nascent shamanic potential, can there be any doubt that the RPG is the neo-tribal game par excellence?

Open Source

With this background in place, we come at last to where we were when this project began: a discussion of the OGL. The OGL, like open source, is first and foremost a business strategy. For Richard Stallman, one of the great pioneers of the movement and the genius behind GNU, the question has always been about freedom. In “Is ‘Open Source’ Synonymous With ‘Free Software’?,” Stallman writes:

The main argument for the term “open source software” is that “free software” makes some people uneasy. That’s true: talking about freedom, about ethical issues, about responsibilities as well as convenience, is asking people to think about things they might rather ignore. This can trigger discomfort, and some people may reject the idea for that. It does not follow that society would be better off if we stop talking about these things.

Years ago, free software developers noticed this discomfort reaction, and some started exploring an approach for avoiding it. They figured that by keeping quiet about ethics and freedom, and talking only about the immediate practical benefits of certain free software, they might be able to “sell” the software more effectively to certain users, especially business. The term “open source” is offered as a way of doing more of this–a way to be “more acceptable to business.” The views and values of the Open Source movement stem from this decision.

This approach has proved effective, in its own terms. Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn’t all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

Sooner or later these users will be invited to switch back to proprietary software for some practical advantage. Countless companies seek to offer such temptation, and why would users decline? Only if they have learned to value the freedom free software gives them, for its own sake. It is up to us to spread this idea–and in order to do that, we have to talk about freedom. A certain amount of the “keep quiet” approach to business can be useful for the community, but we must have plenty of freedom talk too.

Freedom–freedom to innovate, to build on the work of your peers, and to share–is the essence of any meaningful “open culture” movement. The OGL in itself was a bold move in the right direction, but as we discussed one night several months ago, it’s not enough.

The OGL made the rules of Dungeons & Dragons open source, but Wizards of the Coast carefully maintained its monopoly on its “Product Identity”: its characters and settings. We wondered that night, what if there was a role-playing game that didn’t just open its rules, but its setting as well? What might the potential be for an open source, shared universe?

Open source embraces all the same ideals that we find in tribal societies: openness, over the arcane use of power; sharing freely as a matter of course and for the simple reason that it works better than the delusion of ownership; cooperation and the community that forms organically from a group of passionate people working on a project they love.

What if we didn’t just make the rules open source in order to externalize costs and get third parties to make supplements for core rulebooks that net the highest marginal profits–what if we embraced open source as an ideal, and created a whole setting that was open source?

Of course, such a world need not be any more inherently about role-playing games than it is about video games, or short stories, or novels, or movies, or any other medium you can imagine. But it would share something in common with role-playing games: it would be a communal vision.

What, then, should our vision be? Why not try to formulate a positive vision for the future?

At the present time, there are six billion people on this planet pursuing a vision that is devouring the earth. That’s our problem. Our problem is not pollution. Our problem is not consumerism. Our problem is not capitalist greed. Our problem is not conservative selfishness or liberal utopianism. Our problem is not lack of leadership. Our problem is a world-devouring vision that six billion people are pursuing. Now what can we do about this vision? We can’t legislate it away or vote it away or organize it away or even shoot it away. We can only teach it away. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with changed minds, people with a new vision. It will not be saved by old minds with new programs. Vision is a flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow of the river. But I don’t want to impede its flow, I want to change its direction. Is it so easy to change a cultural vision? Ease and difficulty are not the relevant measures. Here are the relevant measures: Readiness and unreadiness. If people aren’t ready for it, then no power on earth can make a new idea catch on. But if people are ready for it (and I think they are), then a new idea will sweep the world like wildfire. In our culture at the present moment, the flow of the river is toward catastrophe, and programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede its flow. Our path of hope is not to add more sticks to impede the flow. Our path of hope is to change the direction of the flow–away from catastrophe.³

The Fifth World

A wiki provided the perfect logistical means for a collaborative, shared universe.  The nature of this universe was inspired by Michael Green’s Afterculture.  Green writes:

For the vast spread of our time on earth, traditional tribal life-patterns have successfully maintained ecological and spiritual balance and we must now turn to them for guidance if we are to escape our present crisis. A worthy tribal culture of the future would not be a simple return to archaic practices but would be an evolutionary synthesis of old and new. Imagine a people grounded in Traditional life-patterns who gracefully incorporate the useful scientific knowledge and global spiritual understandings of our time. To be truly sustainable, they would by necessity have a radically simplified life style.

His art and artifacts provided inspiring glimpses that have long tantalized us with how optimistic our future remains. If there is any failing to Green’s work, it is that he himself admits:

This is a glimpse of “a future that works:” sustainable, simple, sacred–and anthropologically defensible. But it’s not the only possible way we could live: the Afterculture signals a return to the rich “cultural biodiversity” that has characterized the human species for most of its sojourn here, and the viewer is challenged to imagine other versions, other tribes.

Our future will be one bursting with cultural diversity; Green shows only a single concept. That can hardly be called a fault; the undertaking was mammoth already. No one person could ever be up to dreaming a dream so big, so expansive, so diverse.

But many people, dreaming together, just might be able to dream our future.

The Maya and the Navajo both believe that many worlds have risen and fallen before; this is the Fourth World. The Mayan long-count calendar ends, along with the Fourth World, in 2012: the same time period in which we can expect Peak Oil, global warming, and the diminishing returns of our complexity to wreak havoc on our civilization.

But they also predict that because the world moves in cycles, on the other side, we will inherit the Fifth World.

Fine delineated an ethos for Dungeons & Dragons; Hughes did the same for Call of Cthulhu. We will state, explicitly, from the very beginning, that the ethos of The Fifth World is Jeff Vail’s “Four Virtues“:

1. Own only that which you must presently use, for all else is deceit. Use little, as virtue is derived from experience, not consumption.
2. Simplicity is virtue. The most beautiful form of simplicity is the elegant circle of self-sufficient consumption and creation. In all forms of accounting, do not consume more than you have already created.
3. Virtue is found not in secrecy or in the constraint of freedom, but in acknowledgement, and accepting responsibility for all costs of one’s actions.
4. Understanding the universe of connection is virtue. Connect with space through silence. Connect with time through experience. Free yourself from ego through awareness. Protect transcendent beauty.

Christians feared that Dungeons & Dragons was a “gateway drug” to occultism. Of course, it isn’t, but we’re willing to state right from the beginning that we do hope that The Fifth World serves as a “gateway drug,” a first taste of tribal life in the safe, delineated imaginal space of the role-playing game. We hope that it will leave the players wanting more–wanting to live in a world like that, perhaps enough to even make it happen. We hope it can engender, at the very least, a greater sense of the sacred in every day life.

In 1966, Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek premiered on NBC. For the past 40 years, it has provided the model of a utopian future for techno-salvationists. What we need is a vision that maintains its hope and optimism without compromising its realism, a goal we can strive for that isn’t a contradiction in terms. As Green wrote of his Afterculture exhibit:

The truth is that for the first time we are bereft of a positive vision of where we are going. This is particularly evident among kids. Their future is either Road Warrior post-apocalypse, or Blade Runner mid-apocalypse. All the futuristic computer games are elaborations of these scenarios, heavy metal worlds where civilization has crumbling into something weird and violent (but more exciting than now).

The AFTERCULTURE is an attempt to transmute this folklore of the future into something deep and rich and convincingly real. If we are to pull a compelling future out of environmental theory and recycling paradigms, we are going to have to clothe the sacred in the romantic. The Afterculture is part of an ongoing work to shape a new mythology by sources as diverse as Thoreau and Conan and Dances with Wolves and Iron John. The Afterculture is not “against” the problems of our times, and its not about “band-aid solutions” to the grim jam we find ourselves in. It’s about opening up a whole new category of solutions, about finding another way of being: evolved, simpler, deeper, even more elegant. Even more cool. Even very cool.

We were deeply inspired by Green’s art, and we share the same ambition for The Fifth World that he held for Afterculture; in many ways, The Fifth World is a hope that open source can fill in the enormous range of diversity, and begin to excite people with the endless possibilities that lie before us.

The role-playing game itself is a pseudo-shamanic enterprise. When the game is The Fifth World, the GM/shaman guides a group of friends through a communal vision of what their life could be, if they choose to make it. The bonds of their “urban tribe” are strengthened in the pseudo-shamanic ritual of the RPG and their appetites for a better future are wetted.

We face difficult challenges. But the hardest is probably the cultural task: the challenge of creating a new culture based on consensus, on sharing, on egalitarianism. As Tamarack Song wrote:⁴

We come from a technological society, so we naturally think that substituting primitive technology for civilized technology is our doorway. The only problem is that Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools — few and crude, and their craftwork — basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills — how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love. Without these skills, you will surely die. Or else you’ll go back to the life that shuns these skills.

These are our questions; these are our hopes. With The Thirty Theses, we have managed to share our rationale, but it has been considerably more difficult to communicate our vision. How can we communicate our vision? The ways vision has always been communicated: in an imaginal reality, a shared dream, by a shaman, in art, in a role-playing game. The Thirty Theses told you why we believe what we believe; now, we will share with you what we believe.

Welcome to the Fifth World.

Footnotes

¹ This is not an endorsement of Way of the Shaman, Michael Harner, or the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Jason Godesky has written his opinion of neoshamanism elsewhere. [Back]

² “Open Gaming Interview With Ryan Dancey,” published by Wizards of the Coast. [Back]

³ Daniel Quinn, “A Path of Hope for the Future,” Houston Youth Environmental Leadership Conference, 26 January 2000. [Back]

⁴ This is not an endorsement of Tamarack Song; we have mixed feelings about him and the Teaching Drum. Some of what we hear is truly exciting; other things we hear, truly worrying. Since we have not verified any of these rumors for ourselves, we can neither endorse nor condemn him or the Teaching Drum.