The age of unreason - a role playing game I won't run

Inappropriate Illustration

I was reading an article about the EU and it kept referring to it as a technocratic project. 

For people who have played the game Mage the Ascension that sets off a particular resonance, the Technocracy, for most players, are an antagonist. The players in the game have characters who do magic(k), known as Traditional Mages, the Technocracy are trying to eliminate magic from the world. Although members of the Technocratic Union have the ability to do magic themselves they have been trained not to see their abilities in that way.

The Technocracy in Retreat
The idea for the game is that despite almost wiping out the Traditional mages, and probably all sorts of other areas of the supernatural, since the start of the 21st century all around the world the Technocracy is in retreat. The player characters are young members of the Technocratic Union trying to keep the world from, perhaps literally crashing and burning to the ground.

Two possible antagonists

A- The antagonists in the game are unreasonable humans. Some of them may be extremely wealthy, some of them may be politicians, some might run corporations, but they are human. The only supernatural bit is the player characters, magicians who do not believe in magic.

B - The antagonists are the Syndicate.



The threats
The climate crisis. For some time now the scientific consensus has been there is a problem with human created climate change. While there had been some progress at a world level perhaps twenty years ago that seems to be over now as many governments care more about protecting their home based fossil fuel industries than planning for the challenges ahead. Amongst the public some people have just given up. Can the young technocrats help the current grass roots movements make a positive impact, or can they find another way to ameliorate the effects.
The wellness industry. From popular presentations of mindfulness, positive psychology, useless ‘supplements’, goop, to new age crystal healing, homeopathy all the way through to the anti vaccination movement. How can the young technocrats help get people to follow stop indulging in modern quackery.
 Ghost hunters and other popular presentations of the supernatural. In the fictional universe the Technocratic Union have taken care of all the genuine supernatural threats that there were. Yet people seem to profess belief in ghosts, or astronomy or whatever floats your boat as ST.
Popular politicians. Some of them are already in power, and are not beyond using the mechanisms of their state to combat anyone who would interfere. Others have backing from rich individuals, that they can use to hire security consultants, or are only a few steps away from street thugs. This is the most physically dangerous threat (especially if the players are facing a state actor happy to send assassins to poison the player’s characters.

Why I will never run this game

I quite like mage, and have run a couple of campaigns, one set in the modern world and one set in the Renaissance, but is down on the list of games I probably don’t want to run (a list headed by Art Magica because of the preparation time needed).
So what is wrong with mage.

The paradigm problem. When someone plays a mage who belongs to one of the magical traditions there is some guidance about how magic works for them, but it is up to the player to add details to this, their paradigm of magic. When this works well it a joy to play in the game. However it can be hard work to do that, and takes some head space outside of the session. For players who are playing member of the Technocratic Union there is a further twist. Officially they do not do magic, they use advanced science. In game mechanic terms they roll the same dice pool as Traditional Mages to do special effects, but need a none magical explanation. This gets even more difficult if Agent Q has a ray gun, but because no one else has that type of magic it is a inert rod for any other member of the group.

Exporting American Values

There is no doubt that the majority of psychology research worldwide happens in the USA. If psychology was a science this would be of minor concern.

The minor concern is that those funding research, the state, large corperations, and in some medical areas, large charities, fund the research first that is important to them. So some areas get more attention than others. With science, however, the findings add to human knowledge, and over time, as theories and hypotheses are tested, theories made better, it makes little difference the impetus to do research.

So, for example, Germany in the period between the world wars, became interested in rocket science as that technology was not covered under the Versailles treaty. Both the USA and USSR recognised the potential of missiles as weapons of war after world war two, this becoming even more important as a weapons delivery system for nuclear war heads. Famously the USA recruited Wernher von Braun the designer of the V2 missile, SS officer and user of slaver labour, for their development of ICBMs, which as a side effect led to the moon landings. This grisly history has no effect though on the actual rocket science, it is not Nazi science, or American science (or Soviet science) it is science.

As a side note I have little patience with those who apologise for psychology and its lack of progress in almost 200 years by bleating that it is a young science. Rocket science is a young science and rocket scientists have put a person on the moon.

These concerns may become of more pressing importance if a major country, like the USA, were to start defunding science that the President disagrees with, and banned federal agencies from even referring to the issue. How that plays out with regard to the climate emergency we will have to wait and see.

So of course across science, development is uneven as societies have particular cocerns, however for natural sciences, most of the time, these peturbations become less important across time.

Psychology is different, because the academic discipline of psychology changes it subject matter, the psychology of individuals. Psychology is not unique in this, it is probably true of the social sciences more broadly.

As a phenomenon I first became aware of it not in psychology, but in sociology, from the work of Stanley Cohen, specifically Moral Panics. Like many people who played D&D in the 1970s and 80s I became aware of the accusations made that D&D led to all sort of bad things, including  satanism.  Given I have almost always been in an academic environment I read up on Moral Panics, I remember writing a fanzine  piece on it. I also gave a guest lecture on the topic in an introductory sociology class, which ironically led to a complaint about me because I did not believe that certain activities, like role playing games, listening to certain music, reading certain fiction opened the door to satanism. The complaint was not upheld. When a student of mine, Yvonne Adiar, did her dissertation on rave culture, the reaction of the media was referred to by those supportive of rave as a 'moral panic'. The notion was also used by some of the ravers we interviewed for a follow up study to contest the idea that drug use within the rave scene was dangerous. This is a looping effect, what Jones & Elcock, and Tyson, Jones & Elcock call reflexivity (a term with too many other meanings to remain useful) and what Giddens called the ‘double hermeneutic’ ( a term misued in IPA).

Now it is likely that there are some aspects of psychology not open to these looping effects, but it is difficult to know which bits may not be. Kurt Danziger in 2008 wrote a history of memory, noting that particular analogies for memory have gained in popularity with the rise of experiemental and later neuropsychology. That our understanding of memory has changed, but that this has had applied consequences. Edwards and Potter (1992) studied, amongst other topics, how people create memory in their interactions. I argue that one of the resources for this is how the academic discipline describes memory. However memory is also a good example of how other institutions within society, for example the judicial system, resists changes in how reliant we should be on the memories of eye witnesses.

In areas like personality tests, where some aspect of human action, and the reasons for human actions are simplified into a notion that there are different personality types or traits the holders of which act differently the looping effects become more obvious. It may be that certain types or traits are given a higher value than others, or it may be that once a person is told that they have certain traits or types that these become self fulfilling prophecies, in a similar way that some people interact with asrology. This also has the broader effect of individualising human activity, rather than seeing human action within the social environment that influences it.

In aspects of social psychology too these looping effects can be seen, prejudice becomes primarily a problem of individuals rather than issue about social structures. Also when one examines the psychological literature around inequality there appears to be a blind spot when it comes to prejudice directed to working class people.

In Jones & Elcock (2001) we write about how, in an American context, psychology became a prestigious profession because of the work of psychologists for the government of the USA during World War Two. The reconstruction work done by the USA in post war Germany and Japan had an influence on how universities in those countries were organised. Of course since then the economic preeminence of the USA has continued this influence.

I would argue the dicipline of psychology has become a cultural apologist for the USA.