This is kind of a weird chapter, directly inspired by a particular Adam Curtis documentary. If you’re not familiar with his work, I highly recommend checking out basically anything he’s done, though they’re one of those things (like Charlie Brooker’s various -Wipe shows) that the BBC doesn’t bother releasing outside the UK, so you may have to look for them on YouTube or whatever. I think the conclusion of this chapter is kind of weak, and it’s something I need to figure out how to develop better.

Games for the Human Animal

Adam Curtis is a brilliant British documentarian whose work is mainly about, as he puts it, “power and how it works in society.” A lot of his films are about things like the War on Terror and geopolitics, but in The Century of the Self he explores how Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays and others applied psychoanalysis to foster the consumer culture we have today and reshape modern politics, particularly in the US and UK. That’s some heady stuff. It’s well worth seeking out the documentary for purely educational reasons, but there are also ways in which it’s relevant to role-playing games.

Continue reading Tools for Dreaming: Games for the Human Animal →