On the Humanist and Anti-Humanist Aesthetics of Ruin

So, I wrote the last post and then realized that I wasn't done thinking about ruins and how they function in games.  This is about aesthetics and draws a lot from the 19th century.  You have been warned.

Ruin porn in art is exploitative and harmful to the communities from which the images/artifacts are taken.  Ruins in fiction/games cannot be harmful because no real persons are involved in the ruin - playing a game in a ruin or ruined setting does not pull attention away from actual real people living in actual Detroit who could really use some support or, even better, some empathy.

Ruin settings are about decay - things that were once larger than anything that have broken and/or been corrupted into incoherency.  Now, I use ruins as well, as do many DMs and many games, but my ruins look and feel very different from the ones Joseph Manola discusses in his essay.  Now, I'm sure one could chalk that up to my adventures not being as 'good' as Red and Pleasant Land or Deep Carbon Observatory, but that discussion is ultimately pointless.  What I want to talk about are the aesthetics that I perceive underlie some of those differences - what I'm calling humanist and anti-humanist aesthetics of ruin.

I'll talk about anti-humanist aesthetics first - they are primarily the subject of Manola's essay.  In an anti-humanist ruin, or an anti-humanist conception of ruin, the ruined thing is a corruptive agent: it taints those around it with ruin and entropy, meaning that anything encountered nearby the ruin has been transmuted.  The idea is an inversion of the Arthurian connection between citizens and their home - that a ruined environment perpetuates ruin in the people who dwell near it.  It is an explanation for all of the madness and horror that often comes out of such a setting: not only is the ruin itself inscrutable, but it is impossible to understand and/or empathize with the inhabitants of the ruin, either.  That is not to say the party cannot ally with the inhabitants, communicate in some way, but the ruin's denizens are fundamentally inhuman.  Furthermore, the descent into ruin is inevitable - the ruin cannot be repurposed, its inhabitants are doomed to their vices and depravity.  Order is ultimately meaningless in the face of such a profound, sublime ruin.  To borrow from Berlioz, darkness leads to deeper darkness.

The humanist ruin puts a different spin on the same setting.  It takes the same setting but makes two critical changes.  The first is that many or most of the inhabitants of the ruin are understandable; they follow Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or have some other set of goals to which the players might relate, even if only slightly (or can be persuaded to temporarily cease their holy war against the butter-side-ups to ensure that the demon of the deeps stays put, since everyone dies if it comes out).  If we want to draw from romance fantasy, the relatable nature of the creatures involved with such a ruin can be even more horrifying than those of the anti-humanist aesthetic - it can become more personal to the players (not the characters but the players) very quickly.  Often in this case, the only tools available to the players to have a meaningful impact upon the space are their empathy and communication skills, borrowing from the idea of romance fantasy.  The second change is that it is possible to impose order upon the ruin, to find (or assign) a meaning to the ruin that gives it some understandable function and a purpose to which it can now be used - it rewrites the ruined nature of the setting and 'normalizes' it, aligning it with the rest of the setting.  To borrow from Beethoven, darkness leads to light.

Now, these are theories about gaming aesthetics, which means that rather than applying them to adventures or settings or whatever, they have to be applied to actual games being run (just as dramatic theory can only be fully applied to recorded performances or live performances, not to scripts).  However, I can pull a couple hypotheticals from Zak S.'s Red and Pleasant Land to show how both aesthetics can manifest within the setting.

The world of R&PL is a ruin on every level - a war has been fought for an unknown amount of time for reasons that make little logical sense.  The topology of the region is non-Euclidean, the denizens are range from apathetic to inimical to human life, and so on.  However, the Jabberwocky is a symptom of the thwarted space-time continuum: by killing the Jabberwocky, the time frame of the war is established and many of the spatial anomalies clear up.  Knowing, definitively, how long the war has been waged gives players the ability to affect the war, presumably to stop it, which allows order to come back into the region.  A humanist DM lets the players know this information and, if they desire this outcome, will enable them to do so (at least eventually.  It should be quite challenging).  The anti-humanist DM doesn't particularly care about the Jabberwocky, and the only problem results if the party wishes to impose order and the anti-humanist DM doesn't wish them to do so (but that problem has less to do with the aesthetic position and more to do with this particular DM being an asshole).

One of the more interesting insights from Manola's post was his linking the LotFP/OSR ruin aesthetic with the Sublime, an aesthetic phenomena associated with the Long 19th century, and it bears a strong resemblance to the kinds of settings run under the anti-humanist aesthetic of ruin.

Of course, one of the other strong themes from the Long 19th century was that of the triumphant hero who struggles against dark forces and ultimately triumphs, which is certainly one of the potential outcomes from this humanist aesthetic of ruin.