The Origins of HAZMAT: The Game
It all started with reading an article that affected us both and made us want to do something about it.
So, we made a game.
The article discussed some the contemporary definitions and problems of (particularly American) masculinity:
“The definition of masculinity seems to be contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male survey respondents said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been considered masculine. When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank…. [guys interviewed] could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. They’d seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A Big Ten football player I interviewed bandied about the term toxic masculinity. ‘Everyone knows what that is,’ he said, when I seemed surprised. Yet when asked to describe the attributes of ‘the ideal guy,’ those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day)” (Orenstein).
Masculinity
Toxic Masculinity has become a highly recognized term nowadays, it can refer to “socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence,” according to one study published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology (Kupers, 714).
Toxic (or as we have been referring to them as: hazardous) notions of masculine identity persist and spread despite boys/men holding relatively more egalitarian views about girls/women than they did decades ago. Hazardous narratives of masculinity hurt those who hold those views and/or preform them as well as those around them: “Research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide” (Orenstein).
Men also describe feeling like they have to repress their feelings and be “stoic,” that they feel social pressure to be ever-ready for sex and to get with as many women as possible, that they should control their female partners, should express homophobia and even engage in homophobic teasing as a pro-social interaction with their peers (Orenstein). They expect that their anger will be interpreted as combative and also that “at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men” (hooks, 60).
Masculinity however has not always been performed and defined this way and it is imperative that we interrogate how ideas of what constitutes masculinity has changed. According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th century man was compassionate and a caretaker. But with industrialization and the move of paid labor to factories from the home and the land, these qualities lost favor. A backlash to feminism and the women’s liberation/rights movement saw a doubling down on the toxic/hazardous definition of masculinity typical of sexist patriarchy. Other iterations of masculinity in American culture include The Organization Man of the 1950s, the “delinquents” of the 50s and early 60s, The Sensitive New Age Guy of the 1970s, the macho guys of the 1980s, the Grunge rebels of the 1990s (Smiler). Masculinity has changed and is changing.
We can take the reins and intentionally contribute to shaping that change, or we can do nothing and sustain the patriarchial model that is hazardous to us all. It is one thing to make the mistake of conflating what is for what ought to be or what will always be, as the Seduction/PUA movement does with the (mis)use evolutionary psychology/biology, it is another to see what is and do nothing about it.
The reality of “what is” is that contemporary masculinity is in a state of emergence-cy, but it need not be so. A study of boys from pre-K to first grade found little boys have a keen understanding of emotions and desire for close relationships, there’s actually some evidence that in infancy male infants are more expressive than females (Orenstein). But at around the age of 5-6 socialization kicks in, in adolescence they become emotion and shame-phobic, convinced that their peers will lose respect for them if they discuss their personal problems or have friendships with girls. Boys and men are routinely denied the full spectrum of human emotions and human relationships, they are left unable to identify or express their own emotions and ill-equipped to form caring, lasting adult relationships. As the philosopher bell hooks wrote in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love:
“Patriarchy demands of men that they become and remain emotional cripples. Since it is a system that denies men full access to their freedom of will, it is difficult for any man of any class to rebel against patriarchy, to be disloyal to the patriarchal parent, be that parent female or male” (27).
So how can a game help move the needle on this?
Well, it all gets back to the power of conversation.
Conversation
As Sherry Turkle wrote in her book Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age: “Conversation implies something kinetic. It is derived from words that mean “to tend to each other, to lean toward each other,” words about the activity of relationship, on’e “manner of conducting oneself in the world or in society; behavior, mode or course of life.” To converse, you don’t just have to perform turn taking, you have to listen to someone else, to read their body, their voice, their tone, and their silences. You bring your concern and experience to bear, and you expect the same from others” (44-45).
Conversation has been proven to work in this area: Coaching Boys into Men’ (CBIM) is an evidence-based teen dating violence prevention program for male adolescent athletes. It uses a ‘transformative gender’ approach, wherein coach-led discussions explore masculinity, consent, personal responsibility, respectful behavior, standing up against violence against women, and handling power responsibly (Jaime et al.). The goal is to alter gender norms related to dating and sexual violence perpetration, promoting bystander intervention and understanding the role of gender and power can reduce violence against women.
A study of 2,000 male high-school athletes who went through the CBIM program found significantly reduced rates of dating violence and a greater likelihood of intervening to stop other boys’ abusive conduct among those who participated in the 12 week, weekly discussion program (Miller et al.). CBIM was developed by Futures Without Violence, a national non-profit organization that provides training and technical assistance for advocates and other practitioners involved in domestic and sexual violence prevention. CBIM is freely accessible through their website.
Moreover, the development of empathy needs face to face conversation and also eye contact. The psychologist Sara Konrath collated evidence from seventy-two studies that suggested that empathy levels among US college students are 40 percent lower than they were twenty years ago. She notes that in the past ten years there has been an especially sharp drop. She and her team speculate that this may be due to the increase in mediated communication–“with so much time spent interacting with others online rather than in reality, interpersonal dynamics such as empathy might certainly be altered” (Konrath).
These kinds of conversations need to happen in person.
The psychologist Albert Mehrabian has come up with a “7 percent, 38 percent, 55 percent rule.” When we are together in the same room, 7 percent of how we feel is conveyed by words, 38 percent is conveyed through our tone of voice, and 55 percent through our body language.
The work of Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute in USC College, and his colleagues suggests that certain emotions–for example, admiration and compassion–actually take longer to process at a neural level than responses to physical pain, but once awakened the reactions persist longer than those to physical pain. If our interactions are happening too fast, for instance with fast-paced television, film or video games or fast-paced consumption of news, we may never fully experience emotions about other people’s psychological states. We may not be able to elicit or experience empathic responses, and this could have implications on our morality.
“For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection,” said first author Mary Helen Immordino-Yang of the USC Rossier School of Education.
Our nobler instincts take more time.
The work of psychiatrist Daniel Siegel has taught us that children need eye contact to develop parts of the brain that are involved with attachment. Without eye contact, there is a persistent sense of disconnection and problems with empathy. Atsushi Senju, a cognitive neuroscientist, studies this mechanism through adulthood, showing that the parts of the brain that allow us to process another person’s feelings and intentions are activated by eye contact.
Another tool in our toolbelt that can help move the needle on this is that of friendship.
Friendship is an Ethical Relationship
Jerks flock together. Surprised? That’s because only other jerks will put up with their friends being a jerk. Are your friend jerks? Well…that might say something about you…
Circle of Jerks:
Circle of Jerks Game Description from Amazon.com:
- A fast-paced, raunchy party game for true competitors!
- Players must shout obscenities as they race to identify & match hilarious symbols & terms.
- Ideal for quiet coffee shops, Sunday Mass, or even a funeral. Bring life to your party with Circle of Jerks!
- Warning: This card game is not meant for prudes or virgins. Drinking game rules included!
Friendship is a site of ethical construction and character building, it is a relationship that aspires to equality, As the Friendship Scholar (yes, such a thing exists) William K. Rawlins wrote: “Friends seek ways to treat each other as equals despite differences in personal characteristics or social circumstances” (9).
While friends may differ, friendship nonetheless moves toward areas of the relationship where two people stand as equals, cultivating mutual understandings of fairness and cooperation without negating individual differences. Friendship is a private moral sphere where we test the constraints of cultural and public moralities, wrestle with issues of equality, difference, and power, negotiate affection and respect. It is a site of ethical instruction and construction, where the consequences are both character-defining and character-impacting.
You know, like it was for the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, and for J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.
To Aristotle, the close friendship overlaps in significant ways with larger social participation and what he called civic or political friendship. Civic friendship is present when people within communities demonstrate good will toward each other in public settings and discourses, supporting each other by sustaining a hospitable environment for interaction, where common concerns are addressed and the pursuit of the common good (whether or not it is agreed upon) is mutually supported (Rawlins).
The presence of civic friendship within communities facilitates the possibility of close friendships, and the care and concern for close friends broadens into a generalized sense of good will practiced in civic friendship. Mutuality and the mutual well-wishing of affective communication in close friendships expands to concern for the common good and supporting a hospitable environment for wider interaction. The individual human being, the friend, not the community or the mass of humanity, is the preferred object of affection and concern. Without friendship and concrete affection according to the scholar Philip Selznick, a morality based on abstract ideals and the arguments that support them has “no surer touchstones for belief and conduct, morality easily becomes a sometime thing, superficial and transitory, and may readily be used, in systematic ways, to justify evil in the name of the good.” Without the concreteness of persons, of shared situations, of sharing our stories, we risk abstracting individuals and losing direct “fellow-feeling.”
Disrespect breeds more aggression, the reverse is also proving to be true: Healthier attitudes towards gender can help prevent violence. Research has found that peer attitudes towards gender were also influential in predicting violent behavior. Boys who saw their peers engaging in two or more verbally, physically or sexually abusive behaviors were two to five times more likely to engage in violent behaviors themselves, the study found. These behaviors included telling jokes that disrespected women and girls or making disrespectful comments about a girl’s body or makeup.
Emergent Design
The design model of Emergent Dialogue is a relatively new one that comes out of sustainability research and has been used primarily for social mobilization in support of collective behavior change in Serious Games (Tanenbaum et al.). In the Emergent Dialogue model, the “message” is not communicated or encoded in the game; instead, the game interface or mechanics indirectly or the content directly motivates player dialogue and participation that leads to new understandings {Antle et al.). Information flows in a bi-directional manner between players, new and original content emerges through dialogue and the game providing a context and space to create new information and outcomes through the iterative process of ongoing engagement, feedback, negotiation, and reevaluation. This model is concerned with the player’s personal history, attitudes and goals related to the game’s subject, the game provides situations and opportunities to explore, reflect, and discuss these and make meaning. There are no fixed win or lose goals, they can include learning outcomes such as socioemotional learning or other outcomes related to transformative gender, but they are primarily to support players to “determine their own game goals in line with their personal values” (Antle et al., 46).
Like our other game Fellowship of Fools: The (Friendship/Romance/Sexuality) Game, we intend to include a single-player mode for players. Playing these more emotionally/ethically/socially fraught games with others can be extremely challenging, and players need the opportunity to become familiar with the game material by themselves, to interrogate themselves and “care for their selves,” use it for personal development and growth in the comfort of solitude. After all, the material they will face will be by turns explosive, flammable, corrosive or toxic in content.
While stoicism has been seen as akin to conventional masculinity’s repression of emotional expression, men’s need to act “tough” and hide their emotions, this is actually a perversion of actual Stoic philosophy. One particular Stoic exercise can offer us a useful mechanism for expanding definitions and performances of gender and the practice and construction of ethics through conversation and friendship.
The french philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and a certain technology of the self they called askesis or ascetic practices. Askesis means the progressive consideration of the self, a remembering, but also a mastery over oneself, obtained not through renunciation or suppression of feelings or reality, but through the acquisition and assimilation of truth (Foucault). It’s final aim is to access the reality of this world and to prepare for it (paraskeuazo): “It is a set of practices by which one can acquire, assimilate, and transform truth into a permanent principle of action…They include exercises in which the subject puts himself in a situation in which he can verify whether he can confront events and use the discourses with which he is armed. It is a question of testing and preparation. Is the truth assimilated enough to become ethics so that we can behave as we must when an event presents itself? One exercise related to askesis is melete, meaning ‘meditation'” (239).
No, not that kind of meditation.
The Greek meditation is an ethical, imaginary experience. As Foucault wrote; “Melete is the work one undertakes in order to prepare a discourse or an improvisation by thinking over useful terms and arguments. It is a matter of anticipating the real situation through dialogue in one’s thoughts….One judges the reasoning one should use in an imaginary exercise (‘Let us suppose…’) in order to test an action or event (for example, ‘How would I react?’). Imagining the articulation of possible events to test how one would react–that is meditation” (239).
This passage from Foucault was significant for us because it points to our own use of situational game design in Fellowship of Fools, and as a way to approach ethics-construction and assimilation.
While we are in the process of developing how to play with HAZMAT, this section of Foucault’s writing helped guide us to a model that we thought worked well.
We take the model of melete of the Stoics described by Foucault a bit further. Players draw a “Let us suppose” ethical imaginary situation, these are the Hazardous Sites cards. We have added to the melete model described by Foucault a past reflection as well. Players choose a Hazardous Materials cards that prompts them to reflect on how they have struggled and acted/felt/thought in the past in a similar sort of situation, their past related mistakes and regrets that relate to this imaginary ethical situation. These are their personal Hazardous Materials they carry inside them, and should handle with care. Finally, players choose a better way to judge and handle the imaginary situation, these are the HAZMAT suits. These are protective suits that can be used by players to better reflect on how they could do better, they are question prompts with “could.” They are meant to potentially show players the many other options they have to react to a given situation.
Facing an ethical, imaginary experience, players can reflect on their past behavior with the hazardous material card, and then use the hazmat suit to imagine how they could have reacted differently. Then, they can try to navigate the imaginary situation with the hazmat suit and what they learned from their past personal hazardous materials to help them judge the reasoning and reactions they might have/use in this potentially hazardous imaginary ethical situation. During multiplayer gameplay, other players are then invited after these steps to give a response, feedback, critique or share their own related story, they can participate and a discussion can evolve, and a Code of Conduct helps players regulate their behavior toward each other.
We would very much like to develop a facilitated version of the game for coaches, therapists, counselors, teachers, mentors, advocates and others who would be interested in leading facilitated games of HAZMAT, but that will take some significant collaboration with others. If you know of someone who could be helpful for developing a facilitated game play mode or that might be interested in promoting the game later when it’s ready, drop us a comment and let us know!
Note
It should be noted that the article linked to at the beginning of this post and our words here are more so specifically about American (and Western) boys/men and patriarchal defined notions of masculine identity. There is no singular masculinity. There is however a dominant normative idea of what masculinity is and should be.
Our hope is that this game helps players to reflect on it and perhaps perform it differently than they have in the past. Whatever your gender identity, this game can be played to better understand the hazardous aspects of modern masculinity and how individually and collectively players might perform it in alternative ways and encourage others to do so.
We all have a part in constructing it (women and queer folks too) day-in and day-out:
“We need to highlight the role women play in perpetuating and sustaining patriarchal culture so that we will recognize patriarchy as a system women and men support equally, even if men receive more rewards from that system. Dismantling and changing patriarchal culture is work that men and women must do together” (hooks, 24).
-bell hooks
We think there are aspects of other gender narratives and performativity that should be examined and talked about and how they play into and perpetuate patriarchy, such as fem-fem competition, emphasized femininity, internalized sexism, fat-shaming, and queer gate-keeping (REGs such as TERFs and SWERFs), respectability politics, and horizontal oppression. As such, we would like to explore a Femininity and Queerness deck as well for HAZMAT. Stay tuned for more.
Works Cited:
Antle, Alissa & Warren, Jillian & May, Aaron & Fan, Min & Wise, Alyssa. (2014). Emergent Dialogue: Eliciting Values during Children’s Collaboration with a Tabletop Game for Change. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. 10.1145/2593968.2593971.
Damasio, Antonio, Damasio, Hanna, McColl, Andrea, and Immordino-Yang, Mary Helen. Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences May 2009, 106 (19) 8021-8026; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0810363106
Foucault, Michel, and Paul Rabinow. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. New York: New Press, 1997.
hooks, bell. The Will to Change : Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York : Atria Books, 2004.
Jaime, M. C., Stocking, M., Freire, K., Perkinson, L., Ciaravino, S., & Miller, E. (2016). Using a domestic and sexual violence prevention advocate to implement a dating violence prevention program with athletes.Healtheducationresearch, 31(6), 679–696. doi:10.1093/her/cyw045
Konrath, Sara. Why is Empathy Decreasing? https://genius.com/Dr-sara-h-konrath-why-is-empathy-decreasing-annotated
Kupers, Terry A. Toxic Masculinity as a Barrier to mental Health Treatment in Prison. Journal of Clinical Psychology, Vol. 61 (6), 713-724 (2005) DOI: 10.1002/jclp.20105 https://www.ojp.gov/reviewpanel/pdfs_nov06/written-kupers.pdf
Orenstein, Peggy. The Miseducation of the American Boy. The Atlantic. 12/20/2019. Accessed 1/16/20. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/the-miseducation-of-the-american-boy/603046/
Mehrabian A. Nonverbal Communication. Aldine Transaction, 2007.
Miller E, Tancredi DJ, McCauley HL, Decker MR, Virata MC, Anderson HA, Stetkevich N, Brown EW, Moideen F, Silverman JG. Coaching boys into men: a cluster-randomized controlled trial of a dating violence prevention program. J Adolesc Health. 2012 Nov; 51(5):431-8.
Rawlins, William K. The Compass of Friendship: Narratives, Identities, and Dialogues. Sage Publications, Inc. 2009.
Senju, Atushi and Johnson, Mark H. “The eye contact effect: mechanisms and development.” Trends in cognitive sciences 13, no. 3 (January 3, 2009)
Smiler, Andrew. Masculinity is Dead. Long Live Masculinity. The Good Men Project. 9/27/2018. Accessed 1/18/20. https://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/andrew-smiler-masculinity-is-dead-long-live-masculinity/
Tanenbaum, Theresa & Antle, Alissa & Robinson, John. (2013). Three perspectives on behavior change for serious games. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems – Proceedings. 3389-3392. 10.1145/2470654.2466464.
Turkle, Sherry. Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age. New York: Penguin Press, 2015. Turkle, Sherry.
