A Thing or Two About Villains

Sometime around 7 or 8th grade I was introduced to a new type of game - a role playing game called Dungeons and Dragons. I was drawn to D&D because of the imagination and creativity it required. My friends and I spent hours taking on the roles of Elven Archers, Halfling Thieves and Human Wizards, just like our favorite characters from Tolkien, Donaldson, Eddings and more. As more of my peers were drawn to this new genre of games, more of these types of games were published in several different genres, like Sci-Fi, Westerns and Spy thrillers. 

These types of games usually require a coordinator, a Game Master, who takes the rules, and the background, and makes it come alive in a functioning world of imagination for the players.  It was this portion of the games that I was really drawn to.  I learned to use my imagination to create entire worlds, and the cast of characters to inhabit them. My natural inclination for writing and drawing led to volumes of works on places, things and people who don’t exist anywhere else but my mind, and the friends I’ve shared them with.

Being a Game Master taught me things - in fact, being a GM (as Game Masters are known) may have taught me more than high school ever did. At first glance, Role-Playing Games (RPGs) are educational in terms of reading and arithmetic.  A single game can have multiple volumes of books, with lots of various rules to assimilate, and background material to enjoy. That means lots of reading.  And since the rules are almost always based upon math, you end up reinforcing all those math skills that seem so dry and boring in math class.

RPGs also teach valuable social skills, because, it is, at it’s heart, a social experience. Playing an RPG requires taking on the role of a character who may be vastly different from your own personality, a practice which builds empathy for another person’s viewpoint. GMs in particular get to practice this skill running multiple non-player characters - the people of their world.  It also requires learning how to work with others as a player, and as a GM, how to get groups of players to work together to play the game. Time management is another important skill that good GMs pick up over time as well.   And as they build their worlds and adventures, GMs also learn valuable research skills, and quite often a basic knowledge of the things they research.  

The things a typical GM researches is a variety of topics that would boggle most people. Over the years, I’ve done research on things as varied from medieval mining techniques to the history of the Crusades, from basic botany to the French Revolution, from gem cutting to string theory, from how tanks are built to the history of Prohibition, and from the formation of the Protestant churches to psychology.  From Ceasar and Julius to Hitler and Rommel.

As a result of all of this, myself, and most of the experienced GMs I know of almost universally share three important traits. The first trait is that we all tend to know at least a little about most topics - more topics than the average person does, anyway.  The second trait is that our extended knowledge has often shown us how little we actually know overall - we’re always willing to learn more. The third trait - and the real focus of this essay - is that we also tend to know a thing or two about villains.

Crafting a good adventure or campaign is quite often about crafting a good villain.  The primary focus of most RPG adventures is to defeat something or someone, and whether it’s an individual or an organization, whether it’s a human opponent, or a monster or an alien, there are personalities with their own goals at work. Or at least there should be. Any good GM or fiction writer knows that villains need to have motivations, and that those motivations need to be clear to the writer/GM, if not to their audience.

A good GM or writer quickly learns that the best villains - the scariest and most memorable ones - have clear goals and motivations, but generally do not consider themselves as villains. They do the things they do because of who they are, and the goals they’re trying to achieve, not just because they’re evil or bad. They do the things they do for a variety of reasons, but much of the time those reasons are clear and understandable to anyone that takes the time to try, even if they are despicable. Because they were beaten as a child and vowed they would never allow anyone to hurt them again. Or a woman who was raped, and vows that no other woman shall ever be raped. Or a child who was powerless to stop his mother from being beaten, vowing to never feel that powerless again.  The list of reasons and motivations is practically endless, but all are, for the most part, understandable, if you can get into the head of the villain. 

Every GM has to get into the heads of their villains in order to play them well. We have to see them as people first to make them memorable villains. 

And that, my friends, is precisely the point of this entire ramble so far. In real life, outside of the criminal element, many of the villains we see around us rarely, if at all, perceive themselves to actually be a villain. They have their reasons and motivations, and they operate on those.  Even when they’re doing villainous things, they don’t see themselves as being villains. It's important to remember that.

The neighbor who can’t or won’t keep his dog from barking doesn’t see himself as a villain. Neither does the car salesman who sells you the lemon. Nor does the cop who skirts procedures in order to catch a bad guy. Neither does a politician who helps pass a bad law.

In modern times, politicians and those with political opinions are some of the most vilified people. Democrats call President Bush and Senator Cruz villains for their opinions and actions. Republicans call President Obama and Senator Feinstein villains for their opinions and actions.TV hosts, and even bloggers and forum commentators are labelled as villains.

In the cases of those in power, yes, many of these people have committed what I and others would consider villainous acts. President Bush and his administration pushed a war in Iraq that probably wasn’t justified.  Senator Cruz has made some inflammatory comments to his colleagues in Congress. Senator Feinstein has pushed for anti-gun laws that either border on, or out right cross constitutionality. President Obama and his administration have been increasing drone use, and hiding many of their legal justifications for doing so. All could be considered villainous things.

And I could fill a dozen pages with examples like this.

We can label them villains all we want, but doing so doesn’t actually help the situation. We have to recognize that they don’t perceive themselves as villains, and that they honestly believe the actions they take are to help. Calling them villains simply causes them to perceive you as the villain.

C.S. Lewis once said “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

They think they’re helping. They do what they do with the approval of their own conscience. You cannot change their thinking by labeling them as a villain - because, in their own mind, they are not. Calling them names does little help either, no one likes to be called a right wing gun nut, or a left wing libtard. People shut down, and rational discourse dies when you start using labels, and calling names.

The only way to get the rational discourse going again is for all sides to start appealing to each other’s good consciences, rather than calling each other names. The key to defeating a villain is to understand them, and understanding what their motivations are.

In a nutshell, villains are people, too. As a society, we need to start treating people as people, not as labels.