Jungian Shadow Work In Games

Jungian shadow work in games

Jung described the Shadow as the disowned material of the personality: everything the conscious ego refuses to acknowledge as belonging to itself. It includes the obvious, rage, envy, cowardice, lust for power, the capacity for cruelty, but also latent strengths, instincts, and potentials that were inconvenient to the persona one needed to survive. The Shadow is not evil in itself; it is simply what has been split off. Left unexamined, it is projected onto others, acted out unconsciously, or lived as chronic self-sabotage. Shadow work is the deliberate process of withdrawing those projections and taking ownership of the material so that it can be integrated rather than remaining autonomous and destructive.

Games provide one of the few remaining structured containers in which this process can occur with relative safety and high fidelity.

The game as temenos

A well-designed game creates a bounded ritual space (what Jung would have recognised as a temenos). Inside that space, ordinary social consequences are suspended or transformed. One may kill, betray, dominate, fail spectacularly, or enact impulses that would be catastrophic in daily life. Because the frame is explicit, “this is a game,” the psyche is often willing to reveal more of itself than it will in unstructured conversation or even in formal therapy. The rules and the fiction act as both permission and containment. The material that surfaces is still real psychological material; only the stakes have been modulated.

This is why the continuity between myth, game, and daily life matters. The game does not invent the Shadow dynamics. It renders them legible.

Mechanisms of revelation

Several recurring structures in games function as near-perfect diagnostic instruments for the Shadow:

Role and distance.

When a player creates or inhabits a character, two movements become possible. One is identification: the player discovers that the character’s ruthlessness, passivity, or hunger for control feels uncomfortably natural. The other is disidentification: the player watches the character enact something the ego finds repulsive and realises, with a shock of recognition, “That is also me.” Both movements are useful. Tabletop role-playing, with its live social mirroring, tends to accelerate the second movement because other players can reflect the behaviour back in real time. Digital games more often intensify the first, private, intense identification without immediate social correction.

Moral choice architectures.

Games that force irreversible decisions under incomplete information (classic CRPGs, certain narrative adventures, even some strategy games) strip away the persona’s preferred self-image. The player who believes themselves compassionate discovers they will sacrifice the few for the many when the numbers are large enough. The player who prides themselves on principle discovers they will compromise when the cost becomes personal. These moments are rarely about the game’s written morality. They are about the player’s actual hierarchy of values when the protective fog of everyday rationalisation is removed.

Failure, death, and loss.

Permadeath, resource collapse, the destruction of long-built progress, these confront the ego with limitation and mortality in concentrated form. The rage, despair, or sudden nihilism that arises is rarely “just about the game.” It is the Shadow’s response to the ego’s illusion of control. Players who rage-quit, blame the system, or begin to cheat are often meeting the same material they meet when real-life plans fail. The game simply makes the reaction visible and repeatable.

Projection onto the system and other players.

Competitive multiplayer is a particularly efficient Shadow projector. The opponent becomes the carrier of one’s own disowned aggression, cunning, or perceived unfairness. “The game is broken,” “the other team is toxic,” “the matchmaking is against me”—these statements frequently contain accurate information about the speaker’s relationship to power, fairness, and vulnerability. Cooperative games reveal different material: the resentment of having to carry others, the fear of being a burden, the subtle will to dominate under the guise of leadership.

The monstrous and the forbidden.

Horror games and dark fantasy externalise the Shadow as literal monsters, corrupted landscapes, or forbidden knowledge. The effectiveness of the genre depends on the degree to which the external image matches something already present but unacknowledged in the player. When the identification is strong enough, the fear becomes existential rather than merely startle-based. The player is no longer afraid of the creature on the screen; they are afraid of the recognition.

Integration versus acting-out

Here the distinction becomes critical. Many players enact Shadow material in games without ever integrating it. They release aggression, dominate, betray, or wallow in despair inside the frame and then return to ordinary life unchanged, or slightly more defended. This is catharsis or, worse, practice. True shadow work requires the additional movement of ownership: the recognition that the impulse or capacity belongs to the player, not merely to the avatar or the situation.

The most potent games for actual work are those that create enough reflective distance for this ownership to occur. This can happen through:

• post-session conversation in tabletop groups that are willing to speak honestly,
• journal-like mechanics or ending sequences that force the player to review their own pattern of choices,
• or simply the player’s own disciplined attention after the session ends.

Without that reflective movement, the game remains a sophisticated form of shadow possession rather than shadow work.

The spiritual register

Jung insisted that the Shadow is the first stage of the individuation process. One cannot reach the deeper layers of the psyche while still projecting or repressing large portions of oneself. Games that take myth seriously, whether through explicit archetypal structures or through the simple gravity of irreversible consequence, can serve this stage. They allow the player to meet the disowned material in symbolic form, survive the encounter, and potentially return with greater psychological range.

The risk is inflation or spiritual bypass: treating the game’s narrative of heroic integration as a substitute for the slower, less glamorous work of living differently. The game can clarify the territory. It cannot walk it for you.

Continuity again

When games are used with this level of attention, the boundary between play and life becomes porous in a useful direction. The same patterns of collusion, preference for the compromised, flight from difficult clarity, or hunger for power-without-responsibility appear at the table and in the office, the family, and the private heart. The game does not create these patterns. It removes enough of the ordinary camouflage that they can finally be seen.

That seeing is the beginning of shadow work. Everything after it, whether the player chooses integration, further repression, or sophisticated new forms of avoidance, belongs to the player, not to the game. The game only held the mirror steady long enough for the reflection to become unmistakable.

Quads Inititialism

BACKSTORY

When D&D (1974 White Box) moved through AD&D 1st Edition (1978) into 2nd Edition (1989), it took the ethos of the 70s DIY experimental era and converted it into 80s glossy corporate machinery.

A lot of die-hard 'original D&D generation' people hated on it. "If it's not broke, don't mend it," was a more polite comment made about it. "It's a different game" was a common explanation by DMs who had read the new rulebook. It no longer felt hand-crafted. It was pre-packaged.

The focus was on streamlining it 'for the next generation'. At the time the debate was invoked around whose responsibility it actually is to introduce the next generation of players to the game? The players who had loved it from the start and the near-start, or the corporation adapting to the demands of the modern world and who can afford glossy advertising ("whether they will or not is another matter...") said corporation which legally owns the franchise and have done something with it the original supporters consider unnecessary. Player-groups years deep into custom campaigns had already resolved any issues about rule mechanics, both technically and with the generally accepted accord of using customisable 'house rules'; which very much was a feature of D&D since the beginning.

I happened to like it. I like both Basic and Advanced (especially 2nd). What I don’t like so much is 3rd edition (2000ad WoTC) onwards and the a gradual descent and degradation into Wokism. At the time I could never put my finger on why 3E felt like being sick and not being able to breathe fully. I'm diagnosed as high functioning autism; that description is literally what happens when I sense something is toxic. It feels like lisetria from eating raw chicken.

WoTC (Wizards of The Coast) were later sued several times for capitalising on components they had assumed to own, which it turned out through the legal court system they did not, and were using without consent of the legal copyright owners, the original creators, most of whom had no interest in pursuing legal battles for a drawing they made or a world they helped develop twenty years ago for fun. The infraction of the corporate world onto the game took away a lot of the magic of it, something early D&D players had said about AD&D. Gradually the first generation pioneers recognised the value of not allowing a corporation who had nothing at all to do with inventing it except for they now happen own the copyright to some of the material, should not be financially exploiting anybody for their own gain at the same time as making public statements about how the people they were exploiting were assholes (cf).

That early 70s DIY community vibe of collectively making it better by chipping in, building a world and a community from what the individual can bring to the table. It is after all 'our' game. Finally, after decades, the original creators got one up on the capitalist bastards who tried to ruin it while arrogantly claiming 'everything and everyone which came before is wrong and toxic' (cf.)

But that is all backstory.

CLASSES

What I want to explore in this blog is something I have noticed about the shift from Basic to 2nd Advanced which ain’t nobody else talking about.

A decision was made.

In basic D&D there are 4 character archetypes:

D&D TYPES: Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, Cleric.

Quotes Of The Day: “Kill it, Steal It, Cast it, Pray for it.”

Tools Of The Trades: Sword, Lock-picks, Scroll, Holy Symbol.

Everything else was treated as a specialisation or hybrid of those four. Knight is a sort of fighter. Pit-Gladiator is a sort of Fighter. Assassin is a sort of Thief. Minstrel is a sort of Thief. Witch is a sort of Mage. Shaman is a sort of Mage. Kung-Fu Monk is a sort of Cleric.*

The names were changed in AD&D. It was streamlined for cohesion.

2nd Advanced TYPES: Warrior. Wizard. Priest. Rogue.

MULTICLASS

Multi-classing was present in limited, somewhat clumsy form from the very beginning (especially for elves), expanded significantly in Greyhawk (1975), and then properly formalised and made official core rules in AD&D 1st Edition (1978). 2nd Edition kept the same basic system, cleaned the presentation up and made the whole thing feel more polished and packaged.

For most, creating multi-class Characters was not so much described as ‘Shaolin monk, happens to be fighter-cleric to squish it into the clunky and mechanical rules system.” It was simply a new breed of heroes defined by the Class. A fighter-thief. A warrior-wizard. The hybrids were sufficient, no real-world applications were necessary. The world became one of technicality over definition. A Shaolin Monk is simply a multi class Warrior-Priest. Madmartigan is simply a Fighter-Rogue. The flavour of culture is stripped out. The system dictates the language of the day. The language dictates the thoughts which get thinked. Thunked. Thonk. Clunky mechanics dictate the flavour of the world. The bias shifts from historic culture to corporate colonialism. A (heroic) Freedom Fighter is Rebel is a (evil scary) Terrorist.

QUADS

The observation is about the use of the Quad, not only in D&D but in the wider cultural context.

Since the 60s, before D&D, emerged a subculture called S&M which covered the basics of a scene and attracted a certain type of people. It was clandestine, it was taboo, it struck out against the white-picket-fence of the 1950s suburban dream. By the 1990s S&M had evolved and had been rebranded and repackaged by 1980s corporate consumerism. It was now called BDSM which is the title it still goes by in the 2020s where it is more openly acceptable and known about.

Another shift involving the Quad happened during the 1990s where the “gay and lesbian scenes” overlapping thanks to Alt Clubs, were similarly rebranded and repackaged as “the LGBT community” bundling all of that into one box, despite its components having their own unique cultures. It was deemed necessary as a pushback against ‘the hetero-normative mainstream’. Somehow “the LGBT community” was encouraged to perceive heteronormativity as a threat to the people involved. The language was censored that we could no longer call it “straight folk” because that descriptor implied non-straight folks were “bent”, which previously was a word adopted by “gay and lesbian scenes” from the criminal underworld to describe gays and lesbians. “Bent” suggested something is wrong with it. The original term, ‘bent as a butchers hook’, was applied to those who did not ‘go by the book’ or conform to conventional social normalities. Its most famous assigned use was originally ‘bent copper’ to describe someone who was both simultaneouly a policeman and a criminal. Where that fits specifically into D&D Character Alignment is an open question.

Here we see how phraseology and Character Class are being squished into boxes in the Quad. Here we also are observing how the space occupied by Characters who cross the line are 'multi-class' rather than the invention of a massive fifth class to describe them all ("others"); because there would necessarily have to be more ‘fifth classes’ than we have space on a page. We saw that problem with people attempting to turn LGBT into LGBTQ+ where the string of letters gets so ridiculously large to provide every individual their own special unique categorisation in the scene of things.

The frames of reference have to be simpler than that for navigation.

North East South West (Compass directions)

Spades Hearts Clubs Diamonds (Playing Card suits)

Air Water Earth Fire (Cardinal Elements)

Swords Cups Staffs Coins (Tarot suits)

Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholic, Phlegmatic (The Four Humours)

Dominant Submissive Switch Brat (BDSM culture)

The precedent for Quads is ancient in Western / European history.

Is it all we need?

Yes, if we are willing to conform or if it is acceptable to multi-class. Dungeons&Dragons attempted to resolve this in what at the time was a sensible way to go. How much an impact that had one the way we catalogue social movements which have evolved since, or how much of that is simply reflective of an innate human preference for comprehending things in terms of Quads, is open discussion content I will not diverge into here.  

Well that’s it, that’s my observation.

Footnotes

1. Class and Edition history

Original D&D (1974 “White Box”) started with three classes: Fighting-Man, Magic-User, Cleric. The Thief was added in Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975). That established the classic four archetypes that everything later built on.

AD&D 1st Edition (Player’s Handbook 1978) is where multi-classing and dual-classing became fully official and codified. Demi-humans could multi-class (advance in two or three classes simultaneously, splitting XP). Humans could dual-class (switch to a new class under strict ability-score requirements). This was not a later adaptation or something that only became official in 2e.

AD&D 2nd Edition (1989) reorganised the classes into the four explicit groups: Warrior, Wizard, Priest, Rogue. Within those groups sat the core classes (Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief) plus the optional specialised ones (Paladin, Ranger, Druid, Bard, etc.). The term “Rogue” as the group name first appears properly here; the individual class was still called Thief until 3rd Edition renamed it Rogue.

2. Multi-Class and Edition History

Original D&D (1974 White Box – Men & Magic): Only elves had anything resembling multi-classing. An elf could advance as a Fighting-Man or a Magic-User and switch between the two between adventures (with level caps). It was more like “you can be both, but not really at the same time in a clean way.”

Supplement I: Greyhawk (1975): This is the main place it expanded:

Demi-humans could now multi-class with the newly introduced Thief.

Elves could be Fighter/Magic-User, Fighter/Thief, Magic-User/Thief, or the triple Fighter/Magic-User/Thief.

Dwarves could be Fighter/Thief.

Half-elves were introduced and given several multi-class options.

Experience was divided between the classes.

Other early sources (Strategic Review articles, Blackmoor, fan house rules, and the general DIY culture of the mid-70s) also played with hybrid characters, but nothing was systematic or consistent across tables.

Basic D&D line (Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, etc.): largely abandoned multi-classing in favour of race-as-class, so that branch doesn’t count as continuing the development.

3. Kung-fu monk = Cleric: In the Blackmoor supplement the Monk was presented as a Cleric subclass; in 1e it became its own class. It was dropped from the core 2e PHB. Calling it “a sort of cleric” is understandable for archetype talk but not precise. The purpose here is that a Shaolin style 'Kung-Fu Monk' was identifiably a Priest more often than a Fighter in D&D. I want this to be the very debate which called for the evolution of 'multi-class' rules set but in all honesty it was probably the meddling Elves with their strange Elven ways.

4. The Four Humors. 

Ancient Greek and Roman physicians believed these core bodily fluids controlled health, physical traits, and moods. When the fluids were balanced, a person was healthy. An excess or shortage of any fluid caused sickness and shaped a person's unique temperament. 

Blood (Sanguine): Linked to air and a warm, wet nature. People with dominant blood were thought to be joyful, active, and outgoing.

Yellow Bile (Choleric): Linked to fire and a warm, dry nature. Excess yellow bile caused a passionate, sharp, and easily angered personality.

Black Bile (Melancholic): Linked to earth and a cold, dry nature. Too much black bile led to sadness, quietness, and depression.

Phlegm (Phlegmatic): Linked to water and a cold, wet nature. Extra phlegm created a calm, slow, and relaxed disposition. 

5. (cf)

(cf) means 'confer' or 'compare'. It is used in academic writing to indicate a thing is not a direct quote, for which use; (sic). My use of it here is as a summary. My own personal opinions apply. It is in reference to the alleged misogyny and racism of depicting scantily clad elf maidens, chainmail bikini warrior maidens and buxom tavern wenches, also the claim made by WoTC that presenting cannibalistic, rapist Orcs as monsters is somehow an insult to black people. That did happen. Wokism is a religion for people who are mentally unwell.

 

Gamifying Before The Codex Changed Layer Two

Gamifying : Before the Codex Changed : Layer Two :  

Words as Spells, Cognition as Circuitry

Words are not labels.  

Words are spells.  

Every description a person accepts into their mind builds or rewires the circuits of comprehension they use to perceive reality. Speak (or think) in one framework long enough and the world itself begins to answer in that register. This is the foundation of the magic system.

Two great magical paradigms exist in tension.

The Flow (Old Codex Magic)

Organic. Wild. Predatory. Terrifying.  

When held in balance it is holistic. A living expression of something close to James Lovelock’s Gaia: the world as a single self-regulating organism which speaks through those who still know how to listen.  

Flow magic is intuitive shape-crafting. The practitioner does not force a rigid formula; they feel the living edges of a thing and speak the word that fits its actual contour. The old behavioural descriptors, the crude precise slang, the “smoke-dam” codices were never merely social. They were diagnostic true-names for patterns of behaviour, spirit, and predation. Spoken correctly they could reveal, bind, feed, or starve those patterns.

Flow is dangerous because it is alive. It can turn on the speaker. It can call things that prefer to remain unnamed. It grows like language itself; messy, adaptive, regional, sometimes vicious. In harmony it nurtures. Out of harmony it is raw and hungry.

The Path (New Speech / Harmonic Register Magic)

Systematic. Ordered. Ritual.  

The Path rejects intuitive shape-crafting in favour of formal logic, approved grammars, and rigidly codified invocations. It is safer, more repeatable, and far easier to teach at scale. Its great power is cognitive standardisation: by controlling which descriptive circuits are allowed to form in a population, the Path reshapes what that population is even capable of perceiving.

The Keepers of the Concord did not merely censor rude words. They performed a paradigm replacement. They starved the Flow by making its most precise diagnostic terms socially and magically radioactive, then flooded the vacated mental space with Path structures. Acolytes of the Path are not simply polite; their minds are being trained into narrower, more obedient circuits. The Path is mind-enslavement through formality. It is the new era deliberately overwriting the old.

Setting Reframed: Motley under the Two Magics

Motley is a world, city or region, mid-conquest. Not by armies, but by lexicon.

Old Codex / Flow holdouts still exist in the lower city, the docks, the older free companies, and among certain independent Wordwrights. Their magic feels like weather or animals: unpredictable, potent, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes predatory. When they speak the old terms correctly, patterns that the Path has rendered foggy suddenly stand out in sharp relief. Monsters, social predators, and certain spirits become visible and nameable again.

The Keepers of the Concord and their Register Wardens enforce the Path. Public use of Flow terminology is treated as both social disruption and magical contamination. Repeated offences can trigger ritual “clarifications”; mild compulsion, memory softening, or forced re-education into Harmonic Register thought-forms. The Keepers believe they are bringing order and reducing cruelty. In practice they are collapsing the world’s capacity to perceive certain truths.

The Unnamed thrive in the gap. Entities and human roles that were once kept in check by precise Flow descriptors now move more freely because the culture has been taught not to see them clearly. Some of these things actively encourage the Path, because fog is their hunting ground.

Magic has mechanical teeth at the table:

- Speaking a true Flow descriptor in the presence of the thing it names can grant advantage, pierce illusions, or force a reaction.

- Prolonged immersion in pure Path ritual can grant reliability and social protection while slowly imposing disadvantage on attempts to notice or describe anything outside the approved circuits.

- Hybrid practitioners are possible but unstable; the two paradigms do not sit comfortably in the same mind.

Adventure: “The Ember-Stick Affair” (Revised)

The same basic structure as before, now fully magical.

Hook

A contact is charged with “disruptive resonance” after using several Old Codex terms during a public inquiry into disappearances. The official Path record has flattened the specific pattern into vague “social friction.” The disappearances continue. The contact asks the party to recover an unredacted Flow ledger and determine whether the old diagnostic words still point at something real and active.

Key Magical Escalations

1. Upper City (Path Territory)

   Using Flow terms here is not merely rude; it creates audible or visible magical dissonance that Register Wardens can detect. Players feel the Path pressing on their own cognition; descriptions come out flatter, certain intuitive leaps become harder.

2. Dockside Glossaries & Wordwright Circles (Flow Pockets)

   Here the old words still carry weight. Learning a genuine Flow descriptor is itself a minor magical act: the character’s perceptual circuits shift. They begin to notice the pattern the Path had hidden. This knowledge is both power and contamination; Path agents can sense it on them afterward.

3. The Pattern Made Visible  

   Once the correct Flow terms are restored to the investigation, the disappearances resolve into a clear predatory or spiritual cycle that the Path lexicon had rendered almost unthinkable. The party now faces a choice that is simultaneously practical and metaphysical:

   - Speak the true words publicly and risk magical as well as social retaliation.

   - Keep the Flow knowledge private and act in the shadows.

   - Surrender the old ledger to the Keepers and allow the fog to reassert itself.

   - Attempt a dangerous hybrid working that tries to force Path structures to acknowledge a Flow truth.

Climax Options 

A Concord scriptorium where scribes are not merely rewriting texts but ritually overwriting the residual Flow resonance in older documents.  

A living “smoking room” (the in-world descendant of the smoke-and-dam codex spaces) that still functions as a weak Flow node.  

The original disappearance sites, now overlaid with Path euphemisms that actively dampen perception.

Campaign-Level Play

The Path vs Flow conflict can sit beneath any urban, political, or investigative campaign. Every time the party needs to understand a complex social or supernatural pattern, they must decide how much Flow language they are willing to risk. Characters who lean fully into the Path become increasingly reliable within the system and increasingly blind outside it. Characters who keep speaking the old words remain dangerous, clear-eyed, and hunted.

The original blog’s thesis survives intact and is now literal:  

When a culture (or a magical order) decides that certain accurate descriptors are too dangerous to keep, it does not eliminate the things those words pointed at. It only makes the things harder to see and therefore harder to fight. The Path offers safety and order at the price of narrowed cognition. The Flow offers clarity and power at the price of danger and wildness.

That is the engine.  

Words are spells.  

Choose your lexicon carefully.

Original Blog : Before The Codex Changed