Tom Filsinger has published a memoir on creativity called “The Dark Menace of the Universe”

Monsters and demons from Hell. Cosmic adventurers who fight strange and powerful aliens. Gothic warriors that battle the undead.

These are some of the images in many popular role-playing games and fantasy card games. Who likes this stuff? And who are the creators and what does it say about them? According to author, Tom Filsinger, it says a lot.

“Creators of these kinds of games and entertainment are people who dig deep into a wellspring of consciousness that most people aren’t aware of or would rather just avoid,” says Filsinger. “They tap into Jungian archetypes and hence they confront the Shadow aspect of the mind that is repressed by most people most of the time.”

The result is a plethora of dark and frightening characters that are de rigueur in role-playing games such as Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, and the author’s own game, Champions of the Galaxy.

Tom Filsinger is the owner of Filsinger Games, an independent game company that has produced card games like Champions of the Galaxy and Legends of Wrestling for twenty years. Filsinger is also an Associate Professor of Psychology at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York. He has also taught at Northern Illinois University and John Carroll University in Cleveland.

To Filsinger the expression “dark menace” is not an insult. Instead it’s a term that connotes the stereotypes leveled at creative types in our society and the forces their creativity unleashes.

Filsinger himself has created hundreds of characters for his games with names like Bishop Hell, Count Necros, Tortured Soul, Terminus, Anarchy, and Dark Justice. His apocalyptic visions are similar to the visions of other game creators in the fantasy field.

According to Filsinger the origins of these images originate in the collective unconscious, a storehouse of archetypes that was first described in a theory by the Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung at the turn of the 20th century. Carl Jung was a contemporary of the famous psychologist, Sigmund Freud.

“Both men studied repressed conflicts and wishes,” says Filsinger. “Game creators and fans who explore the dark side of life and the mind are tapping into this aspect of the collective unconscious. This provides a form of catharsis for both creator and fan that is usually very healthy…unless it is taken too far.”

By “taken too far” Filsinger means that a person might identify with the dark side of their personality rather than seeing it as one aspect among many. In turn they might identify exclusively with the archetype, adopting say a Goth image as a source of personal identity the same way that some people have over identified with television shows like Star Trek and become “trekkies.”

“According to Jung it is very healthy to consciously experience all the various archetypes that are usually repressed. But it may be unhealthy to identify with the archetype exclusively and objectify it as one’s self-identity.”

Filsinger has written a memoir on creativity called The Dark Menace of the Universe. In this book he analyzes the psychological mechanisms which underlie the creative process. He also analyzes creative people and why they sometimes have trouble “fitting in.”

“I refer to creative people as ‘dark menaces’ because they are often seen as disturbing or threatening to the moral order in society. Just look at how often creative people have been misunderstood and demonized throughout history.”

Filsinger says this is because creative people are right-brain thinkers rather than left-brain thinkers. This puts them at odds with people around them.

According to Filsinger, most people are left-brain thinkers, which means they are organized, practical, and linear in their thought processes. Not so with right-brain thinkers. Right-brain thinkers are intuitive, open-minded, and attracted to novelty.

“Right-brain thinkers simply don’t ‘play the game’ the way they’re supposed to. They prefer to think for themselves and challenge the status quo. Naturally, this will lead to resistance from other people.”

Studies on creative people have consistently demonstrated that creativity is associated with openness to new ideas, risk-taking, and being inner-directed. Do these traits put creative people at odds with the culture and people around them? The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.

There is little doubt that creative people will struggle in environments that are overly structured and will feel frustrated with tasks that are not challenging. This helps explain why creative children often have trouble in school, their right-brain minds wandering while their left-brain teachers are trying to force them to memorize information that these children instinctively see as irrelevant or trivial to understanding the “big picture” in life.

All of this suggests that creative people will often be at odds with people around them and frustrated by work environments and organizational structures that are rigid and unbending. This is partially due to the fact that creative people are attracted to novelty and new ideas and ways of doing things, and their creative minds are often generating alternatives to accepted practices.

Fantasy games provide an outlet for repressed symbols and archetypes that are otherwise unfulfilled or unrecognized in everyday life. This makes fantasy game-playing a healthy outlet for people who like to explore both the positive and negative aspects of the psyche, but may be perilous for people with low self-esteem who, due to personality conflicts, may become tangled in the web of dark and primordial images.

“A person can definitely drown in this stuff,” says Filsinger. “That doesn’t make the games bad any more than it makes horror movies, comic books, or punk music bad. All forms of entertainment fulfill a psychological function, including shows like Oprah and reality television shows like Survivor. These popular shows satisfy other Jungian archetypes. It is merely the case that all these latent psychological mechanisms need to be explored and better understood.”

So, yes, game creators with an active imagination are “dark menaces.” And the world needs more of them.

Tom Filsinger is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Jamestown Community College as well as the owner of Filsinger Games, a company that produces Champions of the Galaxy. He refers to creative people as the “dark menaces” of the universe because creative people are often misunderstood by others. See more about Filsinger Games at: http://www.filsingergames.com