by Bob Clark
The majority of you probably have no idea what you’re looking at. That’s perfectly understandable. I’m actually none too proud to admit that I can identify this at first glance, myself. If you’ve ever played a tabletop role-playing game, or if you’ve merely browsed the Internet enough for its various memes to work their way into your very gene pool, you’ll know that the above image is called an “alignment chart”. Used for the purposes of creating fantastical characters in Dungeons & Dragons and various related games, it’s intended to provide a sense of easily expressed identity for the various fictional personas that get tossed about on so many epic, imaginary quests. With its three-by-three grid, one can fit themselves into any moral/behavioral coordinates they see fit, and decide not only whether or not to play as a face or a heel, but what kind of face or heel. Proportionally, it works on a rather simple mathematical scale, with the conditions of “lawfulness” applied to the left-hand of the matrix, “neutrality” to its middle and “chaos” to its right, as a means of assigning codes of behavior. At the same time, it uses a no-brainer association of “good” at the top and “evil” at the bottom, with another “neutrality” in between. In other words, morality is graphed on the vertical axis, and behavior on the horizontal, and in this way one can chart the relative position of one’s personality in the same manner that students were tasted to rate poetry before Robin Williams asked them to start ripping out pages in Dead Poet Society.