Be twelve. It is 1985 and you are walking into a B. Dalton bookstore. The smell of soft-baked pretzels fades as you walk past the registers. Bryan Adamsâs new song, âSummer of â69â plays over the speakers in the ceiling. Walking towards the fantasy section, you see a book that appears to be an encyclopedia of monsters. Pulling the hardcover off the shelf, you begin leafing through the pages. You see a number of illustrations and entries, each detailing a different creature. Some creatures you recognize, like dragons and vampires, and some you do not, like beholders and carrion crawlers. The book reads a little bit like the Audubon Society field guide to birds that your uncle got you last year for your birthday, except that instead of ornithological terms you donât recognize this book is full of strange terms like âhit diceâ and âarmor class.â There are a lot of numbers. Slowly you begin to realize that the book is a game of some kind.
Be seventeen. It is 1990 and you are sitting in your friendâs basement. The table in front of you is scattered with papers and half-empty cans of Mountain Dew. In just a few weeks you and your friends will head off to different colleges. Over the past five years you have spent countless hours in this basement, the faux-wood paneling reflecting back laughter and arguments in roughly equal measure. The dungeon master , Aaron, has decided to work up something special for this last game session you will all play together. After spending the past few months tracking your nemesis Lord Big Butt (who bears a strong resemblance to your sixth grade science teacher), you and your fellow adventurers have discovered his secret mountain lair. Once inside, you fight through hordes of enemies until you come to the final chamber, where Lord Big Butt has stationed his new champions. In front of the villainâs throne stand four figures, each a mirror image of one member of your party. The battle that ensues is chaotic, but in the end Lord Big Butt is slain. None of the heroes are sure which of the survivors are originals and which are clones. You feel like the idea was a little contrived, and maybe not your best session, but a fitting end to a campaign that you will remember for the rest of your life.
Be thirty-five. It is 2008 and you are at work, scrolling through news headlines. âGary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69,â (Schiesel 2008) you read, and your mind races backwards to a mall in 1985. That night, after you put your children to bed, you go down to the basement, rifling through old boxes until you find it. The Official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual by Gary Gygax . A weathered sheet of graph paper falls from the pages as you open the book. Unfolding the paper, you see that it is an adventure location you started writing during your freshman year of college but never got around to finishing. You look up Aaron on Facebook and message him to ask if he wants to get the gang back together to play D&D on a Skype conference call.
Conjuring Worlds
The narrative above is a fiction; that is to say, it is an amalgamation of experiences which conjures a world. Its world is not exactly our world. Although based on experiences described to me over the course of my research into tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs), those exact events never occurred in our world. We are always conjuring worlds, cobbling them together out of disparate experiences into makeshift wholes. To conjure those worlds for others, we create assemblages of words, or of images, or of sounds. Manipulating these twin abilities, to assemble disparate objects into worlds and to conjure worlds through disparate assemblages, is the central mystery of role-playing games.
Manipulating this world-conjuring power of words which, viewed from the reverse angle, is our human capacity for worlding disparate details into cohesive realms, drives what game researcher Markus Montola calls the first invisible rule of role-playing, the world rule. As he puts it, ârole-playing is an interactive process of defining and re-defining the state, properties and contents of an imaginary game worldâ (2009, p. 23). As players define and re-define a game world, they must take apart some of its pieces, make new sense of them, and then communicate the new state to one another by reassembling the words and images used to conjure the world.
Both scholars and poets have acknowledged the importance of imagining our world, and alternate possible states of that world, as a driving force in human experience. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, for example, said that âthe imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global orderâ (1996, p. 31). Coleridge called imagination âthe living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception ⊠a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creationâ (1817, Chap. XIII). Despite this acknowledgment, we still have much to learn about how people, especially people in groups, interact with these worlds that we imagine. The way we experience imagined worlds, is not static. New cultural innovations shape our imagination, and vice versa. By considering tabletop role-playing games as techniques for shaping our experience of imagined worlds, this book explores and documents how imagined worlds shape the experiences of those who visit them regularly.
Theoretical Background
Partially because of the complexity Cover references here, research on RPGs has been produced from a variety of disciplines, including sociology (Fine 1983), performance studies (Mackay 2001), psychology (Bowman 2010), and rhetoric (Cover 2010). Zagal and Deterdingâs handbook of RPG studies documents no less than ten different disciplinary perspectives which scholars have used in the field (2018). My approach here shares common ground with some of the perspectives described there, primarily performance studies and sociology, but my angle is decidedly anthropological and ethnographic. Definitions of âthe anthropological approachâ vary widely, but the description of the anthropological endeavor as âmake the strange familiar and the familiar strangeâ fits this work most closely (Melhuus 2002). In pursuing this goal, anthropologists embrace three perspectives: cultural relativism, a commitment to attempt to understand people on their own terms; holism, a commitment to treat culture as a complex whole; and comparison, a commitment to gain a wider perspective by looking at human variety. Not every work of anthropology enacts these perspectives equally, of course, but they guide anthropologistsâ angle of approach.[Role-playing games] are neither wholly games nor wholly narratives but use structures of both games and narratives. They are neither wholly immersive nor wholly interactive but, rather, both immersive and interactive. They both involve consumerism ⊠and rebellion against it âŠ. They complicate our understanding of the relationship between authors and audiences, and our definitions of these terms. (Cover 2010, p. 174)
One way that anthropology guides my angle of approach to role-playing games has been to draw more toward the descriptive and exploratory than to the definitive and explanatory. In general, the understanding of play has been shaped by an assumed dichotomy between the serious and non-serious, or between work and play (Fine 1983; Goldman 1998; Schwartzman 1978). Using these divisions as a starting point, many theorists have attempted to explain âwhy people play as opposed to doing something seriousâ (Fine 1983, p. 5). Whether they find an answer in psychologically therapeutic effects or just needing to burn off excess energy, these researchers tended to treat play as a problem to be explained.1 Instead of considering imaginary play as a problem to be solved, I view it as a complex phenomenon to be explored. In this, I follow sociologist Gary Alan Fine in focusing on the processual question of how people experience TRPGs rather than on teleological questions of why they do so (1983, pp. 5â6).
Experience and Phenomenology
Stated most broadly, the question I want to answer is the same that every cultural researcher must ask: Erving Goffmanâs âWhat is it thatâs going on here?â (1974, p. 8). While this is too vague to serve as a useful guide to the subject matter of a book, it has a lot to offer in terms of identifying my angle of entry. I have attempted as much as possible to avoid assuming that I understand even at the most basic level what is happening when a group of people experience a world together through a role-playing game. Even after years of participant observation and playing games, most of my interviews centered on trying to determine what it is like to play a role-playing game. This approach is phenomenological, in the sense that I have attempted to âbracketâ all concerns external to the experience of play, whether issues of power and identity or ideas like narrative, and try to convey in as rich detail as possible the quality of imaginative experience in TRPGs.2 In the places where this has worked, I am left not with an understanding of games that is devoid of power and imagination but with a sometimes counterintuitive understanding of these things as they present themselves in experience.
One major result of this approach has been an increasing sense that one of the most important things going on in TRPGs is not character development or plot progression but the experience of imagined worlds themselves. When I say âexperienceâ here, I mean it in a sense specific enough to deserve elaboration. For phenomenologists, as Harris Berger explains:
We arrive at this understanding of experience by means of Edmund Husserlâs concept of the epochÄ (1931, 1960). Rather than making judgments between objectivity or subjectivity in our experiences, Husserl directs us to suspend those abstractions in a âset of brackets,â or epochÄ , and instead direct our attention to a careful description of the concrete contents of our experience. âWhen we do this,â Berger says, âwe immediately stumble onto a thunderous discovery: nothing has changed: the objectivity of the world is retained in the pure experience the epochÄ establishesâ (1999, p. 20).Experience is not some mysterious substance that stands in opposition to the real, objective world of things; experience encompasses both the objective and the subjective âŠ. As a first approximation, experience can be understood as the contents of consciousness: the ideas thought, the emotions felt, the sounds heard, the fragrances smelled, the flavors tasted, textures touched, and colors seen. By definition, therefore, experience is all we can ever know because it encompasses both the knowledge and the thing known. (1999, p. 19)
If I consider one of the iconic twenty-sided dice used in Dungeons &...