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The Micro-Ethnography: Act Two

     The break in time since you have read part I. is inconvenient as it disrupts the action of the story thus far; in role playing games this occurs quite often – there is almost never a lengthy period of time in which everyone stays in character, in which the mental action flows as easily as it would in the case of an eager Harry Potter fan reading the latest installment cover to cover. Players occasionally get up from the table, breaks are called for food and drink runs, and once in a while the real world pushes its demands into our shared fantasy and requires the game to pause.

     The typical character generation session presented in part I. was far from over: it is not uncommon to spend in excess of two hours designing a new character and a description of this process, even in its shortest possible manifestation, does not easily fit within this format. Role playing games, particularly what are known as “pen and paper” role playing games, require large amounts of time and preparation. Role playing games (rpgs) performed in other formats, on-line for example in such electronic spaces as Dr. Riner’s Solsys simulation or in the popular Everquest multi-user domain (MUD), can be moved in and out of as the player wishes with little thought to the enjoyment of other participants. This is both a factor of scale and of format. At any one time in a MUD there may be hundreds or even thousands of players logged in at one time. If someone leaves their computer for a moment, the other players still active at their terminals are not going to stop and wait for them, especially if they do not know the player or character. In fact, in some of the more impersonal battle-oriented MUDs, an inactive character might just be killed-off by an active character who encounters it. Sometimes a player might join up with other players and have their characters go and do something collectively, but this is not required and does not usually mean that if one of the characters goes inactive the others will wait for them..they will just continue the action. Considering the multiple ways in which a character can go inactive, and these range from computer problems, internet connections expiring, player bathroom trips and so on, it would be difficult to judge how long it would take for a player to return to the game in an on-line environment. Even when pauses are marked in typed text (characters can “speak” to one another in this way) with “brb” (be right back) messages and so forth, the time pause can be a few moments or tens of minutes, or never depending on the circumstances. When players at my game sessions leave the gaming space outside of a group-break, they have to consider that the rest of us may be waiting for them to return before we can continue play.

     Down time can occur during a role playing session at the table in other ways as well. It is not uncommon to have everyone (players and DM – recall this refers to a Dungeon Master, the story teller and referee) sitting around the table ready to play but unable to as a consequence of side discussions or game-level realities. Before I can address these realities, before I can delve into embodiment and timesense in role playing generally, I will need to refocus our attention on what a role playing game is.

     While you were reading part I. of this larger paper, you were in a small sense role playing in that you were imagining being in a scene as a type of character. This character was essentially a mental projection of yourself, most likely from a first-person perspective [5]; recall that in a role playing game you almost never play yourself but rather play the role of a character you design that is “appropriate” to the game setting in the sense that, traditionally and aesthetically, it seems to “fit” in the genre of the game. Thus, in Dungeons and Dragons, a role playing game derived from a Tolkien-type fantasy setting, players play the role of hobbits and elves and humans but generally not Klingons or comic-book style superheroes (which can be found in other games). If you were “really” role playing in part I. there would have been spontaneous interaction that is not possible as a reader of a text – after all, the action here can only end one way. You would have been free to ask the other characters in the scene (which were all real world style characters – players of a role playing game) what the phrases on the table meant for example. In character you can do whatever you want, limited only by prior realities that we want to maintain out of some sense of continuity. Thus, if your character in part I. were described as a “creative and rational anthropologist exploring a role playing game,” and you as a player decided to pick up a chair and hit another character with it, the DM overseeing the game session might point out that an anthropologist would not be likely to do that, and that in so doing you would be violating the spirit of who the character is [6].

     You as player might decide that your character wanted to go exploring beyond the confines of the den described in part I. You might ask the DM “can I see any exits?,” and the DM might say, “yes, there are three exits..a white paneled, metallic front door set to the left side of the North wall, a set of stairs leading up in the NW corner, and a hallway leading South..” Now, as it often happens in role playing games, players will want to explore areas that are not well fleshed out and prepared by the DM. If your character wanted to, say, go out the front door and run into the parking lot, and the DM had not before hand designed the parking lot, then all of the sudden the game has the potential to stop or slow down. The skill, experience, and gaming style of the DM plays a large role here. Some DMs are more aware that downtime is occurring than others, and some try to avoid it more than others. The DM in this case might just engage in impromptu creation and make up the setting and game events as you explore the unexpected. You as a player would of course want to know a variety of details to help you play your role – perhaps how many cars are in the parking lot, what types of cars they are, what the weather is like, whether or not there are people around, ambient smells and sounds – anything that seemed appropriate or necessary at the moment. DMs tend to describe the scene in a way that captures, from their perspective, the more significant aspects of it, and experience (as well as familiarity with various attending players) provides DMs with some sense of how much detail to give and how much to avoid and conceal. A detail-rich explanation of every license plate, every make and model of car present, as well as a detailed map of the surrounding kilometer of outside space would be excessive in this situation, although some DMs might try to give the players exactly this – and these players would get exponentially more bored as they sat through the explanation and waited for the map to be drawn. The better the DM, at least from the perspective of my own group, the better she is at describing only what can be perceived. A one kilometer radius around the parking lot, drawn to a 1 square = 10 square meters scale, is not something that characters could know. Thus, I would not present you with such a map if your character ran into the parking lot. By the same logic, if I as DM decided to place an invisible parking attendant (perhaps inappropriate for my neighborhood, but it would be more appropriate to the setting that, say, an invisible dragon) somewhere in your line of sight, I would not mention his presence when you as player asked me “what do I see out there?” While DMs are on-the-spot creating scenes and events, they must simultaneously balance a variety of concerns, including setting appropriateness (dragons or parking attendants), aesthetic feel – which relates to the concept of appropriateness but also includes a sense of whether or not the scene seems realistic (perhaps I might ad in ambient traffic noises and cracked pavement to the scene, but not swooping dragons), ecology (dragons do not live next to college students), the perspective of characters and their perceptual abilities (can your character see invisible or hear details in the ambient traffic noises or see a car moving down the street?), the flow of in-game time and above-game time (is this description taking too long? While your character is out exploring the parking lot how does this temporally align with the actions of the other characters?), as well as the overall performance of the explanation speech act. Players are perhaps the toughest crowds of all to please on a regular basis [7].

     This brings us back to the game-level realities, since along side of all this a game with rules and conventions is being played. Once your character steps out the front door into the parking lot, the DM might draw upon some of these rules and ask you to roll a perception check (a die roll made on a 20 sided dice – recall we would say a d20 – which is modified by your character’s statistics relevant to perception). If you rolled high enough on the dice, the DM might go into a bit more detail than usual on some significant aspect of the scene – or she might just explain the scene as usual, sometimes a DM has to have dice rolled regularly so that players don’t pick up on certain die rolls as indexes of danger or future encounters that their characters could not be aware of. Centrifuge is a common tool; when I DM I frequently roll dice for no reason other than to suggest that something might be occurring. Clearly, pausing to roll dice adds to the amount of time spent on the game, particularly when reference books, character sheets, and DM notes have to be consulted in order to determine the significance of particular die rolls. In our running example, you might have to look at your character sheet to find your bonuses or penalties to the perception roll – the more experienced the DMs and players are the less time gets spent on such things. These types of “game mechanics” issues can get even more complicated during combat scenes, a major focus of the rules; throughout the game role players have to be aware of the rules and conventions as if they were another level of physical laws that hover about the reality of the fantasy. Not only does the presence of an invisible parking attendant complicate the scene, we have to consider how this particular game treats invisibility generally. We have to draw upon not only the rules but prior interpretations of these rules, our own understanding of physics in the real world, of the nature of photons for example, and how these often contradicting takes have been negotiated in the past. Perhaps they have not been encountered before, and now we will have to decide how it all functions in the game. The DM is the official referee and, generally speaking, has the final word, but seldom are the decisions of the DM made without group input of some form. All of this has a real effect on not only the amount of time spent on the game, but also on player perceptions of time, a topic I would like to explore in section III. Of this paper [8].

An Appendix of Asides

[5]: As people who role play get more used to the game, they learn to readjust their “mental camera angle” to a variety of perspectives, above the action, from the perspective of various characters and so forth. This happens while we read as well, but it seems as if the author’s focus becomes the reader’s own more than during an role playing game, where the action is co-constructed and to some degree everyone is an active author. One of the more interesting aspects of the game is that at any one time, none of these camera angles are likely to be the same. [back up]
[6]: In this section of the paper we are now two levels removed from reality, at a level of meta-communication in which we are speaking about part I. as if it actually were a role playing game session as opposed to a section in a writing assignment. [back up]
[7]: I just read this section to my wife and commented on how much a DM has to balance simultaneously during the game; she replied “that’s exactly why I don’t like to DM – there is too much to balance.” Overall there is the sense among most players that being a Dungeon Master (we call it DMing) it too much work, too frustrating, and this paragraph outlays why this is so. [back up]
[8]: Which I would like to submit, along with the reworked and edited prior two sections of this paper, as the final course paper if at all possible…