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IntroductionThe goal of this paper is to address and overcome the difficulties I have defining and describing tabletop role-playing games and to arrive at a more concise and comprehensible definition that I have been able to achieve thus far. This will be accomplished by examining the two previous course compositions on the topic of tabletop role-playing games – how they were successful and how they failed – and by abandoning the standard structure of academic paper discussion in favor of a more interesting and engaging approach. Since this paper is focused on style, presentation, and the representation of culture, it is perfectly connected to the goals of Writing Culture. From my perspective, Writing Culture has been focused on a meta-level anthropology, on a deconstruction of cultural presentation, on an examination of the figures (voices) we place behind the curtains of our phantasmal culture machines, textual – sometimes mechanical – devices that both create and represent the objects of our study. I will begin with a consideration of selected strengths and weaknesses of both sections of A Change of Scene: a writing exorcise and micro-ethnography of a fantasy role-playing session (each paper appears in appendix IV). This will lead us into a general discussion of what a tabletop role-playing game is – which I failed to do initially – and why these speech events are difficult to reduce to a stream of formatted text. I will then close with thoughts on how a pre-ethnography – an archaeology of prior familiarity – should be an essential research design component in situations where ethnographers may be overly familiar with a particular ethnographic setting. [TOC] Part I. Constructive Thoughts“I am still having some difficulty in figuring out exactly what people do in these games – you have the rules, etc., but I don’t have a sense of what unfolds in a session. Perhaps you need to take a step back here.” Dr. Dubisch (2004: personal wisdom) The first paper I wrote on tabletop role-playing is far more interesting, readable, engaging, and coherent that the successive work which inspired the comment above. Why? First of all, paper one embraced the position of the reader as someone (likely) unfamiliar with role-playing games (RPGs) generally. By transforming the reader into a character, by then placing this character in the strange and unusual setting of a game session, a variety of useful results were possible. While I had not considered this at the time, my own familiarity with role playing was less of a barrier to conveying the basics of the game than it might have been using another writing style – such as the second paper’s failed style. As I built the story and the text of the first paper, I naturally imagined myself as the reader-character. This character was unfamiliar with what was going on in the scene and in this role, I was able to play with the textual reality and become, simultaneously, newbie [1] and experienced role player all in one. The separation between these two states of familiarity is made unusually possible by a core interactional ideology of role-playing games: that player knowledge should be kept distinct from character knowledge. This means that, for example, a player should avoid drawing upon obvious 21st century takes on such things as technology, science, and popular culture when playing her character [2]. This is of course impossible – we can not fully abandon the languacultural frames that we use to interpret reality – but it is a role-playing game ideal nonetheless, an ideal that makes more sense the less one tries to deconstruct it. From the perspective of an experienced role-player, hobbits in a Tolkien-themed role-playing game (for example) should not refer to other characters as “metrosexuals,” [3] or “know” that neutrinos can partially address the galactic dark matter problem [4]. I digress, but the overall point is this: the repeated performance of role-playing is essentially practice for considering the perspectives of the other. Another benefit of placing the reader in the game setting was that I was free to just describe the reality around this character. I find so often that a need for exposition can slow down and confuse the transmission of essential aspects of the ethnographic scene. As I write in the role of an experienced and knowledgeable character “behind the curtain,” my own interpretations can get in the way, block the flow of the text, and snap the reader out of the more pleasurable sensory illusion of deep description. Sometimes this sort of informed narration is needed, but other times perhaps not. The more interesting, and thus successful [5], ethnographic texts seem to be those which encourage the reader to make sense out of what’s going on in a scene before offering an academic perspective. As a reader, I don’t like to be completely lost, but I also don’t enjoy being lead by the hand through an illusion designed to make a point. When I feel as if the examples and descriptions used by an author are only there to support specific conclusions, I start to wonder what other interpretations were possible. Where are the negative cases [6]? I prefer ethnography in which I am provided enough information, enough detail and context that I can disagree with the author. If we consider that a detailed description of any moment in time of any ethnographic scene could fill a lifetime of work, that “truths” lie on a variety of abstract levels and that some aspects of embodied subjectivity simply have to be experienced in order to be understood, then clearly there are an infinite number of potential and valid ethnographic descriptions of any activity. Why should an author be too focused on one strategic trip through a scene when so many other paths are possible? The texts we write can only lead the reader down one path, but if we engage the reader’s imagination then multiple directions are suddenly possible. One of my goals in the edited and forthcoming micro-ethnography is to try even more than before to stretch the boundaries of the description to make it as interactive as possible. In order to accomplish this, I will include, along with the “Dialogical Mode” (Lutkehaus 1995: 198) seen in the first paper, another level which describes the motivations and thoughts of the characters along with their more obvious speech acts. In addition, I will try and simulate an actual role-playing event. But first, I need to describe what a tabletop role-playing game is. [TOC] Part II. What is a Tabletop Role Playing Game?In the text of my thesis prospectus I spent perhaps twelve single-spaced pages answering this very question. Was that due to the inherent complexity of a role-playing game session, to my own over familiarity with the more obvious and basic aspects of the art form, or perhaps to some essential quality of the performance that defies description? Perhaps my perception of role-playing games as art evokes a philosophic sense that one simply needs to experience the performance in order to understand it [7]. It might also be the case that my desire to capture the practice as a coherent, bounded, harmonious whole – perhaps stemming from some deep seated and gendered take on my own life (Tedlock 1995: 276) – ignores an even more difficult to capture level of role-playing as disheveled improvisation. I am not sure which. There are organizations to be found in any given tabletop role-playing game session that can be found in most others, but it really does not make sense to talk about “role-playing games” as if they were any sort of unified entity existing outside of specific contexts. Once again I will turn to the experimental. When I was younger and fully immersed in the gendered and commercialized fantasies of Star Wars and G.I. Joe, I must have spent at least three hours every day playing with action figures. These figures, these characters had their own lives, their own personalities and histories and skills that were established out of previous play performances. They remembered prior defeats, held grudges, and occasionally – when too many would die or one group would meet a particular goal – the story would shift and the histories would begin all over again. Sometimes play performances featured GI Joe characters fighting species wars with Star Wars figures (who had less moveable joints and were thus resentful), sometimes play sessions focused on “base” politics enacted in cardboard command centers, and other times a particular group of figures would travel the open seas of hallway carpets in search of new, upholstered islands to settle. Countless culturally patterned story types were enacted as if they never had been before. Near the end of my fascination with this particular type of performance, I started audio recording play sessions. The following excerpt is as close of an approximation to one of these speech events as I can reproduce from the archaeology of my consciousness. [TOC] An Action Figure Play SessionYou are at observation point 1, hovering above a child’s room sometime in the early to mid 1980’s, centered above a bed with a tan comforter that has been deliberately spread out and ruffled so as to approximate the dunes of an alien world. A red-haired child in period cloths is meticulously arranging action figures in a plastic Star Destroyer vehicle {see appendix III. for detailed images} next to the bed, where a tape recorder rests on the floor. The child practices some of the voices of the characters he will soon animate – both in speech and in action; there are deep, scratchy voices, stereotypical mock-British tones, feminine voices, animalistic voices, and of course, the beeps of droids. The child puts the tape recorder on the bed, presses down two buttons, and the tape spools within begin to spin…
[child]: hello..? {he then turns off the tape recorder, rewinds the tape, and presses play} The role-playing performances the speech event on the previous page is typical of share many of the features of tabletop role-playing games. Notice the ways in which the child becomes a bricoleur: my play sessions incorporated concepts, ideas, and artifacts from a variety of sources and combined them into a kind of hybrid, fictional collage [8]. Tabletop role-playing games are quite similar, their stories and content are like creative collages composed of ideas filtering down through Tolkien and various Conan-like genres which condense into a kind of fantasy someone once described as more like the Wild West than any sort of medieval culture [9]. Each of the characters above contribute to an improvisation that is roughly based on a story concept the child had in mind – as I wrote the text above it became obvious that despite the best intentions of the storyteller/action figure controller, the story could take on a life of its own once the characters were given their own drives and personality [10]. Let us now take the action figure speech event and shape it into a tabletop role-playing game (RPG). If we imagine that another child has entered and wants to play with the action figures as well, then the direction of the story is no longer under the control of only the red haired child – unless for some reason the other child passively accepts the red-haired child’s performances. As I remember these types of play sessions, each child would likely select a group of figures to control that were, from then on, her own. At this point, the overall fantasy would be co-constructed as the children play the roles of the characters and devise changes in the setting. In this situation, the possibility for conflict is ever present, especially when the characters controlled by each child enter into conflict with one another or loose their cool and start shooting. Arguments over which characters were hit, which vehicles were destroyed, which side won are entirely possible. Moreover, if the two children offered radically divergent takes on the ongoing shared fantasy [11], another type of problem would erupt which would limit their ability to get engrossed in the performance. If, for example, child one wants the Star Destroyer’s hyperdrive to be fixed, and the other child wants it to explode, there is a disjunction in the story. One child might want the Star Destroyer to reach the M-class planet, and the other might want there to be a hull breach which kills off all the characters except the droids, who then drift in space in a ruined ship. If we were to reorganize the action figure role-playing game session (AFRPG) into a tabletop RPG session, then one – and only one – of the children would take on a new game-level role, that of the game master (or GM), and the other child would become a player. If other children were to enter the game, say if they were hiding in the closet where the flying Darth Vader figure ended up, then they would all become players as well. Game masters in RPGs are both primary storytellers and referees, they tell the story and control every aspect of the shared fantasy except the desired actions of the player characters. The game would then go like this… [TOC] An Action Figure Role-Playing Game (AFRPG)
[From observation point 1, you see a group of four children now, two who entered from the closet, the red haired child, and the first playmate – all of which look exactly like you have been imagining them. After much discussion and refusal, the red haired child lowers his head and begrudgingly agrees to be game master. {despite this display, he actually prefers to be game master, and all the other children know this} The other children select one action figure from the pile of figures heaped on the carpet [see appendix III.] and start deciding what their characters are like. Are they to be the character in film or cartoon they are supposed to be or will they deviate from the expected role and be someone else? Will they even be the same gender? The children decide as the GM arranges certain other figures in the Star Destroyer and sets it on the bed] The worst possible outcome for all participants involved would not be the missile hitting the ship; it might very well be that the game master intends for the ship to be disabled by the missile no matter what the players do. Far worse would be the players just passively waiting for something to happen instead of engaging the story. The action might have been “restricted” to the areas of the Star Destroyer play set, but the size of the setting can be deceptive: as the characters explore and interact with the environment more and more details can be discovered which often have to be created on the spot by the game master. One of the players might have asked what the various decal computer terminals do, or how to operate the main cannon, or what the floor was made out of. It would be inappropriate for the GM to say in response to these questions “I don’t know,” since: (1) The players could argue that their characters have been on board for weeks and have to operate the computers anyway as they go about their jobs; (2) when role-playing, players should be told any sensory information their characters could detect. Thus, if the bridge were to suddenly depressurize, the GM must inform the players since their characters could not help but to notice this. Moreover (3) role-playing games depend upon a shared fantasy that can expand its details and boundaries as needed and explored. As the text above demonstrates, the game master has ultimate domain over the setting and role-plays all characters not directly controlled by the other players. It is the game master who decides when and if dice are rolled and how these rolls are to be interpreted. The turn-taking sequences enacted by the children-characters above is a good approximation of what people specifically do when they play role-playing games. Players control their characters, but the desired actions of players do not resolve in the game world unless the GM allows them to. This degree of control is necessary to maintain a coherent series of events; if player 2 were allowed to “land the ship on the planet and then get out and look around and find an alien with bug eyes and…” then how would the other players be able to contribute? How would the missile or piloting scene play out? Since the stories and setting details (called adventures) are often planned out in advance by the game master, part of the GMs enjoyment of the game can come from seeing how it all plays out. Will the player characters overcome the obstacles? Were the obstacles designed in such a way that they could be overcame? While the GM devises obstacles and antagonists and red herrings to overcome, it is not the job or position of the game master to play against the players. If it were, considering the amount of control a GM has over the setting, games would be rather short. Role-playing games are not zero sum games in which certain players have to “win” at the expense of other players: the only goal is to have fun. Players and game masters try to get engrossed in the game and when they do the action flows like the textual reality created by reading a good novel. Throughout the AFRPG session, the characters I animated freely transcended the boundaries between “in-game” (or in character) and “above-game” (or out of character). The game master thus asks “What are you all going to do” and all the players would know this really means “What are your player characters going to do?” Players draw upon a variety of metapragmatic cues in order to signal to other participants when the speech act is meant to be taken in or out of character. These can include changes in voice, as player 3 frequently used. Notice that in the text above I avoided direct descriptions of the four children. What kinds of children did you imagine? The action in the text above occurred in your own mental space: I deliberately placed the observation point in an anchored location directly above the bed; consider the ways in which your own perspective drifted from this fixed location. Are our own “mental camera angles” influenced by films we have experienced? In a tabletop role-playing game there might be maps of the setting and there may be just as many figures (or, rather miniatures which are certainly not considered toys), but the action occurs in the same type of mental arena you used throughout this paper. You can see that the multi-faceted nature of role-playing games make them something of a Gordian knot to unravel. All of the layers of action and meaning are interwoven. Place the children around a table instead of a bed, remove the props and add in more dice, incorporate a system of rules into the performance, possibly age the children a bit, record characters on paper, rely upon verbal description of action instead of the physical movements of action figures, and you essentially have a tabletop role-playing game. The differences between AFRPGs and RPGs are minimal and have more to do with an arbitrary separation of age-associated play practices than any structural dissimilarity. The best and perhaps only way to describe a role-playing game in any detail is to involve the reader in one. [TOC] Part III. Arguments for a pre-ethnographyThere may be people who can accurately capture and describe aspects of culture they are intimately familiar with without needing any practice, but I am not one of them. The definition and description of role-playing games I placed in my thesis prospectus was clumsy, but it would have been absolutely unintelligible without the experiences I gained in Writing Culture across two papers on the topic. I had originally intended to devote this paper to the combination of all my semester work on RPGs, but I found it more insightful to focus on a more basic problem of better-describing RPGs in what seems like an innovative way. As an aspect of my thesis project’s research design I intend to compose a pre-ethnography which completes the synthesis I intended to achieve here. This micro-ethnography will allow me to continue practicing and experimenting with the representation of RPG culture, a process that is usually reserved for the period of time after research. If I were to attempt this representation for the first time under the pressures of thesis draft deadlines, I might be able to pull it off but likely I would encounter a great deal of frustration. In situations where student-anthropologists are so familiar with their research topics that they have a hard time knowing where to begin describing them, the composition of a pre-ethnography seems like an essential first step. The approach of this paper will become a major part of this step. [TOC] Appendix I. Endnotes[1]: A newbie is someone who is new to the game. [back up] [2]: [by the way, I tend to use her instead of “his or her”] Obviousness in this sense is cryptotypically defined. Players might know when the separation is violated but might not be able to explain why some references to the real are acceptable but others are just plain silly. Much of this has to do with the feel of the moment, with the fit of the ideological breach with the context of the game. Thus, at a dramatic moment in a role-playing game, it would probably be as acceptable for a character in a Tolkien-themed role-playing game to tell her Orcish opponent “I will strike down upon thee with great malice and furious anger…” (a direct reference to the movie Pulp Fiction and the character Jules played by Samuel L. Jackson), as it would be to say “Kill orc-folk!…Drive away bad air and darkness with bright iron!” (Tolkien III 1987: 109). [back up] [3]: See http://www.wordspy.com/words/metrosexual.asp for an explanation… [back up] [4]: The dark matter problem as described in the following text: “…another long-standing problem of astrophysics, which deals with identifying the unseen mass (referred to as dark matter) responsible for certain characteristics of galactic rotational velocity curves and the gravitational interactions between galaxies, may be solved by the existence of WIMPSs.” (Carroll and Ostlie 1996: 394). This is a wild aside, but “wimps” are weakly interacting massive particles, such as neutrinos, hundreds of which are passing through your body each second you read this, out of your body and through the Earth usually encountering no resistance. Since astronomers can measure the rotational speed of distant galaxies, and since they can obtain a good estimate of the types and amount of stars in a galaxy by looking at a spectra of the light it produces, the two measures (in terms of the total mass of the galaxy, which affects both the rotational speed and the light pattern) were compared to one another. As it turns out, for most galaxies they didn’t match up – at all; 90% of most galactic mass is composed of stuff that does not produce light – hence dark matter – and neutrinos are one variety of massive darkness. [back up] [5]: If we consider the ever-growing gap between science and the lay mentality generally, as well as specifically between anthropology and essentialist American attitudes, the need for interesting anthropological writing that most everyone can absorb is incalculably large. We need more anthropology in the style of Margaret Mead than we do in that of Michael Silverstein [certainly a distinguished and intelligent author, but]. [back up] [6]: For example: consider the following excerpt from Political Leadership among Swat Pathans… “In what follows I choose to look at these conflicts, not as disputes to be settled by recourse to law, but as political contests. This emphasis corresponds to the point of view generally adopted by my informants. It is also particularly suitable in the empirical situation, since the outcome of such conflicts is decisive for the political careers of leaders” (Barth 1959: 73). Most of the text reads like this; the reader is occasionally told that “Informants agreed…” (84), that “This picture is based on my own impressions and on the statements of informants” (79), or “This emphasis corresponds to the point of view generally adopted by my informants…” (73), but we hardly ever hear the emic voices supposedly driving these interpretations. There is no story, no chance to get absorbed into the illusion, and every example drives on toward the larger point. It is hardly possible to read this work and come away with an alternate interpretation. Even placed in its temporal context, this work is dry and lacking – particularly compared to earlier authors such as Malinowski (and I don’t mean to make a career out of attacking this work..but). [back up] [7]: One of my favorite excerpts from the course readings captures this idea perfectly… “Those people are just theorizing.” Isaac nudged the water glass a millimeter to the right, then finally looked up. “How can you say anything about someone else’s practice unless you know it from the inside?” [8]: The borrowing of elements from Star Trek and Star Wars is most apparent. [back up] [9]: A recent E-mail conversation I was having on a variety of these topics is listed below in its raw form. My text is marked with a “>” and the later reply is unmarked. >One of the ideologies I carry around when I role play involves the idea [10]: Indeed, as this paper has taken on a life of its own in the process of writing it. I originally intended to combine the two earlier role-playing game micro-ethnography papers into one larger one, but now it seems best to use the action figure session as a way to describe tabletop role-playing games in a way the other papers could not have. [back up] [11]: A term which comes from Garry Allen Fine’s text Shared Fantasy. [back up] Appendix II. Works Cited
Appendix III. Images and ExtrasStar Destroyer Vehicle, side view.
Star Destroyer Vehicle, Inner Detail.
Assorted Action Figures: Red background are Star Wars and Green Background Are GI Joe. Relevant Star Wars figures include Darth Vader (first row, 2nd from the left), Luke Skywalker (first row, 5th from the left), R2D2 (second row, 2nd from the left) and Hammerhead Alien (second row, first on the right). In the GI Joe group Cobra Commander is in the first row, second from the left.
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