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Abstract

     The proposed thesis project will perform an inductive, qualitative micro-ethnography of tabletop role-playing games in at least three local contexts. The primary research method will be participant observations of these speech events over at least 100 hours of game play. Game sessions will be recorded in audio and video format so as to capture the full range of verbal and non-verbal artistry that accompanies role-playing generally. These recordings will be selectively transcribed. A web site will be constructed which will facilitate IRB and thesis committee monitoring as well as disseminate all findings. Guiding theory is arranged into the domains of Performance, Bricolage, Double-Voiced Discourse and Idioculture. I intend to challenge the idea that tabletop role-play involves a degenerative, limited type of performance. I want to explore the ways in which game participants use double-voiced discourse and strategies of persuasion during game events. I want to examine game structures such as adventures and character speech acts as if they were bricolage; are there patterns in the types of creative collages I will encounter? Considering the amount of context specific frames that role-players use and create during their games (Idioculture), my 18-year familiarity with role-playing games is an asset. This thesis project will not only extend an anthropological foothold into a relatively unexplored type of speech event, it will also significantly improve the existing body of theory which describes and explains role-playing games generally. Research will conclude with a public thesis defense in Fall 2005. [TOC]

     What is a role-playing game? Curiously enough, the overwhelming majority of academic works which address this question seem to be written by people who have never participated in role-playing games. As a result, it is easy to stumble across inadequate descriptions of these social practices that only exist in the imaginations of their authors [1]. The most obvious exception is offered by Gary Allen Fine’s Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds (1983) [2]. Fine’s year-long exposure to a variety of role-playing games as an active player and co-constructor of his research participants’ “shared fantasies” gives him an insider’s perspective that most academic discussions of role-playing games (RPGs) can not achieve. Since role-playing games are (with certain exceptions) interactive, embodied, spontaneous, small-group-oriented and brimming with non-verbal communication, ethnographic techniques which fail to capture a high level of interactive detail or which remove the researcher from the game setting are inappropriate to the analysis and understanding of role-playing games generally. The best way to understand role-playing games is to play them; so, to the extent that this non-interactive format will allow, I will familiarize you with what a role-playing game is by placing you in one. In order for this to work, a bit of background is required.

     The specific type of role-playing game I am interested in is commonly referred to as a pen-and-paper (some prefer pencil-and-paper) or tabletop RPG. Usually, these games take place at a table for reasons of both tradition and convenience. While there is no theoretical limit to the number of players who can participate in any one game session (preferences vary of course), the optimal size of a “gaming group” is approximately 4 to 8 participants. One of the participants will play as a gamemaster (or simply GM) [3]; the function of the GM is to run the game, to provide an imaginary, interactive world which becomes animated through descriptions, drawings, maps, and verbal artistry. The other players co-construct this textual reality as they explore and interact with it by taking on the role of individual player characters (a.k.a. PCs). These player characters are analogous to the main characters in a story and are free to act as the individual players choose within the loose bounds of the game rules and the overall sense of game-continuity particular to each gaming group. While the gamemaster describes and animates the world around the player characters, the players try to imagine being their characters in this setting; when a player wants their character to act they simply announce what their characters are doing to the group: “…my character kneels down and tries to look through the keyhole,” for example. When a player wants their character to say something the player usually (though not always) speaks as if s/he were this character; sometimes this is metapragmatically announced with “my character says…” but often there are subtle clues speakers use, a variation in tone or accent perhaps, which signals to other players that this is actually the character speaking, not the human player. A back and forth exchange process begins which involves a shifting and blending of frames, of in-game and above-game, where players respond to one another and the events in the game progress. Thus, it is possible to speak of game time and real time, of player knowledge being separate from character knowledge. During the most enjoyable moments of tabletop gaming, players perceive the in-game events they co-construct as a distinct reality, as a story they are both engrossed-in and actively composing.

     Continuity is an essential aspect of role-playing engrossment and a major part of all role-playing games. Once a gamemaster approves of a game event or reality, it takes on a force of its own and persists in the mutually constructed history of the game. Continuity errors are generally avoided in role-playing games [4], and in this sense role-playing games are similar to improvisational stage acting. If, for example, a player describes their character as a hobbit, a hobbit it should stay unless something happens in the game to change this reality. If this hobbit’s hair was initially described by its player as curly and black, then it should stay as such unless something happens in the game reality to change this established fact. If at some point the hobbit’s player or the GM described the hobbit’s hair as being, say, straight and green, the other players would want to know why a change occurred. Alterations to the shared fantasy of a role-playing game need to be “logical” even if the overall game setting is a fantastic one. To participate in a role-playing game in which previously established realities were frequently and arbitrarily altered would be like watching a movie with no discernable plot in which the actors playing the main characters changed from scene to scene. While a creative director could pull this off (some interesting film to be sure), it would be something of a challenge [5]. It is important to understand that while RPGs are creative and open-ended they are guided by (sometimes strict) rules and conventions. All role-playing games are played in the context of aesthetic preferences and systems of rules [6] and the gamemaster of any one RPG is “officially” the head referee [7]. The people who play RPGs generally expect that the previous decisions of gamemasters in regard to rules and styles of play will not drastically change.

     Continuity also applies the flow of game occurrences – role-playing game sessions could progress in the creative style of temporal disarray embraced by such films as Pulp Fiction, but they usually follow the A-B-C linearity of a bildungsroman novel [8]. The characters people play grow older and more experienced in the shared fantasy as their players participate in more and more games. However, the “step-by-step, plotted story” presentation of the gamemaster mentioned by Lancaster above is only one possible way to conduct or “run” a role-playing session. In many instances, gamemasters simply do not have enough time to prepare plots and settings and non-player characters (aspects of “adventures”). Other times, they just don’t feel like working on them. In these cases the game reality is made-up on the spot by the gamemaster in mid-play, and the ideas of players – including the actions of their characters – have a good chance of influencing the course of the game at a meta-level that might not occur if the game reality were more fleshed-out beforehand. The important part is that gamemaster provide an adequately detailed, continuous textual environment that the players, in the role of their characters, can interact with in a way that they think is fun [9].

     While RPGs share common features, what separates individual role-playing games from one another are their systems of rules. These rules are sometimes found in just one book or web site, particularly when the game system is new or lacking in popularity, but more often that not there are several books that one needs to buy or acquire (and frequently consult) before that particular role-playing game can be played (unless of course you are willing to wing it). The authors of the original RPG Dungeons and Dragons often divided the rule books of the game into player sections and gamemaster sections (or had separate books for each) – the logic being that players should only read the rules that pertained to their character’s abilities or to the basic functioning of the game, since to be completely familiar with the rules or game mechanics would in some way detract from player enjoyment. Consider the following excerpt from the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide (see footnote 3 for a discussion of what a DM is)…

"As this book is the exclusive precinct of the DM, you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worthy of an honorable death. Peeping players there will undoubtedly be, but they are simply lessening their own enjoyment of the game by taking away some of the sense of wonder that otherwise arises from a game which has its rules hidden from participants. It is in your interests, and in theirs, to discourage possession of this book to players. If any of your participants do read herein, it is suggested that you assess them a heavy fee for consulting “sages” and other sources of information not normally attainable by the inhabitants of your milieu. If they express knowledge which could only be garnered by consulting these pages, a magic item or two can be taken as payment – insufficient, but perhaps it will tend to discourage such actions.” (Gygax 1979: 8) [10].

     The honorable death Gygax refers to above is meant to apply to characters, not players! These comments are written in a common RPG style that mixes and plays with several frames at once. Role-playing is essentially frame juggling. One of the most crucial and difficult to understand aspects of participating in a RPG is that even though players are intimately bound up with their characters, there should always be an attempt to keep player knowledge separate from character knowledge. This is, of course, impossible, but it is a common ideological goal nonetheless. The awareness of player vs. character knowledge is highly variable and, from my own aesthetic perspective, indexes good role players from poor ones. This means, for example, that players should not have their characters make direct references to the real world. Having our hobbit from the previous example refer to another character as a “metrosexual” [11] would usually not be appropriate. When characters are allowed to act on information they could not know it tends to break the scene. For example, if a player were to tell the gamemaster “my character is going to pick the hobbit’s pocket while he is distracted…” it would not be appropriate for the hobbit to suddenly take precautions against thievery just because it’s player (who is also present) knows that something is about to happen [12].

     The adversarial tone Gygax establishes between DMs and players in the previous quotation is a common feature of RPGs. This is not to suggest that players and gamemasters are opponents; if they were the game sessions would be rather short - they might all begin and quickly end with characters staring-down inescapable death traps [13]. Rather, the function of the gamemaster is to be mostly unbiased, a neutral overseer to some degree but with an interest in the player’s enjoyment of the game [14]. Thus, the relationship between gamemasters and players is similar to that of anthropologists and their cultural experts. One of the unique aspects of role-playing games is that the concept of “winning and loosing” is replaced by “having fun;” Whereas in a zero-sum game the players vie against one another in a quest to win, in a role-playing game the players cooperate with one another in order to survive the challenges of the ongoing story [15]. The rivalry between players and gamemasters in RPGs is usually just another role being played, a type of idiom. The mock-tension it is not to be taken seriously and can itself be amusing to act out, but there are moments when players and/or gamemasters forget this and treat one another like opponents involved in a heated game of Risk. It is difficult to get lost in the collective fantasy when this type of rivalry erupts (a topic to be addressed during the research). [TOC]

     Since the best way to understand a role-playing game is to try one, I will now guide you through a brief simulation. The first step in participating in a role-playing game is to make a character. Depending on the game system about to be played (referred to by gamers as simply a system), this process can take upwards of two hours. As we are short on time, we will use the hobbit emerging from previous examples as our character. The first step is to develop a mental picture of this character – you might draw upon the recent Lord of the Rings films to construct this image, or perhaps you would rather flesh out the details on your own. If we were actually making a character now, the gamemaster would explain that there are various quantitative characteristics that all characters in RPGs have, such things as Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity, Luck and so forth, which are defined by the specific game being played. A significant step in the process of making a character would be to determine these statistics, either by allocating a set number of points or by rolling dice, but for now just roughly conceptualize what our hobbit is like, what he or she is wearing (gender is always your choice…which did you initially choose?), and what types of things he or she is carrying. Now, since this is a hobbit, let us assume our character has a great deal of experience eating, drinking, tending gardens, reading history, and cooking; the determination of skills is a standard aspect of RPG character generation and is usually quite fun – the choices made almost always play a major role in the collective fantasies to come. Now, let’s decide upon a name for our hobbit. This is often the last step in making a character and can be the most difficult – the name is usually thought to be appropriate to the game setting in so much as it seems to cryptotypically fit within the bricolage that is a fantasy game setting (Lehrich 2004: 3). Off the cuff, I might choose such names as Bedwar Broomsboggle, Findan McLosh, or perhaps Traith Connad but not Big-Daddy-Kane or John Elway [16]. Once you have chosen your name we can continue our journey into the semi-interactive gaming simulation…

[Gamemaster]: “You were sleeping soundly, in your own bed, when a sudden and deep-seated, embodied process snapped you into consciousness. It was kind of like when you are about to drift off to sleep and then all of a sudden a kind of warm falling sensation knocks you awake. Except this time, you actually were falling, through your cozy hobbit bed, out of your tiny head, down through the borders of the body and into a state of pure energy that seems to explore the vastness of the space that lies in between the electrons and nuclei of your pieces. For a moment, or perhaps a lifetime you exist as fireflies caught in a windy void…And then you snap back together all of the sudden as you find yourself lying face down on a cold stone surface. The area spins a bit as you feel your way back to embodiment and remember the difference between up and down. Your stomach churns. What are you going to do?
[you]: What can I do?
[Gamemaster]: Whatever you want: you think you could move but you still feel…kind of hung-over and tingly all over, as if your body was asleep. The pins and needles are starting to spread down across the hairy tops of your feet.
[you]: My character should get up and look around I suppose.
[Gamemaster]: If that is what you want to do just say so.
[you]: What do you mean?
[Gamemaster]: We, I mean people who role-play, speak as if we are our characters. If you want to have your character to stand up it is ok to just say my character stands up but it is better to say I get up and look around.
[you]: Alright, I try to get to my feet and have a look at the - at my surroundings.
[Gamemaster]: Surprisingly, you have full motor control…the pins and needles sensation quickly drains away as you push yourself off the damp, stone-tile ground with your hands and crawl to your feet. It is early morning, but rather warm for this time of day. You are standing in a recessed stone amphitheatre perhaps twenty feet in diameter at its ground level – the level you are on. It looks ancient but well tended, with moss covered cracks and a recently swept white marble surface. You can’t see out of the area because the amphitheatre is about twice as deep as you are tall. You were lying basically in the center. The area is wet with morning dew and the musky perfume of deep purple lilac bushes which surround the amphitheatre’s perimeter and drape down over the edge. All of the bushes are three to four times your height, perhaps 10-12 feet tall. At the floor level where you stand, off to your left, a whiteware urn lies on its side, perhaps 4’ long and decorated in the American SW style of Snowflake Black-on-White, adorned with large jet spirals and circles. You realize you are unarmed and still in your night cloths.
[you]: Am I in danger?
[GM]: I’m just the gamemaster.
[you]: That’s why I asked you.
[GM]: [laughing a bit]: No – I mean as the storyteller I will only tell you what your character can perceive and since your hobbit isn’t psychic it couldn’t really know if it were in danger. You can of course assume anything you want as your character.
[you]: The other players did warn me that you might try to kill-off the hobbit kind of quick…
[GM]: Well, if there were no dangers the game would be kind of lame – a seven hour session in which characters sat safely at home and baked cookies would not make for epic storytelling.
[you]: Right - can I hear anything?
[GM]: You pause for a moment and take in the ambient sounds…of wind through trees – lots of trees and big ones too, and of birds but none of them sound familiar…they don’t chirp but rather click and growl of all things. The wind you just heard passes through the area and is quite warm.
[you]: I stretch for a moment…(sigh), I suppose first breakfast and tea will have to wait. [spoken in a pseudo-Irish accent, the best you could manage] What is in the urn?
[GM]: You can’t tell unless you walk over a bit closer..
[you]: Giving it a slight berth I cautiously move towards it.
[GM]: The urn seems to have hosted a fire recently as the insides are caked with some kind of sooty resin, but you don’t see any items inside. At this range, you can just barely detect the scent of some kind of exotic incense coming from the vessel which just overtakes the ambient odor of lilac. The bird noises abruptly stop.
[you]: I freeze in place and listen intently..
[GM]: silence..more silence..and then the sound of large birds taking to the air from all around…

     At that point, what would you (have your character) do? Notice that while the gamemaster was in control of the environment, in this case the player co-composed the setting by trying to explore minor details of it – the ambient sounds and the contents of the urn. If other players had characters ready to go they might have started off in the same area you were in, or they might have joined later. The text above is but a shadow of an actual interactive game session. [TOC]

     It was originally decided by the authors of Dungeons and Dragons (D & D) that there would be one gamemaster, and this construction has persisted in nearly every pen-and-paper role-playing game to follow since. There are a variety of reasons why this has been the case which are of interest to the proposed research. First of all, the art of gamemastering is difficult to perform - not everyone has the skill, ambition, or desire to try it. The process of running games can involve heavy amounts of preparation: reading, map-making, graphic design, architecture, ecological awareness, writing stories and plots, designing characters – the list goes on and on! Most gamemasters who regularly run games (such as myself) see their performances as rewarding, enriching, and infinitely fun. In these cases, GMs will want to continue to practice their art. It is also (usually) the case that one prepared adventure can last for several game sessions, and this also tends to result in one person in any particular gaming group taking the role of gamemaster regularly [17]. The ideology of player-mystery discussed earlier by Gygax is another reason the One-GM model works best. Since adventures are most fun when the players are not aware of the details “behind the scenes,” to have multiple gamemasters would necessarily mean that these secrets would quickly become common knowledge. It is a universal role playing fact that adventures are most fun when the players do not know what they are going to encounter. Another factor to consider would be that not all gamemasters like to apply the same takes on the rules, and a variety of gamemastering styles exist which mix like used motor oil and holy water.

     All role-playing games are creative collages or bricolage [18]. Dungeons and Dragons was creatively constructed from three major sources: war gaming generally, which the co-creators Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax were quite familiar with (Fine 1983: 13-14) [19], a specific type of war game called Chainmail which Gary Gygax helped to create – which was in many ways similar to the original Dungeons & Dragons [20], and an Avalon Hill Gaming Company board game/RPG-prototype called Outdoor Survival. The influence of this game is most interesting; nowhere have I seen Outdoor Survival mentioned in the literature’s treatment of the history of role-playing games, and I would not have stumbled across its role were it not for a trip through the web in search of early versions of D & D.

     Outdoor Survival was first published in 1972 – two years before D & D’s debut in 1974 – and “Men and Magic,” one of the three rule books to come with the first printing of D & D, cites Outdoor Survival as a required game supplement [21] useful for its detailed hex-terrain maps [22]. Consider that the playing pieces of Outdoor Survival were meant to represent individual people with distinct skills. Arneson and Gygax necessarily had to employ a focus on the individual (unlike the focus of war gaming, which at the time was on units – collections of individuals) if they were to have a game where people could imagine being someone else, a character exploring and overcoming dangerous environments. Outdoor Survival’s somewhat open-ended game play, in which players pitted hikers and hunters (different types of proto-characters you might say) against a harsh textual environment using a variety of scenarios [23] embodies many aspects of tabletop role-playing. Outdoor Survival even featured a type of “hit point” system (a quantitative measure of a character’s life – a universal characteristic of later RPGs), based on wounds suffered and resources acquired, which affected the movement rates of the “lost” proto-characters (they were not the detailed individuals seen in later D & D but they did have their own skills and abilities). Thus, the existence of Outdoor Survival may have had a profound impact on the formation of D & D.

     War games and the Chainmail rules provided D & D with a referee (called the Dungeon Master or DM) as well as metal miniatures (which are fun to use), along with a series of rules or game mechanics oriented around these miniatures. The movement of characters and the ranges of in-game magical effects, for example, were given in inches on the tabletop, not just in “actual” fantasy-world-level length units. This practice persisted into later editions of D & D, until being temporarily abandoned in the second edition of the game. The most recent corporation to own the rights to D & D, Hasbro, has re-integrated and revived the role of miniatures once more as a gaming aid (or profit making strategy): while it is possible to play D & D 3.5 edition without miniatures and a large, dry erase marker grid-mat it is currently neither aesthetically (thus culturally) pleasing or easy to do so. In the current thesis project I should not ignore the role of economics on the structures of tabletop role-playing, as it has shaped the practice throughout its history.

     We might even include the use of finite game turns simulating larger chunks of real-world time – particularly relevant to combat rules – as a carry over from war gaming, but I am not sure how else the progenitors of D & D would have transfigured battle into a manageable game event. But aside form these speculations, there were some specific human interactions which facilitated the masterwork that was to be D & D which the following text lays out…

“Kuntz (1977: 51) suggests the creation of D & D was a multistage process. If we exclude the discovery of role-playing, characteristic of children’s games (playing sheriff or photographer or soldier), then fantasy role-playing gaming was created recently. Dave Arneson, one of the D & D co-authors, credits his original insight to a war gamer in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area in 1968:

I would have to give a lot of the credit to another local gamer, Dave Wesley. He was the first one to input role-playing…the first game that stands out in my mind is little medieval games, a very dull period of war games. He had a dull set of rules and after our second game, we were bored. To spice it up, Dave, who had been doing the set-ups and refereeing [for miniature battles], gave each of us a little personal goal in the battle. [personal interview]

Players were motivated to change as a result of frustration with the inadequacy of a well-established system of play (“normal gaming”). Arneson continues:

Well, that kind of got us all thinking about “wasn’t that neat,” and we did a couple of other games with various people. “Let’s have a big medieval campaign with half a dozen different people playing with little powers with fifty or sixty men, and then you’re king or the knight or whatever.” And it developed from there. That got us into role-playing. As far as the fantasy part, I was the first one to come up with a violation of the basic concept of warfare of the period. We were fighting an ancient game. Very dull again. And I’d given the defending brigands a Druid high priest, and in the middle of the battle, the dull battle, the Roman war elephant charged the Britains and looked like he was going to trample half their army flat, the druidic high priest waved his hands and pointed this funny little box out of one hand and turned the elephant into so much barbeque meat. This upset all of the participants in game a great deal and the fellow playing the Druidic high priest was, well, he was laughing his head off in a corner. That was absolutely the only thing in the game that was out of the ordinary, but they weren’t expecting it and it was of course, Star Trek was then playing, firing a phaser was adding science fiction to an Ancient game". (Fine 1983: 13-14)

     Arneson was bored with the game, and although he had thought of the possibility before the game began, his decision was not premeditated. He continued with minor variations, but the first game in which fantasy was dominant occurred in 1970 or 1971 when Arneson organized the Blackmoor dungeon campaign, which he claims was a fantasy role-playing game as we know it today:

All the fellows had come over for a traditional Napoleonic battle, and saw the table with this huge keep or castle on it. [They] wondered where this had come from in the plains of Poland or wherever we were playing at the time, and they shortly found out that they were going to go down in the deep, dark, dank dungeon [personal interview; for more details see Arneson 1979]

Arneson and E. Gary Gygax at that time were members of the Castles and Crusades society, an informal organization whose members shared an interest in medieval warfare. During the early 1970s Gygax and Arneson corresponded and both play-tested what was to become the rules for Dungeons and Dragons, which included innovations from both men. D & D appeared commercially in 1974, published by Gygax’s gaming company, TSR Hobbies, Inc.” (Fine 1983: 13-14) [24]

     That the first (recorded and recognized) deviation from war gaming involved a Star Trek phaser is a wonderful example of how innovations are constructed out of existing languacultural [25] constructs. The history of role-playing games are intimately associated with works of science-fantasy fiction. I am reminded of the music video of The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins as performed by Leonard Nemoy, in which the groovy dancers – with Vulcan ears – perform the hobbit dance [26]. There was something going on in American cultural history that fit with science-fantasy, Star Trek, Tolkien, and war gaming in such a way as to allow a Druid to melt an Oliphant [27], which the following text nicely captures…

“Like all good histories, we begin with a famous genius who sets the ball rolling. In this case, it is the incredible visionary, H. G. Wells. For not only was Wells the grandfather of science fiction, he was also the grandfather of war-games. Which makes him, if you like, the great-grandfather of role-playing games.

Wargames have pretty much existed for as long as there have been wars. The idea of simulating battles without the personal hazards can be traced back to ancient Sumner, more than four thousand years ago [28]. Chess and Go, two of the oldest games in the world, arose from war-games [29]. Contemporary war games originated in Prussia, at the turn of the 19th century. The game, Kriegspiel (War Game), introduced the ideas of arranging markers on a "sand table", and using a dice to determine any random elements in the battle. After the Franco-Prussian war, the English came up with their own version, and they began to be used wisely by armed services to train in tactics and predict military outcomes [30].

It was Wells, however, who first opened up the games for the amateur. In 1915, he published a set of amateur war gaming rules in a book entitled Little Wars, now seen as the "wargamers’ bible". Wells was also the first to suggest that miniature figures be collected to represent respective forces, to add flavor, and a sense of involvement, to the game. Though the book was popular, war games did not really take off until, in 1953, Charles Roberts released the first commercially available "board" war game. Though it was a slow starter, Roberts eventually went on to form the Avalon-Hill Game Company, now one of the world’s biggest game companies.

In fact, in the 60’s and 70’s, wargaming enjoyed a peak of popularity that it has yet to recapture. It seems all those young people who weren’t doing LSD and listening to Bob Dylan were playing a hell of a lot of wargames. Soon, it was no longer a game, it was an industry. A huge, well-established and well-defined fanclub, with its own congregations, publications and jargon was evolving, just as it was for science-fiction fans at about the same time. By the late sixties, there was a strong and stable sub-culture for wargamers, a supportive environment that was beginning to foster much creativity and experimentation among its members. It was just this sort of exploration that was to be the fuel for the role-playing fire. But a spark was still required. And what a spark it was: The Lord of the Rings.

Released in full across the United States in 1966, it was to forever change the literary world, and likewise the worlds of millions of middle class American teenage males. And since ninety percent of wargamers were middle class teenage males, it took little imagination to see what was going to happen next. No longer did players want to recreate the battle of Gettysburg, but the battle of Helm’s Deep. The Napoleonic Wars were discarded in favor of the War of the Ring, goblins and orcs replaced foot soldiers and cavalry. People wanted to know just how much damage a Balrog could do, and what the range was on a lightning bolt spell.” (Darlington 2004)

     RPGs in American society are predominantly white male activities [31] (but not exclusively so by any stretch of the imagination) and the text above partially explains why. Consider that the characters in Lord of the Rings who perform 99.9% of the action are men – white men I might add which we can easily infer from the text (or the recent movies if we choose). Throughout the Lord of the Rings trilogy, there is a prevalent semantic association of blackness with evil (dark lord, dark tower, for example) and light/fairness with goodness. Thus, the men who answer the call of the Dark Lord Sauron are black and orientalized (see Tolkien 1987 II: 269), as are the orcs with their scimitars: “And some are large and evil: black Uruks of Mordor” (Tolkien 1987 I: 338) [32]. Whatever the “actual” meaning of color symbolism in Tolkien’s masterpiece, he did successfully give England a unique mythological text which resonated better with certain American populations in a time when certain young American adults were eager to sample all things British. Notice Darlington’s reference above to hippie culture – to LSD and Bob Dylan – and how this is placed in opposition to another group who embraced war gaming. Where are all the people who preferred Motown? Throughout the popular texts of science-fantasy fiction there is a definite overabundance of white male heroes; can we say that this fact has had no selective impact on the people who were attracted to engaging this genre in fantasy [33]? Perhaps not, but we can be hopeful that future fantastic representations will be more sensitive, inclusive, and diverse. [TOC]

     Maxwell, in his excellent discussion of the use of theory in qualitative research, distinguishes between description, “a factual narrative of what happened, at a very low level of abstraction” (1996: 32), interpretation, “an account of the meaning given to some situation or event by the people studied, in their own terms” (1996: 32), and theory, which “provides a model or map of why the world is the way it is…a simplification of the world, but a simplification aimed at clarifying and explaining some aspect of how it works” (1996: 32). Each of the theoretical domains I will discuss in this section, Performance, Bricolage, Double-Voiced Discourse and Idioculture, are intended to help me organize and understand what I am going to encounter during my fieldwork; they transcend mere description, they move beyond the point of view of role players (including myself), and tell an interesting, enlightening story that provides insights and understandings that would not have been possible in their absence (Maxwell 1996: 32). Note that none of these theoretical domains will be tested – rather I will use them as preliminary models of what goes on in certain aspects of tabletop role-playing games. [TOC]

“Dungeons & Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game; although players take on roles of particular characters, they perform these roles only in limited ways. Much of the action is determined by rolling dice and is restricted to the game grid (a map drawn on graph paper). Instead of performing actions, players narrate their actions, often including speech. Some players choose to perform their characters through special language use, but such performances may be fleeting and marked in comparison to ongoing discourse. Gary Alan Fine suggests in his ethnography of gaming communities that the relative absence of performance in tabletop role-playing games is due to the limited theatrical abilities of the players:

While groups differ in the emphasis they place on natural conversation,…very few conversations consist of characters “directly” talking to each other. That involves greater role-playing skills than most players, even experienced ones, possess. Rather than conceiving of gaming as improvisational acting, a better metaphor might be storytelling – with each storyteller having authority over one character – producing a collective fantasy. (1983: 213-214) [34]

However, some role-playing games – known as live-action role-playing games or LARPs – are much closer to improvisational performance than the tabletop gaming that Fine describes. In light of the fact that many people play both tabletop and live-action games, the varying extent of performance found in each is better attributed to generic convention than to lack of talent…” (Bucholtz 2001: 231-232)

     While Bucholtz’s take on tabletop RPGs is inaccurate [35], it is not unusual. Many authors seem to prefer the study of live action role-play as opposed to tabletop gaming for the reasons she lists above. To a researcher unfamiliar with tabletop RPGs – particularly one who goes out of her way to demonstrate that LARPs are an evolved and advanced form of role-playing [36] – LARPs do seem to involve people doing more. They consist of people moving around in costume, in actual, readily-observable space. LARPs include far more people interacting simultaneously than in tabletop RPGs (perhaps hundreds as opposed to 4-8 or so); their players might touch one another, throw bean bag “spells,” or enact battle scenes in ways that obviously fit with an anthropological concern for embodiment. Around the tabletop however, there seems to be less real action, aside from people talking and rolling dice. Bucholtz embraces this surface-view of tabletop gaming when she explains that “much of the action is determined by rolling dice and is restricted to the game-grid” (2001: 231). We have already seen that this is not the case; tabletop gaming actions begin with the active co-construction of the game by the players. Saying that character actions in tabletop RPGs are “restricted” to the “game-grid” is reductive; it would be like arguing that Lord of the Rings was a simplistic story because its plots were limited to the map of Middle Earth.

     The richness, the artistic value of Tolkien’s work lies in the way he was able to bring the details of Middle Earth to life and form them into a memorable story; the same is true for tabletop role-playing. Game sessions that have lasting aesthetic value, that players tell stories about and that were fun to play are those that are well-performed. A key aspect of a good role-playing performance is that it is actively co-constructed. For example, the textual environment the gamemaster provides need to be explored by the players and interacted with – even if the game’s action takes place “in” one drawn room on graph paper, the exploration of this one room’s detail and significance can last an entire enjoyable session – so long as the players think-up ways to explore and develop it. As characters poke about in the game-reality, the gamemaster responds by expanding on the particular details of interest at the moment. Imagine, if you will, a large attic full of boxes and collected odds and ends which might appear in a role-playing game session as a playable setting. Now, a gamemaster might give a general, paragraph-long description of this room and its contents to the players – he or she might even draw a map of it: this description will certainly not reveal the entire nature of everything in the room! It is up to the players what they do with the possible depth of detail waiting in the various boxes and locked within the history of the collected junk. Perhaps the players, as their characters, will rummage about. This forces the gamemaster to reveal more detail and description, which might encourage more exploration on the part of the players. Thus, the setting is co-constructed. Thus the setting is performed, all according to the aesthetic preferences of the gaming group in question.

     The things players do in the game as their characters are also performed/co-constructed, predominantly verbally. The speech acts of tabletop role-players can be thought of as the strings that animate their characters. To understand this we need a focus on the character as mental construct. If a player were to animate this mental actor in a scene by saying (for example) “My character attacks the orc” [37], it would be like a puppeteer raising a puppet off a micro-stage floor and plopping it in front of an orc puppet, and then violently and mechanically clanking the puppet’s wooden body into its foe: clink, clink, clink. This might make for a good children’s show – and it might be funny to witness at any age – but it does not necessarily make for a good performance. We might want the puppet to act in a manner which helps us slip into a suspension of disbelief, we might want it to walk and act like a humanoid, we might like it to dramatically draw its weapon (as well as it could given the strings) and march over to the orc as might Aragorn or some other fantasy hero. By the same logic, a better performance from the role-player might be “I watch in horror at the violent actions of the orc for a brief second and then scream a blood curdling war cry as I draw my blue glowing short sword and full-out charge the creature…” Notice the difference, and without even needing to speak in character. This type of creative, linguistic animation is often seen as essential to “good” role-playing game sessions [38], and is used to add aesthetic depth to in-game descriptions as well. There is a vast difference between “your character sees an orc” and “you character sees a figure trying to conceal itself in the shadows of the far corner of the room…”

     This is not to say that it is possible or preferable to rank particular tabletop game sessions according to the verbal artistry of the players: each particular game session develops its own fluid logic which continuously impacts the style and quality of in-game performances. Even in cases where one player is speaking in-character, the reaction of the group co-constructs the appropriateness of the speech act. Good and bad performances are judged on the spot according to local aesthetic preferences: a good performance in one game session might be wildly out-of-place in another.

     Some of the more obvious performances delivered in tabletop RPGs involve players speaking as the characters they are playing. Bucholtz identifies several types of linguistic adjustments (2001: 236) that live-action role players use to both distinguish their roles and signal to others that an “in-game” or “in-character” frame is to be used to interpret their speech [39]. These include the use of a character style (2001: 236), which may include creative alterations in “…pitch and volume modulation, lexical choice and syntax, phonology, and extralinguistic contextualization cues such as gesture” (2001: 236), as well as stereotypical or culturally scripted accents (2001: 240-245) [40].

     There are also a variety of non-verbal cues that players use to give-life to their in-character performances which rely heavily on gesture and movements of eyes and face. In one of the games I regularly participate in, one player will make a sweeping hand gesture to signal a particular spell-effect his character will often cast – he does not have to signal to the group that his character is using that spell, all he has to do is sweep his hand and everyone familiar with this action is able to envision this player’s character going through the motions of the spell. Even in times where the verbal artistry of narrated action is somewhat lacking, even when players forget to employ linguistic adjustments, character styles, accents and non-verbal cues, an aesthetically pleasing performance can be achieved in the familiarity players have with one another’s characters. This performance is highly individualized and occurs on the mental stage. Just as the reader of a book can transcend an otherwise bland passage and interject a personal take on the imagined action – spice it up so to speak – so to can players of tabletop gaming sessions transform “my character attacks the orc” into a vivid, aesthetic mental picture by drawing upon their familiarity with one another’s characters, other game sessions, and so on. How could a non-participant hope to explore this type of performance? [TOC]

     A specific history lies beyond the accents I perform as I role play which gives them seemingly essential meanings (Bucholtz 2001: 249). Since the majority of cinematic takes on Tolkien-style dwarves (for example) have commonly used Scottish accents to animate their speech [41], it just makes sense to speak like Mel Gibson in Braveheart when role playing a dwarf. Role players actively engage the fantasy they consume (Bucholtz 2001: 230), they tend to discuss ways fantasy movies could have been improved, they create new texts based on their favorite products of popular culture (Bucholtz 2001: 230), and sometimes they come up with an innovation of their own, but usually these are thrown together – creatively assembled – from bits and pieces of existing elements of science fiction and fantasy (and from elsewhere). The sources of insight are themselves creative collages, perhaps constructed from ideas decorating episodes of Star Trek, sneaking through the Mines of Moria, or wandering through the Dunes of Arrakis. In this way role-players frequently play the role of a bricoleur, a term introduced by Levi-Strauss and described in the text below…

“Levi-Strauss’s idea, in simple terms, is that cultures think like oddly artistic hobbyists. Imagine you are in a basement full of stuff from which to build whatever you like. You have bits of odd machines, things your neighbor threw out, scraps of wood, and tail-ends of old projects, as well as taken-apart bits of all your old projects. Now you decide to build something, and you have some ideas – aesthetic and practical – about that should be done; you are very skilled and talented, and can see possibilities in all sorts of things. But you do not have a Home Depot available, or you consider it “cheating” to go buy things. At any rate, you have to build the thing you’re going to build from what you already have in your basement…Levi-Strauss’s point is that each object used contains its own history; that is, the iron has already been used for something and the bricoleur then gives it a new use. The iron, to focus on the single example, is a local source of heat; it can burn pants, or make a grilled-cheese sandwich, and of course it can press a shirt. But it cannot be a refrigerator. And if, clever person that you are, you pull the heating coil out of the iron for some project that requires a heating coil, your iron now contains the history of its usage: it is now a heating coil and a heavy weight…Every sign [42] in myth and ritual, says Levi-Strauss, is like this iron, and every living mythic culture is like this bricoleur. When faced with a (social) situation, an intellectual problem of whatever kind, the bricoleur begins by running through his memory (the basement) to see what he already has that can be used to solve the problem. He then builds the machine that solves the problem, in the process incorporating the entire history of every object in question, and furthermore altering (however slightly) each object used; when he goes on to build something else, later on, the current project will be part of the history of each object.” (Lehrich 2004: 3-4).

     I am not primarily interested in tracing the histories of ideas in my thesis project, but rather I expect to see role playing elements (characters, roles, plots, adventures, adversaries, genres) as creative collages of past collages. The most obvious example I can think of can be found in the semi-standard bestiary of monsters that commonly decorate fantasy role-playing settings. Such things as Hydras, Medusas, Giants and Devils derive from mythologies and cultural histories that were themselves semi-globalized takes on earlier ideas. Gamemasters, particularly those who take pride in not needing to use RPG industry-produced game worlds and plotlines, do not usually consider their adventures to be bricolage, but they are nonetheless. From what mental-basements do these fantastic realities stem? It might be difficult to tell, but a consideration of RPG text as bricolage at least focuses attention on broader contexts – literature, film, current events, group history, mass-media, sci-fi and modernity (Stromberg 1999) to name a few – as much as it does on the specific details of game sessions. [TOC]

“To describe the mutual influence apparent in preschool girls’ social interactions, Sheldon (1992) proposed a theory of double-voiced discourse (a term taken from Bahktin, 1929/1978). She argued that the concept, double-voiced discourse, reflects a dual orientation that shapes girls’ talk. Because our society portrays feminine self-assertion as based on a “self-in-relation” model (see Gilligan, 1987; Miller, 1986), girls often display greater concern for collaboration and consensus in their talk than do boys (Elder, 1988; Leaper, 1991; Tannen, 1990). To maintain relational solidarity while asserting themselves in conversation, girls tend to express a double orientation. One orientation is toward the self and one’s own goals; the other is toward conversational partners and their goals. According to Sheldon, preschool girls engage in double-voiced discourse during conflict episodes so that they can put forth their own agenda while simultaneously attending to the agendas of others (see also Goodwin, 1990; Miller, Danaher, & Forbes, 1986; Sheldon, 1990). Double-voiced discourse is characterized by affiliation, reciprocity, and efforts to protest other’s face. Single-voiced discourse, in contrast, is “overly self-serving because the speaker has a primary orientation to self-interest” (Sheldon, 1992, p. 100). The following excerpt offered by Sheldon illustrates two preschooler’s efforts to negotiate their differing agendas. One of the girls, Erin, had just voiced her plans for the two girls to build a house together out of blocks. Her playmate, Molly, disagreed.

7     Molly:    No, I want- I have a good idea. Let’s make a bridge.
8     Erin:       No, I don’t wanna make a bridge.
9     Molly:    I do. So we can crawl through it.
10   Erin:       No, a bridge house. How about- no, this bridge goes
11                  here. How about a bridge house? ((Molly tacitly
12                  agrees and they continue arranging the blocks.))

As Sheldon noted, Erin used a concession (in lines 10-11) to mitigate the conflict that was brewing between herself and Molly. By suggesting they build a “bridge house,” Erin accommodated her own agenda as well as Molly’s agenda – she used double-voiced discourse to demonstrate her attention to both agendas and resolve the disagreement.” (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 354-355)

     The examples of fantasy play that Barnes and Vangelisti describe take place in preschool daycare settings and are performed by children who “ranged in age from 3.0 – 6.9 years” (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 359). The role-playing games I intend to study will be performed by older children ages 21-30 [43] in game stores and in private homes. As the background section demonstrated, these older role-players are over 90% likely to be male. How then could the concept of double-voiced discourse, a theoretical tool the literature applies to young girls in conflict, apply to my project? Is it that grounded theoretical constructs are more/only applicable in ethnographic contexts that resemble the original insight-inspiring/pattern-producing venue or population? While I do not believe this is the case, the tabletop role-playing game settings I intend to participate in are quite similar, on a variety of levels, to the scenarios of fantastic play Barnes and Vangelisti describe.

     The use of double-voice in fantasy play episodes of any kind is all about influence and persuasion (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 355). In the example above, Erin and Molly had different play goals that they needed to negotiate in order for their block-building to continue. Had they been engaged in fantasy play, say in the roles of Space explorer and Alien, then in addition to personal goals needing resolution the children would have also potentially had to deal with conflicting character goals. Apparently, when the children Barnes and Vangelisti observed initiated fantasy play a major area of conflict involved who would play what, “who is ‘the mommy’ and who is ‘the baby’” (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 353) for example. This process of negotiating role agendas was contrasted with a need to mitigate personal agendas, described as “goals associated with the behaviors that children enact during their fantasy…whether ‘the baby’ should take a nap” (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 353). Players in a role-playing game do not need to establish who their characters are once they are created, but beforehand there can be quite a bit of negotiation needed to settle who is going to be what that is just as complex as deciding who is going to be the mommy and who is to be the baby [44].

     The fact that players are required to choose moral orientations for their characters requires some level of negotiation as well. If the players blend good and evil characters, or characters from oppositional factions (such as kindhearted knights with evil priests), then conflict may well result. Sometimes this can be fun to play out, but usually it is best to have a certain degree of inter-character harmony.

     In regard to personal agendas, the RPG situation is a bit more complex than the preschool scenario in that the gamers (usually) adhere to an ideology of player/character separation that does not seem to exist (as much) at the preschool level. Erin and Molly do not seem to recognize the difference between their own goals and desires and those of their characters. In a tabletop role-playing game however, the orientations and desires of players and gamemasters will often conflict with those of the characters they animate. This leads to tension. For example, an evil character in a RPG might be compelled, as a consequence of its essentialist role, to do things that its player might not want to have happen. A GM-controlled villain might destroy the player characters (due to the bad luck or poor decisions of the players) despite the amount of time the GM spent working on the now-ruined story. This sort of thing happens all the time.

     Conflicting personal agendas of RPG characters constantly require repair and negotiation; it may be that one character wants to follow the GM-derived plot line to acquire a valued treasure but the other characters want to go off on a tangent and research magic spells. In this situation, the GM might try and convince the characters to follow the path of the adventure, the lone wolf might try to persuade the other characters to follow him, and the other players would do their best to resist. Single voiced strategies of persuasion are, as Barnes and Vangelisti explain, less likely to succeed than double-voiced strategies. Just as harmonious play might end in conflict if Erin were to hit Molly with a block in order to persuade her to see the activity her way, the lone-wolf character telling the others that “they can either follow his character or face the consequences” is likely to result in players having their characters fight one another (not the best way to keep the game going). If the gamemaster were to bully the characters into following his adventure (another way of saying story), perhaps by having super-powerful adversaries push them towards the “correct” path, the characters might complain or stop playing altogether. But, if the lone wolf character were to employ a double-voiced strategy and tell the others “look, if we acquire X treasure it will be easier for you all to research spells since you could purchase needed and expansive supplies,” then it is more likely that his goals will succeed. If the gamemaster were to write a story in which everyone could accomplish their goals yet still participate in the plot, then everyone would win.

     Barnes and Vangelisti identify four distinct aspects of “dual-oriented talk” (1995: 352) that will serve as useful analytical categories in the proposed research. These variations on the double-voice include: (1) synthesizing multiple agendas, (2) using the pretend frame, (3) using a familiar script and (4) emphasizing micro- rather than macro- elements of behavior. These strategies require contextual modification considering the minor differences between preschool and RPGs generally. This discussion follows below.

1. Synthesizing multiple agendas: Barnes and Vangelisti explain that “By linking their own role agenda with those of their peers, children can create a context where the agendas of their playmates reinforce or contribute to their own agenda” (1995: 358). We have already discussed the ways this applies to RPGs.
2. Using the pretend frame: “Children’s ability to influence their peers during fantasy play can be enhanced when the children “frame” their personal agenda within the context of the play setting. Putting forth a personal agenda that is consistent with the play setting and fantasy roles being enacted can prompt children to comply with the agenda” (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 358). In the case of the role-playing events I intend to explore, using the pretend frame would involve playing in-character. This involves speaking in reference to game events as well as to the group’s history. Suppose, drawing on a previous example, that the lone wolf character were to say “Come now, didn’t we promise the lady Valna that we would rescue her treasures and restore her family’s honor?” This double-voiced strategy would be more effective at getting the party to join him in the hunt than if he were to say “I think we should go and recover the treasure so I can finally afford that manor house,” or “, hey guys, I think the gamemaster wants us to follow the adventure.”
3. Using a familiar script: “By presenting their playmates with well-known scripts, children can encourage some behaviors and discourage others. When participants agree to enact a familiar script, they often constrain their behaviors to those that are consistent with the script” (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 358). This is not to suggest that RPG participants are limited in their actions – they can be as creative as they otherwise are in the context of a particular languaculture – it only suggests that certain scripts are known which can be drawn from. Thus, a player-as-character might draw upon a final stand in the face of impossible odds script in order to get the other players-as-characters to follow her character to certain doom. There are a staggering number of potential scripts. These include the expected behaviors of warriors, rogues, wizards and priests (types of RPG characters) as well as specific scripts as recorded in fiction, film, and prior role-playing sessions. So long as the other players are familiar with the script it could possibly work as a persuasive strategy.
4. Emphasizing micro- rather than macro- elements of behavior: “By focusing attention on specific details of their peer’s behavior, a child can restrict disagreements about his or her personal agenda to those relatively specific details and discourage more general opposition” (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 358). The ultimate idea of this strategy is to limit the possible responses of the other players by constructing a reality that focuses on the intended play acts (Barnes and Vangelisti 1995: 371). A good example of this occurred during a recent RPG session I participated in. One of the player characters wanted the other PCs to spend time helping him create a constitution for a township they had recently “acquired” in the game. Instead of asking the other characters a general macro-statement like “should we work on the document?” he said instead “here is my version of the document [reads document in character], what would you guys like to add to it?” In this way, the other characters were directed into the activity the persuasive player was interested in. This type of dual-oriented speech ironically relates to statements like “why are you so X?” which establishes a certain fact, X, that needs to be challenged by the person it is directed towards unless it is to be accepted or ignored. [TOC]

“Every group develops a culture which I have termed its idioculture (Fine 1979). An idioculture is a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs peculiar to an interacting group to which members refer and employ as the basis of further interaction. Members recognize that they share experiences and that these experiences can be referred to with the expectation that they will be understood by other members, and can be employed to construct a shared narrative of discourse (Hollingshead 1939: 816). Gaming groups are particularly amenable to analysis as idiocultures in that they explicitly deal with the construction of shared culture through game events. Gaming groups develop a culture for members within the game itself, and simultaneously as a friendship group they develop traditions. These two levels are not isolated from each other – the within-game cultural content can affect the friendship culture and vice-versa. Huizinga (1959: 12) asserts that playing together, through the development of shared community, promotes the establishment of a social group even after the game.” (Fine 1983: 136)

     One of the more perplexing, and intimidating aspects of engaging in a role playing game for the first time is that your usual frames just don’t work; you don’t know the rules – and there are a lot of rules – you don’t as of yet understand how the game is going to work – yes, the gamemaster told you it was like a more-flexible Choose Your Own Adventure Book [45] where there are no predetermined, limiting choices and everyone co-constructs the story – but what does that mean in practice? Frames that might commonly help you to move through and interpret American culture are relevant, but don’t quite prepare you for much of the local action. If you have engaged in role playing games before, the frames you built during those performances help a great deal, but still there is something different, something context specific going on that is well described as idioculture. What are some of the more typical aspects of this metaphoric domain that I will (most certainly) encounter during my fieldwork?

     The most common idiocultural feature of tabletop role-playing would be the tendency to make allusions and references to group histories. These occur both in and above the game (Fine 1983: 139), often spontaneously and without any metapragmatic warning. Fine explains that…

“Game events can be meaningfully referred to by the group as a gaming history develops. While a historical focus applies to all groups to some extent (McBride 1975), in gaming groups this historical focus is particularly salient, because the game events continue from week to week, and the gaming episode is seen as having a history of its own. Episodes in which characters act humorously or successfully overcome obstacles are recalled. The existence of the group history distinguishes group members from outsiders (Bales 1970: 153-154)” (Fine 1983: 139)

     Fine identifies three “classes” of common references, discussed in the text below…

References to previous game encounters are common, and may have a “referential afterlife” of months (Goffman 1976: 289). These references fall into three classes: (1) reference to the actions of the entire party – particularly to the party’s overcoming an impossible obstacle, thus indicating group solidarity; (2) reference to an attempt by a player to receive attention in a game; and (3) teasing reference to an embarrassing or incompetent action by a player in a game.” (Fine 1983: 139)

     It has been my experience that references to attention-grabs do not usually occur unless the gamemaster is unskilled in managing and balancing the focus of the game on all the characters, or in the rare instance where a player is simply too verbose or wants to dominate the action. Teasing references are fairly common, and one crucial aspect of this type of reference is its power to enculturate players into “proper” ways of playing [46]. As gamemaster I routinely recount amusing tales in which characters die in order to point out (particularly to new players) certain styles of play that are unproductive. Other types of group-historic references to what Fine distinguishes as gaming culture (1983: 138) might include stories which characterize the gamemaster’s mood or style or which focus on specific aspects of the gamemaster’s overall story or make-believe world (Fine 1983: 144-152). For example, if you were a new player at one of my gaming sessions, someone might tell you “Make sure you don’t piss off any ironfangs.” Notice how “you” is used here; it sort of refers to both you the player and you as your character all at once [47]. What is an ironfang? You would definitely want to know and might feel lost at the moment of the warning; it is a commonly encountered species of humanoid in my game world that will often be found serving the collective fantasy as an antagonist. This knowledge is so taken for granted that most players would not even think to describe it.

     Another daunting aspect of idioculture lies in the jargon that permeates role playing generally. Some of this jargon would be readily familiar to any experienced role player and does not necessarily fall under the category of idioculture: d4, critical hit, initiative, XP, and so forth [48]. There is, however, a significant array of terms that would be too context specific to find them outside of the group which authored them. Among the people I role play with, some examples would be: dice! [accompanied by the gamemaster quickly pointing at some one], pulling a Josh, elf-arrow-machinegun, cast Dink’s and “there’s no reason for violence” to name a few [49]. The last quote derives from a gaming context my current group has no familiarity with outside of my constant descriptions of it; they are fully aware of what it means nonetheless and outside of the game context the term occasionally comes up in normal conversation: it actually means to suddenly and without provocation launch an attack, and was used by a particular character to distract his opponent’s attention while secretly signaling to his allies to initiate hostile action.

     The role of idioculture can not be underestimated. Ethnographies of RPGs which ignore context-specific languaculture or which misinterpret local conditions as common to role-playing generally are simply lacking in validity. This project challenges the longstanding and outdated bit of dogmatic anthropological wisdom which advises against the study of one’s own culture on the grounds that one is likely to miss the more basic and obvious characteristics that would necessarily have to be encountered and explored by a newcomer. Since this research project intends to examine role playing games, and since these games often occur in small group settings where idioculture serves as a barrier of understanding, my strategy will be to include local gaming settings I am familiar with in the ethnographic scenes my thesis work will explore. As the methods section will demonstrate, I have included in the overall research design a means to account for and resist the taken-for-granted, difficult to articulate aspects of my familiarity with RPGs. I embrace my own experience. [TOC]

“Within the field of face-to-face interaction, Goffman (1961b: 96) proposed that a basic unit of study should be the “situated activity system”: a “somewhat closed, self-compensating, self-terminating circuit of interdependent actions.” Such a framework has close affinity with Gumperez’s (1972:16-17) sociolinguistic notion of “speech event,” an interactive unit above the level of speech act “which is to the analysis of verbal interaction what the sentence is to grammar.” Both Goffman and Gumperez formulate a unit of analysis which emphasizes the interactive meshing of the actions of separate participants into joint social projects.

The analysis of activities is also relevant to general theoretical issues posed in the anthropological study of culture. Goodenough (1981:102-103) has argued that the proper locus for the study of culture is not a society but rather situated activities. For Goodenough, culture consists of an underlying body of structures, practices, and procedures, much like the grammar of a language. From such a perspective, people are not “members” of a culture any more than they are “members” of a language. Moreover, the structures members of a society use to build appropriate events change in different activities. Individuals thus have access to a variety of different operating cultures. Insofar as this is the case, the notion of describing the culture of a group as a monolithic entity (e.g., black culture or American culture) is a chimera that distorts ethnographic practice more than it helps it. Rather, Goodenough argued, the proper locus for the study of culture is the local activities within which appropriate cultural structures are situated” (Goodwin 1990: 8-9)

     The tabletop role-playing games that I intend to participate in and examine during the proposed research are accurately described by all of the units of study mentioned above: they are perfect situated activity systems, speech events, joint social projects, and local activities. The ethnographic setting of a role-playing game is somewhat closed and bounded by roughly the start and end of the game (although significant interactions occur just prior to the event and sometimes after it). The actions of players are not restricted to the table or game area but are focused on its space; thus, a finite zone of interaction can be defined, a zone that is in fact self-compensating and self-terminating [50]. The focus of role-playing games on the verbal construction of shared fantasy – a joint social project – highlights the total performance as a speech event. Culture is what people do, and role-playing games involve a staggering array of interaction and complex verbal artistry that becomes its own social grammar – its own languaculture. Role players participating in any one game event are not, as Goodwin explains, “members” of an idioculture, but they might be familiar with the frames necessary to understand one small group’s interactions; they are not “members” of local role-playing culture, but they might have experience producing and interpreting local styles of play.

     These ideas have a variety of impacts on the proposed research. First, I will not be trying to uncover, understand, or describe any level of cultural abstraction associated with space. This necessarily means that I embrace a micro ethnographic or “activity system” focus, which is really all I can expect to do during a thesis project anyway. The relevance of the proposed project will lie in the insights it produces, in its creative use of existing theory, not in its predictive value. Moreover, since I reject the possibility that I could describe any type of role-playing culture, subculture or subsociety (Fine 1983) existing on its own, outside of actual RPG game events, and since I could not hope to locate, count, or estimate the number of gaming groups occurring in any bounded area, the concept of a sample size or sampling technique makes no sense in the context of the proposed research. Therefore I will not be concerned with generalizing my findings to anywhere or with the collection of demographic data. We already know that for specific historic reasons discussed in the background section, most people who participate in role-playing games are young-adult white males. This pattern is not especially relevant to the construction of shared fantasy during RPG speech events – any kind of human, so much as their vehicles through reality would allow, is able to creatively and effectively play the game.

     I want to emphasize that I do not reject the culture concept. Rather, I want to follow the path of Goffman, Gumperez, Goodenough, and Goodwin; I want to disassociate the concept of culture from space and reconnect it to practice and activity (Goodwin 1990: 9). Throughout this proposal I have used the metaphor of frames as a substitute for culture, as a way to account for the fact that people creatively co-construct situations, but that this construction stems from (and is guided by) certain pragmatic and aesthetic insights gained from practice and experience with these situations. Frames are used, composed, abandoned, modified and merged with other frames, they help us to understand what to expect in any given situational context; we get to decide if they work or if they fail [51]. The eighteen years of experience I have with role playing games has provided me with general role-playing frames that derive from links I have made between various individual games I have observed and participated in. The few years worth of experience I have had with the current gaming group I role-play with has provided me with context-specific frames which help me to both understand what I have crudely described as the group’s idioculture and to separate these embedded meanings from the more general RPG frames. The intended research will draw on both of these types of frames.

     The research design will employ the following ethnographic methods and innovative techniques: (1) participant observations of both familiar and unfamiliar role-playing game group sessions, (2) audio and video recordings of these sessions, meant to capture significant verbal and nonverbal communicative art that could not be adequately captured with fieldnotes alone during play, (3) the construction of a website devoted to, initially, this thesis project and, later, to an understanding of role-playing games generally, (4) the composition of a pre-ethnography meant to help account for the possible blinding-effects of my own familiarity with role-playing games, (5) an ongoing exploration of the relevant literature and (6) a potential single role-playing game session or series of role-playing game sessions conducted exclusively with the members of my thesis committee as a means to further familiarize them with the research topic. [TOC]

     My goal is to participate in as many local (Flagstaff Area) tabletop role-playing game groups as possible, preferably more than two but not more than ten. Research will also include participant observations of one non-local American tabletop RPG group so as to accommodate a comparative perspective. All research participants will be at least 18 years old (most likely they will be over the age of 24) and are highly unlikely, considering the demographic characteristics of the average gamer, to be considered a part of a “special population” as defined by the NAU IRB. As of 2/7/05 I have five prospective gaming groups which I could conduct research with. Group one, consisting of 5-8 players including myself, will take place in my own home during our regular Sunday afternoon sessions. I have been role-playing regularly (one every week or two, sessions lasting on average 12 hours or more) with this group for nearly four years. Two of the potential eight participants have only been playing in our group for a few months, and one of these players is relatively new to the game. Group two is composed of seven players (including myself) and meets regularly every Saturday at a local game store called Overlord Games. This group began as a pick-up session during the gamestore’s celebration of the 30th anniversary of Dungeons and Dragons (last October 16th), and has served as an interesting contrast to the style of gaming I am used to – which makes it of great interest to the thesis project. Groups three and four regularly meet near the Tri-State intersection of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, in the private homes of the players, approximately once every two weeks (or more). I have already discussed the possibility of conducting participant observations with these groups, who are eager to set up the logistics. My association with these groups is a consequence of a long-standing friendship with a player who games in both. Aside from my friendship with this player, I do not know the other participants in groups two and three; these groups are, with the exceptions of my friend, composed of four or more unique players. The last prospective group (thus far) is located in or around Gilroy, California: a long-standing friend of mine games in the area and has volunteered to let me participate in a few of his games. While I don’t have any specific details about this last group or any direct assurances that I can conduct research during their games (as I have in the other groups), it must be said that people who play RPGs seem unusually open to the idea of being a part of a research project. I can say with confidence that the majority of tabletop role-players want their pastime – their game-as-art form – to be examined and understood.

     It just so happens that each of the five prospective groups play variations of the same tabletop RPG – Dungeons and Dragons (2nd, 3rd, and 3.5 editions). Given this game’s popularity, I would not be surprised to find other prospective groups playing D & D as well. It is not my goal to focus exclusively on this game system: in fact, it might be best to explore as many game systems as possible. Since RPGs share a variety of core features, data taken in the context of one game system is still quite compatible to data taken in other game contexts.

     There is a unique methodological question faced by participant observations of role-playing game group sessions. Does it matter whether researches play or gamemaster these groups? There is insufficient ethnographic data available to know; the only social scientist who has conducted participant observations of role-playing games that I am aware of was, during his fieldwork, both a player and gamemaster (Fine 1983), as was the author of the other book-length discussion of RPGs I have read (Mackay 2001). One possible critique a researcher choosing to gamemaster or run a game session he or she were studying would be that it would lead to some sort of bias in the data. This bias would potentially result from the researcher having control of the game – as much as gamemasters alone have in shared fantasy. So much as I am interested in interactions, in types of performances and double-voiced discourse, this critique has no weight: no mater how the game is run people will perform various speech-related roles. So much as I am interested in adventures and gamemaster materials as bricolage, it would be best not to produce these texts, but there are many available texts in any one role-playing game that are not produced by the gamemaster. Following Fine’s lead, I will conduct participant observations as both a gamemaster and a player.

     An average game session in groups one and two lasts approximately 8-12 hours; assuming an average game session of 10 hours for all groups, one game played with each group 1-5 will consist of roughly 50 hours of role-playing. Since I expect to add other groups to my research pool and since I expect to game weekly in some of these groups, I can expect hundreds of hours of participant observations.

     It would be both distracting and inappropriate to record detailed notes during game play, but some fieldnotes will be taken throughout each session. Since I assume that the reflections and insights researchers gain from fieldwork fade rapidly as a function of time (Bernard 2000: 356), I will try to record notes as soon as possible after each game session. I will take every reasonable precaution to prevent fieldnotes from being inspected by anyone except myself: at home I have a locked desk where all research materials will reside. [TOC]

     Since I am interested in capturing the subtle and complex non-verbal interactions of the research participants as much as I am interested in their actual speech, it is necessary that I make video recordings as I conduct participant observations. Given that I expect to participate in hundreds of hours of role-playing games, I will videotape only small samples of each game session [52].

     The video recorder to be used is a Sony DCR-TRV140 8mm Camcorder. I will set this instrument up on a tripod prior to the beginning of each game in such a way that the field of view covers most of the game space. I will explain to the players that the camera will remain off until I activate it using the camera’s remote control, which I will do from time to time as interesting game events and interactions take place. If any of the players object to the presence of the camera I will not use it during that particular session. I estimate that perhaps 20-30 minutes of video recordings will be gathered during each game. This body of data will not be immediately transcribed, but will be recorded on my Sony Vaio home computer (which interfaces smoothly with the camcorder) and converted to DVD format so that I can review it as needed during the eventual process of ethnographic data review and pattern-finding. Eventually, as I come to focus my attention on specific aspects of RPGs, I will reduce the video-clips into shorter segments with more specific themes. The only time I will transcribe video clips will be (1) when and if it becomes useful to do so for the purposes of analysis, and (2) when I compose the final micro-ethnography, which must predominantly take the form of typed text. My preferred style of analysis involves a process whereby patterns and domains are encouraged to emerge from repeated exposure to the data – this is best accommodated by reviewing as much of the actual game as possible as opposed to a reduction of this reality. Thus, instead of manipulating and reviewing one-moment’s interpretation of RPG action – transcribed text – I will be sorting and coding detail-rich and open ended moments of role-playing in the form of video files [53].

     Throughout the process of data acquisition I will draw upon the insights offered by Duranti’s Linguistic Anthropology and its Appendix: Practical tips on recording interaction (1997: 340-347), which includes a variety of ways to reduce the number of common problems students encounter during their fieldwork. Ethical considerations of informed consent will take absolute priority: as Duranti explains, “Be sensitive to people’s reactions and expectations. Always explain what you are doing, why you are recording, and ask permission” (1997: 344). Considering the popularity of science fiction and fantasy fiction (the success of the recent Lord of the Rings films), considering the decline since the late 1980’s in stigma associated with participating in role-playing games and considering that there is absolutely no evidence that role-playing games are harmful in any way (Lancaster 1993: 77-78), the ethical dangers involved with videotaping game sessions is essentially nonexistent.

     Duranti argues that “One should record as much as possible” (1997: 344), and I agree. Complete audio recordings will be made of each game session to serve as one more avenue of data gathering and as a backup for the videotaping procedures using a Panasonic Slim Line AC/Battery tape recorder and a Radio Shack uni-directional dynamic microphone. As will be the case with the video records, audio tapes will not be transcribed in their entirety, but rather selectively according to their utility to the ongoing research. I will use a 4 channel mixer to transfer audio tape data to CD format and then store and reduce this data (as research continues) on my personal computer.

     Using both the Sony DCR-TRV140 8mm Camcorder and an hp photosmart 435 digital camera, I will take still images of the game spaces I encounter during my fieldwork to supplement the audio and video records. This method will focus on the artifacts players use as they role-play (usually scattered around the game table) such as polyhedral dice, maps, drawings, rule books, miniatures, and snacks. Some of these artifacts, such as gamemaster handouts, will be collected as well. [TOC]

     According to Mary Bucholtz, transcripts reflect the orientation of the researcher; they are more subjective than empirical. Before we embark on transforming reality into transcripts we should carefully consider who our potential audiences are, what our research goals are, and how our transcription preferences impact the conclusions we draw from these texts (1999: 1439-1465) [54]. Given that the primary audience of the proposed research (aside from the thesis committee) is likely to consist of role-players with little to no familiarity with linguistic anthropology, transcripts which sacrifice readability for the accuracy of, say, Conversation Analysis [55] will not be as well received and may be ignored. Cluttering an otherwise interesting transcript of a role-playing event with precise timing notation, labeled stops/breaths, and phonetic spellings would not only detract from the aesthetic character of the event’s record, it would focus on details that are not of theoretical interest to me. What is of theoretical interest, aside from the basic content of player speech acts and the game itself, is the way in which role-players perform their roles, animate their shared fantasy, and interact with one another. The following preliminary transcription conventions [56] will focus on these aspects…

     I intend to use these conventions and employ a “film script format” during transcription, one which will read like an instruction manual for constructing what seems to be the most important aspects of a given role-playing game scene. This format will label distinct recorded events [60] with line numbers, which will facilitate analysis. Abbreviations and idioculturally charged words will be defined at the bottom of the transcript, before specific endnotes. An example of what my transcripts will look like is given below.

     Once the proposed research attains thesis committee and IRB approval I will compose a web site specifically devoted to the thesis project. This web site will contain the following elements:

1. The thesis prospectus, so that research participants (and the world) can, at any time, examine the layout and goals of the project.
2. A running timeline of work I complete, so that my committee can easily evaluate the project; unlike other projects, the IRB will be able to keep exact track of the proposed research through the web site.
3. A discussion board devoted to the study of role playing games in which research participants (and anyone else) can discuss my tentative findings, the project, or any other topic relevant to the study of role-playing games. This could be a potential ethical risk, and I will take great care to not post sensitive information, but at the same time it adds to the ethical strength of the project in that research participants will be able to comment on my own research practices.
4. A glossary of role-playing terms. There are other such listings on the internet, but none of them factor in the role of idioculture; this one will be the exception.
5. A quotes section. RPG participants love to record humorous or appropriate quotes from their games, and this section will contain any that people want to offer. My gaming group records quotes all the time and I will list the more interesting ones I encounter during fieldwork here. Since these bits of text will be listed “in-character” there is little danger of confidentiality being breached; only people who participated in the source game session will be able to link quotes to actual players. Even if these quotes were linked to actual people, it is likely to have little impact, as they deal specifically with aspects of the shared fantasy.
6. A narrative section. This will be similar to the quotes section but will contain stories from actual role-playing sessions; these will be submitted by anyone who cares to contribute and are likely to cover such topics as humorous game events, character fatalities, and dramatic scenes.
7. My Bibliography. This will facilitate future research [61].
8. The Pre-Ethnography. This text is described below.
9. The Master’s Thesis! The final write-up will be posted to the web site so that everyone – research participants and the world – can benefit. Dissemination should be a part of every research design. [TOC]

     Throughout prior semesters I have devoted various course assignments to the partial composition of a mini-ethnography of role-playing games taken from the archaeology of my prior experiences. This final document, when completed, will serve as a potential source of data. The process of writing it has made me increasingly aware of the ways in which my familiarity with role-playing games can serve as a type of barrier in that my descriptions are often difficult to understand from the point of view of people who have never participated in RPGs. The Pre-Ethnography is a way to work through these types of challenges and is absolutely essential to the thesis project – it allows me test whether or not my ideas and perspectives are readily interpreted. I will include this document in the web page. [TOC]

     I have thus far thoroughly reviewed approximately sixty academic works prior to the composition of this proposal; there is much yet to be examined. I include this process in the methods section for two reasons. First of all, it is perhaps the most important method and should not be overlooked. Moreover, the notes I have taken thus far on the readings which discuss role-playing sometimes include more thoughts on the ways in which my previous RPG experiences support, resist, or link with the work I am reading. These thoughts are just as valid a source of data as anything I am going to encounter during fieldwork. [TOC]

     I would like to formally invite the thesis committee to participate in a role-playing game session at their convenience. Unless someone on the committee objects, I would be happy to serve as gamemaster in one of the following game systems: Dungeons and Dragons of any edition, Palladium System’s Heroes Unlimited (a comic book genre RPG set in the near future), or Star Wars the Role-Playing Game. The best way to get a feel for my topic is to jump in and try it, and I am certain that the committee will have a good time. This trial session could become a part of the ongoing thesis research if the committee is willing. [TOC]

[1]: I am making the assumption that if an author can not adequately describe what a role-playing game is, that author is unfamiliar with role-playing in general. A good example of a “phantasmal” description of role-playing offered by Douse and McManus in the text below.

“Fantasy-Role-playing Games (FRPGs) have become increasingly popular over the past 20 years, following the creation in 1974 of the game Dungeons and Dragons (Butterfield, Parker & Honigmann, 1982; Gygax, 1979), Games are characterized by a set of fantastic individuals, often derived from quasi-mediaeval myths, whose personalities are adopted by the players. The gods, demons and other supernatural beings compete for power, influence and resources. Players control one or more characters which interact with other players’ characters, precise rules describing the outcome of interactions…” (1993: 505).

While the first two lines are accurate, the authors do not seem to understand what they are describing; at the very least they could have addressed the inherent heterogeneity the term FRPG involves. The most glaring error in the text above concerns the statement “precise rules describing the outcome of interactions;” role-playing games are not games of Risk, when characters interact rules often do not have anything to do with what results from these interactions, unless they take the form of combat, in which case there are usually quite a few rules involved. However, these rules are not “precise” in any sense and derive as much from tradition and on the spot decisions of the gamemaster as they do from printed words in rule books.

One of the most insightful description of a role-playing game in the academic literature, aside from Fine’s book-length treatment, is offered by Kurt Lancaster in the text below…

“All role-playing games manifest several unique qualities. A moderator, called the gamemaster, presents a step-by-step, plotted story to the players. These adventures, as they are sometimes called, can take place in many different settings, ranging from a medieval fantasy world to starships in deep space. Each player adopts a character to use to interact with other player’s characters as they progress through the scenario. These characters – being individuals in a make-believe world – are unique, possessing qualities, skills and occupations that may be different from the players themselves. The gamemaster also plays the role of all the characters that the players meet in the story. In fact, the gamemaster progresses the players through the plot by using these “non-player characters” in much the same way that a novelist uses characters that the hero meets in a novel. In the role-playing game, the gamemaster gives these non-player characters a purpose, and adjusts their actions according to what the players do with their own characters. The choices that the players make are open-ended but are influenced (or guided) by what the gamemaster says in response to a player’s decision. The scenario is usually over when the players have moved their characters through the story in completing their goal, although this may last several sessions of play. The players may use their same characters in other adventures that the gamemaster creates. As they do this, the characters increase their reputation and power in the gamemaster’s make-believe world. Traditionally, all action during game-play is presented orally.” (1993: 68). [back up]

[2]: While actually playing RPGs is the best path to understanding these games, techniques which include non-participant observations (direct observations of games or videotapes of games) are nearly as good, as (Stromberg: 1999) demonstrates. [back up]

[3]: In any one particular game, the person acting as gamemaster is said to be gamemastering or GM-ing. Synonymous with GM is DM, a term deriving from the game Dungeons and Dragons referring to a Dungeon Master. One can also DM or be DM-ing, just as it is possible to “referee” a game or to be a referee, but this last variation is somewhat antiquated. I will primarily use the term gamemaster or GM since this is (I believe) the term most commonly used throughout the gaming industry. It is interesting to note that when role-players discuss RPGs they will often use GM instead of DM as the later term carries with it a history of negative semantic associations. [back up]

[4]: The web site http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/continuity is the source of some of these ideas and is highly relevant to this discussion. [back up]

[5]: Of course, there are role-playing games in which the shared fantasy is less rigidly defined. For example, in the role-playing game (RPG) Toon, the players take on the role of cartoon characters who are, for example, expected to pull anvils (and anything else players can think of) out of their pockets. However, even in Toon there are conventions and idioms which guide the cartoon exploits of characters. [back up]

[6]: These rules are almost never strictly interpreted nor are they all inclusive – role paying game sessions frequently move beyond the scope of the rules. Note that when people who participate in role-playing games (role players) refer to “the rules” they might be referring to the “official” rules one can buy for a particular role-playing game as well as the “house rules” a gaming group develops over time. [back up]

[7]: Players, like professional athletes, will from time to time protest the decisions of the referee, and arguments are possible. Sometimes, differing takes on rule interpretations can lead to interesting seminar-style debates which enrich the game. Other times, game ending arguments can erupt. Players like to know how the gamemaster will generally conduct or “run” the game so that the actions of their characters reflect good in-game decisions. Role-playing games need only be mostly harmonious to function. [back up]

[8]: http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Plot describes a bildungsroman as “…a novel which traces the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social development and growth of the main character (usually) from childhood to maturity.” David Copperfield is listed as an example of such a novel. Ideally, (and especially in gaming groups where character development is emphasized) characters will become more interesting as they pass through game sessions and acquire histories of their own – they grow and develop as would a character in a novel of this sort. [back up]

[9]: I do not mean to convey the sense that everyone in a particular gaming group is likely to have similar takes on “adequate” and “fun.” In fact, it is often the case that players have radically divergent takes on what styles of role-playing are fun from moment to moment, and gamemasters often run games that players do not enjoy. [back up]

[10]: By the second edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons the basic idea was the same: “Let’s assume that since you’re reading this , you are, or plan to be, a Dungeon Master.” (Cook 1989: 3)…

“You are one of a very special group of people: AD&D game Dungeon Masters. Your job is not easy. It requires wit, imagination, and the ability to think and act extemporaneously. A really good Dungeon Master is essential to a good game. The Dungeon Master’s Guide is reserved for Dungeon Masters. Discourage players from reading this book and certainly don’t let players consult it during the game, for two reasons. First, as long as players don’t know exactly what’s in the Dungeon Master’s Guide, they’ll always wonder what you know that they don’t know. It doesn’t matter whether you have secret information; even if you don’t, as long as the players think you do, their sense of mystery and uncertainty is maintained. Second, this book does contain essential rules that are not discussed in the Player’s Handbook. Some of these the players will learn quickly during play: special combat situations, the cost of hiring NPCs, etc. Others, however, cover more esoteric or mysterious situations: the nature of artifacts and other magical items for example. This information is in the Dungeon Master’s Guide so the DM can control the players’ (and hence the characters’) access to it. In a fantasy world, as in this world, information is power. What the characters don’t know can hurt them (or lead them on a merry chase to nowhere). While the players aren’t your enemies, they aren’t your allies either, and you aren’t obligated to give anything away for nothing…” (Cook 1989: 7). [back up]

[11]: See wordspy.com for an explanation… [back up]

[12]: A recent E-mail conversation I was having on this very topic 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
>that "character knowledge" should be separate from "player knowledge," an
>idiom we have no doubt heard a thousand times. I was thinking of the ways
>in which this idiom/ideology gets applied as I role play and I came up with
>the following rough domains...
>**personal relationships in the real world should not carry over into the
>game: Thus, I should be just as willing to wack my wife's character as I
>am any other.
Agreed, of course it might be interesting to build the relationship or the
exact opposite of the relationship into the game. (wife&hubby are mates in
the game/wife&hubby are enemies)
>**knowledge of game mechanics: in character, the ideal implies that we
>should avoid having our PCs min/max, choose weaponry based solely on their
>damage potential and so on. This also relates to statements like "Arineon,
>cast magic missile at the wizard! It has a casting time of 1!" and so on.
I have issues w/ this one because it depends on how it's stated... Arineon knows
which of his spells is the quickest to cast, and that he needs to hit that other
wizard fast before he gets his spell off. Likewise, Gunther the Impregnible
always uses Tivarian Battle-axe as opposed to his Fenorian Whip because he
likes the way it Really Tears Into his opponents.
>**direct reference to the real world: in character the ideal implies that
>we should avoid contemporary/pop cultural [?] idioms such as "my dwarf
>busts a cap in his ass," "listen up hippie..." and so on. This also
>applies to directly referring to technology, science knowledge, Marxism,
>real world figures and so on.
This is a good one... our knowledge of physics, political science, astronomy.
I know a dwarf and a half-elf who knew way too much about govt. ;)
>It is interesting to consider what we try to edit out and what slips under
>our role-playing radar. It is, of course, impossible to abandon our
>respective languacultures, our familiar ruts of perception so to speak,
>but I think we might fool ourselves into thinking we CAN sometimes.
>What do you think? What violations of player/character knowledge
>separation are most noticeable, and which are less noticeable? To what
>extent does the general American unfamiliarity with cultural
>relativism/constructivism play a role here?
Well, from a direct historical standpoint we're way off. Concept of love was
out, arranged marriages in, people wouldn't ask some strange adventuring
party to handle their problems, if the local baron couldn't handle it he'd send
to the count/duke/etc. The way we play medieval culturally is more like the
wild west. [back up]

[13]: While I was wandering through the internet doing research for this prospectus, I encountered a web site which contained an unusual RPG in which the rules explicitly state that the gamemaster is playing against the players, and can “win” if the characters all die in the game. See http://www.logatroth.com/faq-logatroth.htm#FAQ5 ; the exact text is below…

An Ending - According to the authors of AD&D, winning and losing "doesn't apply to role-playing because no one 'wins' in a role-playing game." In the Saga of Logatroth, once the Bishop of Logatroth has been terminated, the game is over. The Players of those characters that survived the final battle with the Bishop of Logatroth are considered the winners of that particular saga. On the other hand, if all the Players use their characters foolishly and get themselves slaughtered in the final battle with the Bishop of Logatroth, the Referee is considered the winner of the saga. Once the winners have been declared, it is time to get a different person to play the Referee, roll up new characters, and start the saga all over again in a different tribal-state than the first time. [back up]

[14]: One of the many “gaming supplements” (which usually refers to sourcebooks which give inspiration or to more elaborate or context specific rule books) for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition explains…

“Imagine that during the course of the game, the player characters have just barely survived the climactic encounter with the Baron Skorditch, Wizard-lord of the Kroolons, escaped with the cumbersome princess Natasia and discovered the lost secret of double-entry bookkeeping. All that stands between them and glory is 100 feet of corridor. Unfortunately, the DM had decided long ago (more likely at 3 A.M. the night before) that this corridor would be filled with deadly Snargon gas. Since none of the players thinks to check for traps, the DM secretly makes the die rolls for them. All-too-suddenly, the hot die rolling that allowed the PCs to so handedly overcome their earlier obstacles goes sour. No one detects the gas. If the party continues, they will all die! And, of course, they continue. While the DM should not feel that he must protect his precious plot lines or make sure that the desired outcome of the story takes place, he does have a responsibility to his players, he owes them a good time. Having the entire party wiped out as the denouement of an adventure is rarely considered a good time. In situations like these, it’s OK for the DM to cheat. Throughout these chapters on DMing, it will be stressed time and time again that the DM must remain impartial. He should not take the side of the monsters against the PCs or side with the player characters in their battle against their fiendish foes. So now we tell the DM to cheat! What should the fair DM do in such a situation?” (Jaquays and Connors 1990: 32).

The author goes on to suggest that fun overshadows impartiality, and that in this situation it would be best not to kill the characters off – especially since the players were having a good time. [back up]

[15]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game is this inspiration for this line. Specifically, the text below…

“At their core, these games are a form of interactive and cooperative storytelling. Whereas cinema, novels and television shows are passive, RPGs engage the participants actively, allowing them to simultaneously be audience and author. A example of this difference could be the classic scene in a horror film when a doomed character ventures alone into the basement to fix a broken fuse. The audience experiences dramatic irony and says, "Don't go down there!" because they know the monster is lying in wait. In an RPG, the player may choose what to do about the broken fuse. The cooperative aspect of RPGs comes in two forms. The first is that the players are generally not competing against each other. Most sports, board games and card games place players in opposition, with the goal of becoming the winner. An RPG is not usually zero-sum game; the only way to actually lose is to not enjoy the game. The second form of cooperation is that all of the players are writing the story together, as a team. At the end of an RPG session the events that transpired could be written into a book that would tell a story written by all of its participants.” [back up]

[16]: These names do in fact come hot off the press of my consciousness. In some gaming groups, silly names are in fact the norm, and the hobbit might end up as “PorkChop the oblivious” or “Jellyhugs;” character name choice is too context dependant to discuss generally and has much to do with the theme of the role-playing game. In Toon for example, to have a serious name might be inappropriate. In other gaming groups a clever name might index a clever player. In the RPGs I participate in, player character names come in all varieties but are usually created with the theme of the game in mind. [back up]

[17]: In one of my own gaming groups the players tried rotating the position of gamemaster from session to session as a means to “share the work” so to speak – it was not a successful experiment [An unwritten rule during this process was that none of us should favor our own characters while gamemastering]. Once it became my turn to tell the story as referee I found the developing shared fantasy to be too interesting to relinquish; as there were aspects of the plot and fantasy environment I prepared which the players had not discovered or encountered during the first session, it just didn’t feel right to simply reveal it all to the next player who was going to GM – it would ruin their fun and mine. Part of the enjoyment a gamemaster gets from the practice is similar to the feeling of watching someone open a wrapped gift you have put some time into selecting; changing the roles of gift giver and receiver on Christmas morning might be interesting but would simply be too unusual to enjoy! [back up]

[18]: A full discussion of bricolage appears in the theory section of this prospectus. The web site http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricolage explains that...

Bricolage, from the French bricoler "to tinker" or "to fiddle", is that language's equivalent of the English phrase "do-it-yourself". In art, bricolage is a technique where works are constructed from various materials available or on hand, and is seen as a characteristic of postmodern works. These materials may be mass-produced or "junk". See also: Merz, polystylism, collage. In biology the biologist François Jacob uses the term bricolage to describe the apparently cobbled-together character of much biological structure, and views it as a consequence of the evolutionary history of the organism. (Molino 2000, p.169) In cultural studies bricolage is used to mean the processes by which people acquire objects from across social divisions to create new cultural identities. In particular, it is a feature of subcultures such as the punk movement. Here, objects that posess one meaning (or no meaning) in the dominant culture are acquired and given a new, often subversive meaning. For example, the safety pin became a form of decoration in punk culture. [back up]

[19]: Fine explains that “Arneson and E. Gary Gygax at that time were members of the Castles and Crusades society, an informal organization whose members shared an interest in medieval warfare.” (1983: 14). [back up]

[20]: Before the rules for D & D were play tested, Gygax co-authored Chainmail: Rules for medieval miniatures, which was first published in 1971. While there is some disagreement over the impact this had on D & D, Gygax at least emphasizes its importance. Consider the following excerpt…

“Chainmail. The progenitor of Dungeons & Dragons. Ostensibly a straight-wargaming rulebook for miniatures, its "Fantasy Supplement" sparked a phenomenon Whether the "Fantasy Supplement" to Chainmail formed the basis of D&D is a matter of some disagreement between D & D's co-creators, Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Arneson claims in Heroic Worlds that the influence of Chainmail in the development of the Original D & D rules was in the Combat Matrix only (i.e., giving RPG characters and monsters "hard statistics"). According to Arneson, Chainmail bears little resemblance to D&D whatsoever; "not a hit point, character class, level, or armor class" anywhere. Furthermore, Arneson states that a series of naval combat scenarios, "The Braunsteins", were the critical foundation of his Blackmoor campaign, and later, D & D. Gygax disagrees. In Best of Dragon Volume 1, he notes: "...when the whole appeared in Chainmail, Dave (Arneson) began using the fantasy rules for his campaign and he reported a number of these actions to the C & C Society by way of articles. I thought that this usage was quite interesting and a few months later when Dave came to visit me we played a game of his amended Chainmail fantasy campaign. A few weeks after his visit, I received 18 or so handwritten pages of rules and notes pertaining to his campaign and I immediately began work on a brand new manuscript. About three weeks later, I had some 100 typewritten pages, and we began serious play testing... Dungeons & Dragons had been born." Gygax quickly goes on to say that Arneson was only given co-authorship of D&D for his "valuable idea kernels", and that D&D bears little resemblance to the Blackmoor campaign. Further, as contributor Bruce Robertson notes, "I don't see how you can argue that D&D doesn't draw heavily on Chainmail... 'fireball', 'lightning bolt', 'conjure elemental', 'phantasmal force', and all the core monsters are in the 1971 edition -- along with an armor sequence that exactly matches the one in D&D." The argument between Gygax and Arneson, we believe, stems from a lawsuit Arneson brought against TSR in 1979, demanding royalties from the AD&D line of products. Arneson was listed as the co-author of the Original D&D rules, and as such, he believed he was owed a portion of the proceeds from all things derived from that work. It was certainly not advantageous for Arneson to claim inspiration from Chainmail, a product authored by Gygax! The outcome of that lawsuit was never made public, but rumor has it that Arneson received a lump sum in exchange for ceasing legal action. Regardless to the degree Chainmail guided Arneson in his campaign, the influence of this little yellow booklet on the eventual development of D&D is undeniable.”

This text derives from http://www.acaeum.com/DDIndexes/SetPages/Chainmail.html And has been stylistically edited to accommodate this format (without changing its meaning). I was unable to locate any mention of Chainmail’s influence in the academic literature, although Fine discusses a lawsuit and rift between Arneson and Gygax (Fine 1983: 255, endnote 11) that the author of the web-text above cites as the reason why Arneson refutes the influence of Chainmail. In the mythology of the “gaming community” (or rather the collective consciousness of people who are experienced role players – such as I), it is widely known/suspected that Chainmail was the “grandfather” of D & D. [back up]

[21]: I do not have access to this rare text; see the source of these insights, http://www.acaeum.com/DDIndexes/MiscPages/OutSurvival.html for a more complete description and follow the Original D&D hyperlink for more thoughts on the connection. Yes, drawing on the web for insight is problematic, but that acaeum.com is devoted to documenting the history and value of gaming accessories (as opposed to random banter) adds to its credibility. I trust its content. http://members.aol.com/wergames/ahoutdor.htm Has a nice image of the game contents and briefly discusses its origins – it was possibly created on a dare. The author of this site also explains that: “The other rumor I've heard about Outdoor Survival is that it remained in print as long as it did because the original Dungeons and Dragons rules suggested using an Outdoor Survival board as a campaign map.” Apparently, unless players wanted to use the “optional” combat rules of this edition of D & D they would also need Chainmail to play. [back up]

[22]: Most of the Avalon Hill war games used what are referred to as hex maps, which are simply maps divided into adjacent hexagonal divisions. See http://mywebpages.comcast.net/thinlines/hexmaps/ for some examples… [back up]

[23]: http://www.gameroom.com/gamebits/RULES/Outdoor_Survival_Rules.html explains that…

“OUTDOOR SURVIVAL is a simulation of the essential conditions for staying alive when unprotected man is beset by his environment. It recreates real world conditions of the wilderness, and places trained and untrained people in emergency situations. The players have varying abilities to make the necessary decisions for survival. This is done through a number of scenario situations of increasing complexity, which state the abilities of the Player(s) to survive, and their objectives.

Each scenario contains a “To Win” section explaining the goal of that particular game. These may be solo (for one person) or competitive (for more than one player). Each turn in the game represents one day; each hexagon on the mapboard represents a width of five kilometers (three miles).

OUTDOOR SURVIVAL is actually five different games. LOST is the “basic” game in which you must get out of the wilderness before lack of food and water ends your survival ability. In SURVIVAL you must get across a large wilderness area before your opponent. In SEARCH you must find someone who’s lost before the other search parties do. In RESCUE you must not only find the lost party, but by using your survival skills, get them out of the wilderness. In PURSUE you must, as the escapee, get out of the wilderness into a neutral country or, as the pursuer capture the escapee. Or, in an adaptation of this scenario, one or more players can take the part of hunters while one player assumes the role of their quarry.” [back up]

[24]: This text has been summarized by several authors (see Lancaster 1993, or http://ptgptb.org/0001/history1.html for example) and is an essential part of the history of RPGs. Note that FRP refers to Fantasy Role Playing, a role playing game with a fantasy theme (such as Dungeons and Dragons). [back up]

[25]: The term languaculture derives from Language Shock, by Michael Agar (1994: 60). The intent of languaculture is to unite the semantic divide between language and culture into one concept, since neither can truly (or functionally) exist out of the context of the other. [back up]

[26]: See http://www.alteringtime.com/features/misc/?p=baggins for the complete video! A must see… [back up]

[27]: The gigantic elephants adorned with howdahs which stampede through The Battle of the Pelennor Fields, in Tolkien’s The Return of the King. [back up]

[28]: Fine argues that “war games attempt to preserve the strategy and competitive excitement of battle without the personal hazards by simulating the strategy of battle more or less explicitly. These games have been traced to the lower valley of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates valley in the third millennium B.C. (Murray 1952: 229)” (1983: 8). What forms did these games take? We are left to guess… [back up]

[29]: Actually, this statement is misleading. Go is the Japanese version of the Chinese game Wei-Chi or Weiqi and is far older (perhaps as old as the than the earliest known forms of Chess (which date to around)…Furthermore, that these games were later metaphorically associated with war does not mean that they were originally intended as war games – in fact, they may derive from religious practices or divination. [back up]

[30]: Fine notes that had the Japanese followed the predictive advise of their war games, they might not have lost the battle of Midway. See (Fine 1983: 253-254). [back up]

[31]: While Fine avoids the topic of race like the plague he describes the typical gamer as follows…

Describing the “typical” gamer by a single example is impossible, probably more misleading that instructive. However, we may reach certain tentative conclusions about this subsociety by focusing on the hard-core gamer. This person is male, unmarried, and in his early to mid-twenties; he has read deeply in science fiction, fantasy, and history; he has completed college and may have attended graduate school for some time; he believes that he has a lively imagination; he either has a job commensurate with his skills or has decided to live as best he can with a low-paying job for the present, planning to look for a more appropriate job later; he often has strong feelings about war, either as a former member of the armed forces or as a confirmed pacifist; finally, he disregards many of the normative requirements of conventional society, feeling a need to concentrate on his own interests without regard to the expectations of others. Having drawn this picture we must not forget that a population’s variance is as important as its central tendency.” (1983: 47).

Bucholtz explains that: “Science-fiction and fantasy fandom has a long history in the United States, dating back to the 1940’s and earlier (Warner, 1969). Although largely populated by white middle-class teenagers and young adults, fan culture encompasses both genders, and extends far beyond the United States; fandom is a global phenomenon.” (2001: 229) I might point out that there are more than two genders; that fan culture encompasses both genders is interesting, but that could mean 1 male (I think she means sex not gender) and a billion females. It may well be that in LARP there are more balanced gender ratios, or Bucholtz just does not want to discuss the over presence of male gamers. [back up]

[32]: This is but one possible interpretation; an alternate take on color symbolism in Tolkien (which rejects the possibility of a racist but not ethnocentrist interpretation) can be found at http://www.inklingbooks.com/inklingblog/C1886987029/E776113974/ [back up]

[33]: The amount of homogenous heroes seem to replicate geometrically throughout time as they appear in increasing numbers of fantasy creative collages; each successive usage, each instance where the dichotomies of Tolkien’s text are reproduced reinforces the potential segregating impact of his work. [back up]

[34]: Fine’s next paragraph, listed below, should have been cited (or at least mentioned) by Bucholtz considering her article’s focus…

“The style of talk is also significant. Although several of these games are grounded in medieval romance, in which ornate, flowery language was expected, most of the talk of characters is mundane. This does not mean that players never use flowery language; they do. However, this style of language is used infrequently to add atmosphere to the game, and even experienced players do not use it regularly. Indeed, flowery language as a counterpoint to the natural language of players is used as a joke to suggest the dichotomy between the fantasy frame and the natural order of everyday life…” (Fine 1983: 214). [back up]

[35]: I will address some of the discrepancies below, but the most glaring misrepresentation lies in the idea that tabletop RPGs are characterized by their board game-like status. Bucholtz seems to have confused RPGs with the game Hero’s Quest, a board game where playing pieces that resemble fantasy heroes move around a dungeon and whose actions are in fact “…determined by rolling dice and…restricted to the game grid” (Bucholtz 2001: 231). [back up]

[36]: Bucholtz explains that “As a development from earlier tabletop role-playing games, LARPs combine elements of play and improvisational performance. Player characters, or PCs, physically move through the game world, and the action is furthered through encounters with non-player characters, or NPCs, who populate the game setting. The purpose is not to win, but also, and just as importantly, to interact in a rich and consistent game world through the use of props, sets, costumes, dialogue appropriate to one’s role.” (2001: 233). Notice the dichotomy she establishes between limited-to-the-game-grid tabletop role playing games as non-performative and the more advanced, “rich and consistent” LARP setting. She seems to confuse the perspective of her informants as general fact. Is there some degree of tension between people who prefer live-action role-play and those who prefer tabletop RPGs? The people I role-play with see live-action role-playing games as limiting and strange, and the reverse perspective seems to exist as well. [back up]

[37]: Orcs, in the sense that RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons use them, are essentially the innately evil minions of the eye depicted in Lord of the Rings. [back up]

[38]: Of course, not everyone who role-plays would agree, but for the most part the people who write role-playing game books hold this to be true. Consider an example from the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide:

There exists a tendency in adventure gaming for both the DM [recall, a DM is a gamemaster specific to D & D] and the players to sacrifice the color and richness of role-playing for the expedience of advancing the game. The DM forgets that he is a storyteller and becomes a rules judge. The players forget that they are characters in a drama and behave like board gamers calling out combat results. Instead of talking descriptively about actions and their outcomes, the participants refer to dice rolls and game statistics. An exchange might go: DM: “The orcs see you and advance 20 feet to attack. Somebody give me an initiative roll.”
Player one: (rolls dice) “Drat, only a three.”
DM: “Still Beats my one. What’s going on now?”
Player one: “My fighter Bruno attacks with his +1 sword.”
DM: “OK, he needs a 13 or better to hit, and the magic user needs a 16 if she uses her weapons.”
Player two: “No way! Wands zaps with her magic missiles. Aw, only six points of damage from both missiles.”
[this scene plays out for a while but you get the idea]
The action comes across, but without any particular emphasis on the setting, the characters, or their foes. Wanda and Bruno are played as generic characters who encounter a band of equally generic monsters. One set of numerical statistics has met another and exchanged a round of randomly generated numbers. Now try the same encounter with a little color and role-play.
DM: “A pair of heavily armored, low-browed humanoids round the corner. They see Wanda and Bruno and they don’t look happy to see them here. The big one growls out something that sounds like Orcish to Wanda.”
Player two: “What did it say? Wanda knows the orc language enough to make out basic words.”
DM: “‘Surrender or there’ll be trouble’ is all you can make out.”
Player two: “Wanda drops to her knees and starts to plead for mercy, wringing her hands together. She tries to get Bruno to do the same.”
Player one: “Bruno will never surrender to orc scum! He charges the largest orc, swinging the mighty Calabash over his head in a deadly arc! ” (Jaquays and Connors 1990: 28-29) [back up]

[39]: “A crucial tension of live-action role-playing games is that between the game world and the game world and real world. Effective role playing requires maintaining one’s orientation to the game world, but effective game playing often requires stepping out of the game world to negotiate and further the action of the game. In ongoing play, players continuously shift between two different interactional states which they call in character and out of character. This distinction is so central to role playing that players may metapragmatically announce their interactional style at the beginning of a turn of talk in order to signal to others how to appropriately interpret and respond to their turn.” (Bucholtz 2001: 235) [back up]

[40]: Bucholtz explains that “…the selection and performance of particular accents ties the game intertextually to previous enactments of the fantastic. At the same time. however, it forges ideological ties to specific ethnicized categories…” (2001: 249). I am particularly interested in examining the use of accent. [back up]

[41]: Recent examples would be Dungeons & Dragons the movie (one of the worst movies ever made in my opinion) and Lord of the Rings’ Gimli character. [back up]

[42]: In this sense a sign refers to Ferdinand de Saussure’s sign, described by Michael Agar as “The symbol, the unit of study, the thing one grabs on to and focuses on, [that] Saussure called a sign. A sign is a Janus-faced thing, a single creature with one face that looks outward and another that looks inward. Saussure named the two faces. The face that looks outward toward the public world of sound and fury he called the signifier. The inward-looking face, the face that whispers to the perceiver what the signifier meant, he called the signified. When a signifier and a signified are bound together, when the faces of Janus are complete, they make up a sign ” (1994: 39). [back up]

[43]: This statement is part humor and part critique of the languaculturally-patterned take on child found in such ideas as children’s games and child’s play and was inspired by Bucholtz (2002). It has been my experience that people avoid RPGs out of some semantic association they recognize that fits role play into a “child’s games” category. [back up]

[44]: Notice that there is an implied power structure here as defined by existing kinship bonds the children are used to – the same can happen as role players determine what characters they are going to play in a new campaign. A common tabletop RPG ideology argues that in order for a group of player characters (also referred to as an adventuring party) to survive the challenges devised by the game master they must have diverse abilities. Given that the authors of tabletop role-playing games tend to make character types (rogue, wizard, warrior, etc.) proficient in only one area (stealth, magic, martial prowess, etc.), the playing of these individual types of characters requires differing strategies. Players tend to play certain character types better than others, and many character generation sessions are filled with debates on the best mixes of characters and who plays which types best. The final decisions will have a major impact on game play, since (depending on the in game context) certain character types are simply more powerful than others. It is not uncommon for the real world to map itself out in the shared fantasy of the players in regard to power issues – with the players of higher power/status playing the more powerful characters in the group. [back up]

[45]: I find myself using this line when explaining the concept of a RPG to new players. See http://www.gamebooks.org/cyoalist.htm for examples of Choose Your Own Adventure Books. A Google search for “Choose Your Own Adventure” will yield some interesting and humorous results that are a bit too risqué for this research proposal… [back up]

[46]: Fine suggests an awareness of this when he writes “Aside from Raging Barry [a player], the continued reference to this event also indicated to players that they should be adventurous and not flee from danger.” (1983: 141), but he does not develop the idea. [back up]

[47]: Fine explains that “In addition to those idiocultural elements that are based on friendship and those that describe fantasy events, a third set of cultural elements overlaps the two areas. This relates the player’s behavior to a game event, or a game event to some attribute of a real-world relationship. Such cultural elements suggest the close relationship between the fantasy world and the natural world, as each is used by group members to comment upon the other” (1983: 142). Thus, game events are depicted in terms of real world concepts and vice versa (Fine 1983: 142) in ways that seem confusing to new players. [back up]

[48]: “dX” refers to a particular type of dice [note that, as Fine explains, “Players use “dice” as both the single and plural of the word “die” (1983: 262)]. Thus, d4 refers to a 4 sided dice, d20 to a 20 sided dice. Common dice types include d4,d6,d8,d10,d12,d20,d30 and even d100 (it looks like a sphere with tiny flat sections, but usually players who “roll d100” are rolling two d10s and choosing a one to be the tens place, thus generating a random number between 1 and 100). If you are interested in other possible polyhedral solids or curious about dice in general see http://members.aol.com/dicetalk/polyh.htm A critical hit refers to a situation which arises in RPG combat scenes; not all role playing game systems include critical hits and occasionally players will develop their own house rules for critical hits (as they develop house rules on nearly every aspect of the game) where none exist. Usually, when a RPG character wants to attack another character (or anything else) a die roll is made and a certain result is required in order for the attack to succeed. Critical hits may occur in a variety of situations, but often on the maximum die roll. Thus, if a d20 is rolled for a hit roll a result of 20 might be a critical hit in some games. Initiative refers to the sequence of combat situations in RPGs (which characters attack when in a particular time frame), usually determined by rolling dice. A gamemaster or character might say “initiative” indicating that combat is going to happen or a new segment in an existing battle is about to begin (for example). XP is short for experience points, which are sort of like a running score a player accumulates for his or her character by overcoming challenges, role-playing character traits particularly well, coming up with good ideas, and so on. Experience points are nearly universal to RPGs and it is usually the case that when enough experience points are accumulated a character will start to get more experienced in the gamer, better at its skills, more adept at avoiding danger, and so on. [back up]

[49]: In my gaming group, when a gamemaster (and only a gamemaster has the right to do this) points at someone and says “dice!” the other players will immediately attempt to be the first person to throw one of their dice (typically the one with the most sides) at the targeted player. Whoever accomplishes this is often rewarded a minor amount of experience points [see end note above] and prestige. Pulling a Josh makes an allusion to a former player in our games who role-played his characters in a daring, no-holds-barred, often thoughtless and humorous manner. Upon locating a dangerous and complex magical puzzle-trap in one game, Josh’s character started pulling levers and pushing buttons and nearly eliminated the entire party. Everyone loved to role-play with Josh, but their characters often found his characters unbearable. Elf-arrow-machine gun refers to an existing elven character in one particularly long running adventure who can fire arrows from a longbow at nearly the firing rate of a modern machine gun. To cast Dink’s refers to a magical spell in my fantasy games called “Dink’s heat seeking missile;” while nearly every experienced gamer would recognize the phrase to cast (a spell) they would not know what Dink’s referred to. Many listings of RPG terminology, oddly enough including the few terms Fine lists (see 1983: 29-30), do not factor in the role of idioculture and are usually labeled “RPG terminology”. See also http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/glyng/r_dict.html [back up]

[50]: RPGs are self-compensating in that they adjust to the mood and character of the moment. The self-terminating aspect of RPGs lies in the simple fact that it is often enough the group that decides when the game is over – there are usually no set limits. [back up]

[51]: This comes from Agar’s discussion of culture as a system of frames (1994: 138). [back up]

[52]: An inspiration from a comment by Dr. Wilce which is included below.

Comment: Here you need a strategy for analysis. Using the rule of thumb that one hour of tape takes up to 100 hours to transcribe (depending on what you’re counting as relevant, Ochs 1979), you need a principle of selection—of one tape over another, or of isolated scenes in a tape. [back up]

[53]: The inspiration for this derives from the following text…

“Most crucially, a truly reflexive transcription practice will involve a discussion both of the choices we make and of their limitations. Because these are not always evident to us, we must work from tapes rather than transcripts as much as possible. And we must seek reactions from colleagues, from laypeople, and especially from the speakers whose voices we record - not to find validation for our own decisions but to discover other ways of hearing and transcribing.” (Bucholtz 1999: 1462) [back up]

[54]: “The transcription of a text always involves the inscription of a context. The conditions of the transcribing act are often visible in the text: the transcriber's goals; her or his theories and beliefs about the speakers; her or his level of attention to the task and familiarity with the language or register of the discourse; and so on. And this context is social and political in nature: the transcription practices of individual transcribers emerge in large part from the practices of the surrounding community, whether this is a transcribing service employed by a police department, a newsroom, or an academic discipline. Because transcription is an act of interpretation and representation, it is also an act of power. As Mishler (1991: 227) points out, 'there is no way not to make such decisions'.” (Bucholtz 1999: 1463) [back up]

[55]: See http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/intro1.htm for a discussion of what Conversation Analysis is. [back up]

[56]: I say preliminary because they must adapt to the changing research focus of qualitative research. In order to decide upon the exact type of transcription convention the proposed research will use, I listened to an NPR Morning Edition audio clip from 8/19/04 [See http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3858560] in which a group of people are playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons. Using this example, I made notes on what aspects of RPGs I would want to record and how I might record them, as well as what aspects of RPG interaction would frustrate transcription. This procedure lead me to the following ideas…

1. When players communicate they do so as either themselves, as characters they animate, or as both simultaneously!
2. This communication frequently overlaps other player performances. Furthermore, it is not uncommon for several mini-performances or side conversations to be going on at once at any moment of a game.
3. The interpretation of speech acts in RPGs requires esoteric and often ideocultural frames of reference: in order for a person lacking these frames to understand a transcript of a RPG session, a great deal of exposition would need to accompany the text. This interpretation would have to come from my own experience and judgment and would heavily influence later analysis: I might want to pass these explanations back to the other players to see how they interpret them as a means to reduce bias.
4. Players utilize a wide variety of linguistic adjustments that signal in game/out of game, in character/out of character. These include the use of a character style, which may include creative alterations in “…pitch and volume modulation, lexical choice and syntax, phonology, and extralinguistic contextualization cues such as gesture” (Bucholtz 2001: 236), as well as stereotypical or culturally scripted accents (Bucholtz 2001: 240-245).
5. In regard to sound recordings alone, the ambient sounds of the gaming area can be just as significant as the noises of the game itself. Such sounds as dice bouncing on various surfaces are essential to the game’s aesthetic character.
6. It would be impossible to capture every nonverbal detail (movements of players, facial expressions, events in game space) in a transcript of a RPG, although some events are more significant to the game than others: certain key die rolls and rolls of the eyes for example. A record of why certain events are significant should accompany a transcript of the game – I should not shy away from adding in interpretation or occasionally mentioning what was left out of the text. [back up]

[57]: Dr. Wilce uses ?’s to represent inaudible words, but considering the amount of creative and playful speech acts role-players employ I decided to go with syllables. The inspiration for this came from http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssca1/notation.htm , as did the idea to include dashes and colons in the transcription convention. [back up]

[58]: This was inspired from a reading of Transcription As Theory, (Ochs 1979: 63-65) [back up]

[59]: Such as in the following example…

101     Player1: I rolled a…nineteen to h/it with my longsword
           Player2:                                       /oh yah you hit!     [back up]

[60]: Such as one speech act with an associated nonverbal stage direction, an overlapping pair of these types of actions, or perhaps a distinct background event. [back up]

[61]: An excellent role-playing game bibliography (the basis for my own) can be found at the following URL…www.rpgstudies.net/ [back up]

• Agar, Michael. 1994. Language Shock: Understanding the Culture of Conversation. Quill, William Morrow. New York.
• Barnes, Melanie K. and Vangelisti, Anita L. 1995. Speaking in a Double-Voice: Role-Making as Influence in Preschoolers’ Fantasy Play Situations. In Research on Language and Social Interaction. 28(4): 351-389.
• Bhatkin, M. 1978. Discourse typology in prose. In M. Matejka & K. Pomorska (Eds.), Readings in Russian poetics: Formalist and structuralist views (176-196). Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications. (Original work published 1929).
• Blackmon, Wayne D. 1994. Dungeons and Dragons: The Use of a Fantasy Game in the Psychotherapeutic Treatment of a Young Adult. In American Journal of Psychotherapy. 48(4), 624-632.
• Bucholtz, Mary. 1999. The Politics of Transcription. In Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1439-1465.
• Bucholtz, Mary. 2001. Play, Identity, and Linguistic Representation in the Performance of Accent. In Texas Linguistic Forum 44(2): 227-251.
• Cook, David Z. 1989. Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. Lake Geneva, Wisconsin: TSR Inc. Random House.
• Darlington, Steve. 2004. History of Role Playing Games. http://www.geocities.com/catstesha/ {follow the Roleplaying link and scroll down to read the full text}
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