Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds

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Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds

Nicholas J. Mizer.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

ISBN: 978-3-030-29127-3

Role-playing games are emerging as distinct objects within Game Studies. As Deterding and Zagal (2018) note, role-playing games suggest a variety of approaches for scholars interested in exploring their cultural function and value. Role-playing games are a specific form of play, harnessing aspects of childhood make-believe within the formal structures of ludus. Role-playing games are also one mode of social role-making, as Gary Alan Fine details in his foundational study, Shared Fantasy (1983). Many role-playing games construct transmedia story-worlds and their study might shed light on what Henry Jenkins (2007) has called ‘convergence culture’, that is the merging of ‘old’ and ‘new’ forms of media as the top-down forces of media production wrestle with the bottom-up power of consumers and fans. In a collection of essays on digital roleplaying games, Gerald A. Voorhees, Joshua Call and Katie Whitlock (2012) position their investigation as being concerned with identifying the tropes of role-playing games and tracing their evolution from wargaming miniatures to Bioware’s Dragon Age. Elsewhere, under the banner of ‘Analog Game Studies’, researchers have been more concerned with examining the increasing popularity of the pen and paper role-playing game despite digital interlopers. Analog scholars thus explore the mechanics, mechanisms and practices of role-playing outside videogame spaces. Across the field, though, there is a shared acknowledgment that roleplaying games, whatever the medium, are a distinct practice and form, and not merely a genre or subset of games in general. Mizer’s timely new book makes an intervention in these discussions by focussing on what he calls ‘the central mystery of role-playing games’ – how they allow their players to conjure worlds (2019: 2).

Written for Palgrave’s ‘Games in Context’ series, Mizer’s study of table-top role-playing games takes seriously the practice of conjuring worlds, exploring what it means to create, share and experience fantasy role-playing games through speech and embodied, situated interactions. Though not framing his work in these terms, Mizer’s commitment to understanding role-playing games echoes accounts of ‘worlding’ found in the writings of Karen Barad and other theorists who have called for a renewed interest in materiality. It is in this light that I read Mizer’s work, since the practices he describes are not merely linguistic and representational, but involve entangled agencies, some embodied and some imagined, in iterative processes of materialisation. That is, role-playing games exemplify, in a very particular context, what Barad (2007:66) identifies as the intra-actions of ‘material-discursive forces.’ Barad’s concept of  intra-action replaces ‘interaction’, understanding agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human, but as a dynamism of forces (2007: 141). This dynamism of forces is clearly at work in Mizer’s account of role-playing games in which the physical setting for play exerts its agency on the process of worlding as much as the players themselves. Likewise, his account of a Dungeon Master’s ability to conjure worlds with colour words, or by inhabiting virtual objects during play, works away at the gap between word and object that new materialists such as Barad hold to be false. The worlding practices of role-players are intra-actions and the results of their play are tangible yet highly contingent. In this way, Mizer’s account of roleplaying is sympathetic to the ‘new materialist’ project even as it traces the relationship of matter and meaning in the opposite direction to thinkers like Karen Barad and Jane Bennett (2009). In Bennett’s work, for example, matter is imbued with vibrancy and meaning: it is what Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (2014) call ‘storied matter’. In Mizer’s work, however, stories materialise as the worlds created by role-players expand, leaking out of the boundaries placed upon then. Here, fantastic worlds can conjure the past and even ‘kidnap’ everyday reality.

From the outset, Mizer is alert to the ambiguous and contested nature of role-playing games. He situates his work within anthropology and ethnography, although he eschews approaches that attempt to document and taxonomize social interactions. Nor is Mizer interested in the psychology of role-playing games, though his commentary does reflect upon his own and other players’ feelings and emotions. This is a sensitive and sometimes necessarily speculative phenomenological account of the experience of role-playing games. Offering a fresh perspective, Mizer takes role-playing games to be ‘phenomenological interworlds’ (2019: 6). Rather than thinking through the process of immersion for an individual player or categorising the roles each player might take in the construction of the fantasy world, Mizer explores the ways in which a shared world emerges during play. He evokes Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the interworld within which internal relations obtain between self, other and world. As Anya Daly (2016) suggests, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the interworld reveals that the oppositions we generally hold between interiority and exteriority are misconceived. As such, it is an apt theoretical lens for role-playing games, which are predicated on continual negotiation not only between self and other in terms of interactions between players, but between self and avatar, and movements out and back from the body and in and out of the world of the game. Role-playing is a phenomenon produced by entangled subjectivities and agencies rather than distinct individuals. At the forefront of Mizer’s approach is the world that emerges through play, rather than the rules of the game or its narrative. This focus neatly sidesteps the issue of whether role-playing games are best understood as ludic or narrative forms.

A key insight in this new book is the contradictory role of enchantment in role-playing games. As Mizer argues, the worlds of role-playing games are the result of embracing enchantment within an apparatus of disenchantment, namely the often-rigid rules that determine how games ought to be played. Mizer shows that enchantment is enabled by the very tools of rationalization that would elsewhere promote disenchantment. Again, this insight chimes with new materialist thought, much of which, in the wake of Bruno Latour’s excoriation of modernity (1993), seeks to reenchant the world to combat the profound negative social, political and ecological effects of the Enlightenment. As Jane Bennett (2001:3) insists, enchantment is necessary for ethical life. Illuminating a portion of this project, Mizer offers a history of Dungeons and Dragons that charts the push and pull between enchantment and rationalization. In Chapter two, Mizer also offers a detailed history of the origins of fantasy roleplaying from the 1970s to the present within the US context. This history emphasizes the ideological ground of Dungeons and Dragons, with its puritanical conceptualisation of  ‘experience’ as the accumulation of treasure (Mizer, 2019: 33). Mizer’s potted history highlights the various ‘rebellions’ enacted by players against the game’s tendency to become bureaucratic over time. That said, I do not think Mizer accord enough credit to players and player communities in his account of the game, preferring to emphasize the top-down control exerted by the game’s creator, Gary Gygax.

Chapter three focuses on role-playing games experienced as part of ‘Gary Con’, a gathering of role-players held annually at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, former home to the creator of Dungeons and Dragons. Here, Mizer is here interested in role-playing as a process of memorialization, showing how the past shapes players’ experience of the worlds they create, but also how game worlds exert their own strange effects on players’ memories. As might be expected, Mizer eulogises Gygax to some extent, though he is reflexive about this and recognises that his writing is ‘a new piece of commemorabilia’ (2019: 72). That admission aside, Mizer does tend to place too much emphasis on certain figures as more important than others in the development of role-playing game practices. While some DMs, who have remained active since the early days of the hobby, have no doubt been influential in the wider culture of role-playing, too much reverence for self-confessed “old school” DMs blinds Mizer to other play-styles and systems in shaping the practices of world-building. Mizer was given access to the inner circles of Gary Con, even invited to play in the basement belonging to Gary’s son, Ernie (2019: 54), but outside this social context are many and varied forms of role-playing wherein DMs and players hack and hybridise Dungeons and Dragons with other systems, making their own ‘home brew’ games and worlds that creatively reject the systemization and ideological ground of Dungeons and Dragons in its official incarnation.

Thankfully, Chapter four acts as a corrective to the myopic focus of the earlier chapters and Mizer shifts his attention to more idiosyncratic practices and play styles. His case study here focuses on one DM, Liz Larsen, and her player group in Denton, Texas. In Mizer’s account, Liz is a chromomancer, able to summon fantasy worlds through colour (2019: 76). The worlds conjured through Liz’s games have a distinct and separate existence from the DM and the players who enter. In Mizer’s descriptions and analysis of role-playing with Liz there emerges a concern with materiality, both in terms of the objects and inhabitants of the game world and the force they exert, but also with the materiality of words. As a DM, Liz reveals ‘the agency of the things and the inter-permeability of things, concepts and people’ (2019: 91). Crucially, neither the DM nor the players are positioned as determining what occurs: it is the ‘world’ that acts (2019: 94). Here imagined matter is vibrant and tangible, and the gap between word and thing is traversed in play. Mizer reflects upon a physical object of the game-world that exerts its agency during one session – a barricade. He notes that players’ ‘speech about the barricade is not a signifier of it, but the thing itself’ (2019: 110). This statement does not endorse idealism, however, but accords with Barad’s insistence that words and ideas ‘don’t fly about free of the weightiness of their material instantiation’ (2007: 55). The barricade is as much an actor as any of the objects present in the play-space. Summoned by Liz’s words, the barricade materialises during the players’ intra-actions, in their worlding.  

Mizer’s interesting and absorbing account asks us to take seriously the worlding practices of tabletop role-playing games. He wishes to insist upon ‘the primacy of worlds over narratives’ (2019: 166). As an ethnographer, he is aware that much of his own practice involves telling stories, but he is keen to assert that such stories emerge from the worlds he has attempted to reproduce in his account. Researchers and practitioners interested in further understanding what makes role-playing games unique should consult Mizer’s work for a fresh perspective. Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds crosses disciplinary boundaries and contains insights for scholars engaged in social science research, narratology and hermeneutics, ludology and anthropology. For me, the book developed important arguments about the materiality of textuality as play, about how stories are worlds, and prompted me to consider further the ontological distinction between real and game worlds.

References

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009.

Daly, Anya. ‘Meleau-Ponty's Aesthetic Interworld: From Primordial Percipience to Wild Logos.’ Philosophy Today. 2016. 32 (4).

Deterding, Sebastian, and Zagal, José (eds.). Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge, 2018.

Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Roleplaying Games as Social Worlds. University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Iovino, Serenella, and Opperman, Serpil (eds.). Material Ecocriticism. Indiana University Press, 2014.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York University Press, 2007.

Latour. Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard University Press, 1993.

Voorhees, Gerald A., Call, Joshua, and Whitlock, Katie (eds.). Dungeons, Dragons and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game. Bloomsbury, 2012.