The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art

by Daniel Mackay

Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

Genres: Role Playing Games, Fantasy, Gaming

215 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Killer cover art.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel like this one got 3.5 stars, rounded up to four. There are parts of it I really liked, parts I only liked, and parts I found tiresome.

Daniel Mackay is a Performance Arts scholar and that's how he approaches his study of Fantasy RPGs. Like every other book I've read on the subject thus far, he sticks pretty solidly to D&D, which is a shame, but leaves room for other scholarship (mine, for instance!).

Of great interest to me is the notion of the "fictive block." TRPG players produce their characters in field conditions: we cobble together numbers, possibly write up endlessly complicated histories, and dream up different elements of their character, but the manifestation of all that happens in real time around a table. A lot of the character, probably even most, is created from our storehouse of narrative possibility - every dramatic moment we've experienced, read, or seen stripped of its context and present as a "X reacts to Y" formulation. These "strips" of narrative action are then placed, line by line, into the living history of the character, like sentences glued down in a cut-and-paste paper that grows into a story. Since most of us have never actually faced a dragon or summoned Great Cthulhu, we used that storehouse of experience to try and create a relatable moment. Sometimes we produce something that, even as it is a reworking, feels new and fresh. Sometimes, we're just producing a TV Tropes page.

One idea I found engaging, but disagreed with in the end was his view of the aesthetic object produced by a TRPG campaign. Mackay states that the aesthetic object of a campaign really only exists in the aftermath, because the moment of the game itself is filled with frame-switching from In-Character to Out-of-Character to Far-Away-from-Character-discussions-of-the-pizza order. I get where he's coming from in viewing it as a performance. As a rhetorician, however, there is still meaning in the discourse itself, and that meaning can be analyzed aesthetically. Very often it is the choices we make in the moment, and how we attempt to resolve the exigencies that brought us to play and brought our characters to crisis, that are where meaning happens.

What I found tiresome was the endless critique of commercial culture. Spare me one more diatribe about the banality of modern consumerism. Consumerism is about wants and their lack of fulfillment - guess what, so is drama! It is certainly conceivable that a great TRPG session could end up producing spiritually moving art, but I suspect that's the rare bird, indeed. Most of the time, we're there to have a fun social experience, and there's nothing wrong with that. How our more pedestrian goals mingle with the (sometimes) more high-minded ideals and ambitions of our characters is the sort of alchemy that explains a lot of where the rhetorical exigencies live and how we resolve them at the table. Dismissing them in the name of art puts on, to my mind, blinders half a shade too narrow.

High marks for being a non social science study of TRPGs, and therefore less likely to indulge in soft-science psychoanalysis of gamers, and one of the better reads if you want a good argument on why In-Character utterances are empowering to the game experience. If you can wade through the gnashing of teeth over science and capitalism, it's definitely worth a read.

[Savannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read for fans of pen and paper games.

Having picked up this book to help with a college paper I was pleasantly surprised to learn I just enjoyed this as a reader. It gives an interesting look at what goes into both the creation and performance of role play character and the world around them. I would say that because of the age of the book many of the examples of pop culture are dated now and younger readers may need to do additional research to understand some comparisons made.

[John Carter McKnight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, comprehensive analysis of tabletop RPGs as an aesthetic experience and performing art. Excellent citations and a broad theoretical framework: a lot of Bakhtin makes up for too much Barthes.

I don't find all of his theoretical structure useful (performance studies is pretty far afield for me), but his analytical and observational core is excellent.

[Michael Underwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

A much more recent study of RPGs, from a Schechnerian Performance Studies perspective. Really Schechnerian, to its detriment, actually. But Mackay looks at a broader range of more recent games and talks a lot about RPGs as performance, an important facet of their nature.