Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [102]
9
CONCLUSIONS, DEFINITIONS, IMPLICATIONS, AND LIMITATIONS
A central concern in this book has been one of definition. With so little scholarship currently available on the tabletop role-playing game (TRPG), we must first ask how we should define and study it. The question is a complex one. I have shown that TRPGs cannot be subsumed under the study of other games, particularly computer games, nor should they occupy a position of prior and inferior text. As computer games continue to evolve as a medium, they too need to be studied on their own terms. Even computer games that might have been based on Dunegons and Dragons (D&D), such as Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons and Dragons Online, have significant differences from both the original TRPG genre and from each other. Yet, the justification for the study each of these texts is the same as the justification Aarseth (1997) gives for studying adventure games:
They present an alternative mode of discourse; a different type of textual pleasure. By investigating this we may be able to extract knowledge of a more general kind, which may tell us something about discourse itself and which we could not have learned from our previous, more restricted horizon [Aarseth, 1997, p. 109].
Even genres that die out, such as the text-based adventure game or the gamebook, at one time offered us a new form of discourse. These texts still offer us the chance to learn more about the progression of genres and how texts influence each other. Too often we focus on the newest example of a genre, the latest technological advance, and we forward a myth that each new change constitutes a more advanced form of discourse, a new literacy that requires us to change our methods for studying texts. Our theories of authorship, readership, and texts in general suddenly seem to fall short, and we seek new methods, new theories to explain each new phenomenon. While advances in technology and the emergence of new genres and new media may indeed challenge our current definitions and call for new theories, I argue that these changes are neither as extreme nor as sudden as we might imagine. In fact, we find that our notions of authorship, of interactive narrative, of genre, are all challenged by the TRPG, a genre that is neither new nor makes use of digital technology.1 D&D, the first TRPG, began in 1974 at the very onset of post-modernism and well before the Internet offered possibilities for massive collaborative storytelling. What strikes me about Murray’s (1998) text as well as Ryan’s (2003) study of virtual reality is the unyielding desire and hope that new technologies will afford us opportunities for interaction, authorship, and agency that I see already available in forms like the TRPG. While digital environments continue to progress toward games with increased opportunities for building social communities and authoring both stories and storyworlds—opportunities that seem particularly present in genres such as the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)— we must not be so focused on our futuristic utopian visions that we forget to look at our own backyards. We might say that this book has been a study of Kansas, not of Oz. This perspective offers both new insight and new questions. Like any study, it is also limited. As I conclude this book, I wish to take a closer look at both the implications and limitations of the work that has been done here and the work that is left to do.
New Definitions
Throughout the course of this book, I have compared TRPGs to scholarship about traditional narratives, traditional games, gamebooks, cybertexts, fan fiction, make-believe games, and virtual reality. Of all these genres, TRPGs fit most closely with make-believe games in the form of oral discourse, with computer role-playing games (CRPGs) in terms of the gaming rules, and with fan fiction in terms of purpose. As my model in chapter 5 shows, the levels of interaction