Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [34]
This account of the relationship between genre and media means that when Temple is adapted for several different media, the rhetorical purpose also shifts. Of the gamers I surveyed, approximately half of those who had played Temple had played more than one version. In fact, all of the participants who had read the novel had also played one of the game versions—either one of the TRPG modules or the CRPG. Again, this seems to indicate that players engage with multiple versions of a text in different genre and media because those versions serve different purposes and allow them to experience the text in multiple ways. It also indicates that players may build their view of a particular story based on multiple experiences and media rather than just one. Let us turn, then, to the question of what happens to a particular story as it shifts between media.
Stories Across Media
The problem of storytelling across media is hardly a problem at all for structuralist narratology because of the clear separation between story and discourse. The distinction between these two concepts can be traced back to the Russian formalists. In his introduction to narrative theory, Michael Toolan (2001) notes that the terms fabula and sjuzhet (from Russian formalism); histoire and discours (from Barthes and Benveniste); and story and discourse (from Chatman) all represent similar concepts. The first term in each set, according to Toolan, “is meant [as] a basic description of the events of a story, in their natural chronological order, with an accompanying and equally skeletal inventory of the roles of the characters in that story” (p. 10). The second word in each binary “denotes all the techniques that authors bring to bear in their varying manner of presentation of the basic story” (Toolan, 2001, p. 11). Thus, there is a distinction made between the actual events occurring in the storyworld and the way those events are relayed through narration. The first of the terms is traditionally seen as transferable between mediums whereas the second is seen as dependant on the narrator and the medium of a particular telling of a story (Herman, 2004, p. 51).
Like most binaries, this one has come under question. Specifically, the move has been to divide discourse into text and narration (Toolan, 2001, p. 11). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (2002) explains this distinction clearly: “Whereas ‘story’ is a succession of events, ‘text’ is a spoken or written discourse which undertakes their telling” (p. 3). Some scholars might add visual or digital discourse to this definition. By this definition, texts are tied to media but stories are not. The third aspect, narration, pertains to “the act or process of production” (Rimmon-Kenan, 2002, p. 3). This distinction clearly separates the text as artifact from the text as production. In other words, narration involves the actual process by which the story is told rather than its physical form.
However, one wonders how these distinctions hold up in light of post-structural theory. As David Herman (2004) explains, the outcome of this structuralist approach has been a lack of attentiveness to “origin, medium, theme, reputation, or genre” without clear justification for generalization (p. 47). How does the medium or the genre affect the narrative? Herman (2004) notes that a more post-structural school of scholars has come out in opposition to the idea that “narrative is medium-independent” to argue that stories are “radically dependent on their media” (p. 50). However, he sees problems with both the structuralist and post-structural schools of thought. The first does not