Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [35]
While compromise is certainly appealing, it doesn’t immediately solve all of the problems with looking at stories across media. Walsh (2007) argues that anything other than the semiotic view of narrative implies that “narrative structure can be conceived in the absence of representation, or that representation can be conceived in the absence of any medium” (p. 104). When we shift our view from an audience receiving a message (which is problematic to begin with) to an author writing, it seems clear that all narratives are initially constructed within a medium. If stories are shaped but not determined by their media, what, exactly, does determine them? Where do they begin?
I agree with Walsh (2007) that every story is conceived within a particular media, and thus can never be “media-independent,” particularly when we work from Walsh’s perception of media as including both technological and mental frameworks. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that authors and readers have attempted to transfer stories between media and that there is often something we can recognize as common across these attempts. So, how do we account for these commonalities while still recognizing the dependence of texts on the affordances of media? What, exactly, did the game developers making Temple computer game take from Temple module that allows us to recognize this story as similar, if not the same, to the favorite classic? I will attempt to address that question in this chapter, but rather than reconciliation between the structuralist and poststructuralist views, I argue that any given story is shaped in the mind of the reader through their own transmedia experiences and associations. In other words, it is not that one story of Temple is transported into different media, but that by interacting with multiple media, gamers come to form one story of Temple.
Stories from The Temple of Elemental Evil
It seems that the next move to make would be to introduce the story of Temple. Yet, doing so implicates me immediately in the school of thought that says that the story can be separated from its medium. If I retell it here in an academic book, what does that do to the genre or the medium? What can possibly remain intact from the experience of playing the tabletop module, the computer game, or reading the novel? Thus, I am presented with a conundrum. In articulating the story, I already make judgments about which parts of it are key and translatable across media. Yet, some articulation of the story is necessary in order to analyze it. Therefore, rather than tell the story myself, I turn to the results of a survey in which I asked participants to recall for me the story of Temple.
Interestingly, not all participants responded to my request to “please briefly explain the story in your own words.” Instead, they apologized for not remembering the story or explained other aspects of the game that they could recall. This may be because the majority of those who responded to the survey had not played the game, or had not done so in many years. Of 65 participants, 20 had played the initial module, 13 had played the sequel, and 16 the computer game. Only three had read the novel. Yet, 45 participants responded that they heard other gamers talk about their experiences with Temple and only four said they had never heard of it. Whether or not they had played it themselves, it seems participants knew Temple by reputation.
Several participants who had experience with multiple versions of Temple agreed to tell their versions of the story. One respondent who had played both modules and the computer game recalls:
A group of greedy