Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [44]
Yet, the link between narrative theory and the field of literature or literary theory has itself begun to dissolve, allowing for a broader perspective of the study of narrative. Ryan (2006) explains that “the trend today is to detach narrative from language and literature and to regard it instead as a cognitive template with transmedial and transdisciplinary applicability” (p. 184). In addition to seeing narrative as a cognitive template, I would add that seeing it as social and rhetorical force further opens the door for an interdisciplinary approach to the study of all genres and media with narrative elements. I maintain that games and narratives have been seen as incompatible, in part, because of a limited view of what constitutes either. Thus, I revisit the narrative versus game debate with two new perspectives in mind. Ludology, or games studies, has focused almost exclusively on video gaming which, as we have seen, was highly influenced by tabletop role-play but did not replace it. I thus bring to bear on the narrative versus game debate the inclusion of the TRPG as a game genre. Furthermore, the debate hinges on concepts from structuralist narratology; a perspective that warrants challenge from both post-modern and rhetorical theory. I argue here that a rhetorical approach to narrative offers a valuable framework that explains the narrative nature of gaming without discounting its other important features.
Games Versus Narratives
In order to understand the position that games (even those that seemingly have a storytelling element) are not narratives, we must look at the definition of narrative that has been appropriated by many ludologists. This traditional definition comes from early linguistic studies of narrative that rejected anything other than oral storytelling with a clear narrator and narratee. Linguist William Labov (1972) defined narrative as “one method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred” (pp. 359–360). Gerald Prince echos this definition in his Dictionary of Narratology, originally published in 1987 and revised in 2003. He defines narrative as “the representation of one or more real or fictive events communicated by one, two, or several narrators, to one, two or several narratees” (p. 58). Prince accounts for collaboration here as well as fiction, but still defines narrative in terms of representing (rather than creating) an event and in terms of having narrators and narratees.
To separate them from other types of speech for linguistic analysis, narratives involve longer turns at talk, where an interlocutor recalls the events of the past in an order that shows the cause and effect relationship necessary for the progression of the story. When we hear statements such as “the king drank from the poisoned cup” and “the king is dead,” we know that the second statement is a result of the first statement. Cognitively, we have a sense of the linear progression of narrative; thus, we are able to establish a connection between these two events as a story. This sense of causality and linearity from the study of oral narrative persists, even in studies that examine new media. Objections to viewing games as narratives are based often on the non-linear progression of games2 and the fact that the story is created through play rather than a retelling of the past (Ryan, 2006, p. 186). In addition,