Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [53]
A Social and Rhetorical Approach to Narrative
When I say that the TRPG “possesses narrativity,” I mean that it contains narrative, but is not exclusively a narrative. The game does appear to favor story over exploration of space, and does consist of narrative interludes with a clear narrator and narratee. More importantly, whether or not ludologists or narrative theorists would consider games such as D&D narratives in terms of their formal structure, many gamers feel that their experience with the TRPG is a narrative experience. Rather than dismiss the views of gamers for not using the careful terminology as defined by scholars, it is our obligation to reconcile the actual gaming experience with our scholarly accounts, even those produced by scholars who are themselves gamers.
If we take a social rather than a formalist approach, we quickly see that narrative is an important element of gameplay for many role-players. Ed Stark from Wizards of the Coast, the company that now owns D&D, comments that “people often say playing D&D is like writing your own movie” (as cited in Waters, 2004). When asked by BBC News Online to comment on their memories of D&D for its 30th anniversary, participants noted the feeling of controlling a storyworld. James Dodd of the UK states that D&D provides “a chance to star in your own subjective version of any film or novel.” Paul Grogan also says that D&D gives you a chance to “recreate cinematic moments, kinda [sic] like being in a film where there is no defined script.” Diana Thirring agrees, noting that “it is like writing a story without knowing the outcome” (as cited in Waters, 2004). Whether or not a formal analysis reveals a story in narratological terms, it seems clear that those participating in the TRPG are aware of a story behind the game.
Furthermore, narrative can be seen not as a form, but as a response. When talking more broadly about rhetoric and the rhetorical situation, Lloyd Bitzer (1968) argues that “we need to understand that a particular discourse comes into existence because of some specific condition or situation which invites utterance” (p. 6). Bitzer talks of discourse here in terms of speech, but his basic idea has more widely applied. The argument that a situation is rhetorical and that such a situation calls forth a particular response is also the basis for the rhetorical definition of genre applied in chapter 2. Something about the TRPG invites a narrative response, and it seems that narrative theory, whether or not it can elucidate all aspects of the gaming genre, can help us explain why we respond to this form as a narrative.
This notion of experience rarely factors into definitions by ludologists or narrativists, although Ryan (2006) opens the door for such an approach. While she doesn’t argue that retelling what happened during a game makes the game a narrative (in a structural sense) as it is being played, she does say that “the greater our urge to tell stories about games, the stronger the suggestion that we experienced the game narratively” (Ryan, 2006, p. 193). We see an important move here away from Aarseth’s (1997) view of narrative as a form to see narrative as an experience (whether that be a cognitive experience, a social one, or both). That we can experience something as narrative, regardless of its form, is an important shift in perspective when looking to explain the comments of gamers that they see themselves as a playing a role in an ongoing movie or novel. Aarseth’s (1997) notion that in hypertext (as well as in games) the “reader must produce a narrative version” and that the text “does not contain