Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [70]
Whether or not they enjoy outfitting them, players often do become attached to their characters to a degree not often seen in response to traditional narratives. Fine (1983) observed that players often responded with anger or resentment to their character’s problems or death (p. 222). In a post to a blog titled “gamer_chicks,” a user posed this question: “In your gaming groups, have you ever had such an intense/amazing/tragic/touching event happen that people start crying in the middle of the game—in-character or out?” In the fourteen responses that bloggers gave to the question, there was unanimous agreement that TRPGs provoked this type of emotional response. Furthermore, the situations presented always involved situations such as death or trauma in a character’s life. One respondent explains that she cried when, her “character’s mentor/love interest sacrificed himself to save the party.” Other players also mention the death of players. One blogger tells the story of a conflict between their character and the group:
My Mage (another man) was in love with a villain (partly a past life thing) who returned his feelings, but all the other characters HATED the guy. My player character walked a fine line, staying loyal to his companions while staying faithful to his lover, but hiding his real emotions. When they finally figured it out, they cornered him and called him on it. He had to explain how he felt and how it had all happened, and try to talk them out of killing their enemy. That got me, and some of the other players too.
To these experiences, I add my own experience with the situation presented at the beginning of this chapter. Although many moments in the Sorpraedor campaign led to strong emotions, the strongest emotional scene for me was the confrontation between Whisper and David that resulted in David’s death. Although these feelings did not negatively affect our out-of-game relationships, there was a great deal of anger and frustration exhibited during gameplay over this development in the story.
Social Immersion
While spatial, temporal, and emotional immersion are connected to both the storyworld and the game world, none of them hold up if social immersion is not present. The importance of the social setting in the TRPG was a point brought up repeatedly by my survey participants. Of the 40 respondents to provide a written response explaining why they enjoyed multiple types of role-playing, over half (26) explicitly mentioned the social interaction involved in the TRPG. One player notes, “The faceto-face [game] serves a social purpose as much or more than the game itself, at least in my demongraphic.” Another states, “It’s an activity that helps me become belonged in a small community, and lets me be creative with other people, which is a valuable resource to me.”
The social setting can reinforce or interfere with other types of immersion in the TRPG. Goffman (1961) observed that face-to-face games involved a sort of mutual emotional commitment that could either be added to or detracted from based on the other participants’ level of engrossment. He states that a player not being as involved in the group activity “can discredit the identity imputed to him as someone who is able and ready to immerse himself in an encounter and can weaken for the others their own involvement” (Goffman, 1961, p. 42). Although Goffman’s (1961) analysis predates TRPGs, the way the social situation affects immersion in the game is similar. During the RPGA session I observed, one of the participants was particularly distracted by her need for dinner. She spent a good amount of time pursuing local take-out menus, often needing to be reminded that it was her turn or even asking another player to take her turn for her. Her lack of immersion in the social situation appeared to affect the intensity of the game as a whole. Since many TRPG gaming sessions last six hours or more, incidents such as this, phone calls, computer distractions, or the like are not uncommon; however, this type of distraction