Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [71]
The shared experiences of the group members may also increase the level of emotional responses, such as laughter, to situations in the story that recur. For example, the incident in the orc adventure where Maureen carved an “M” into her dead assailant’s body later became an inside joke for the group. David, at the time, had commented that he could not tell if the marking was an “M” or a “W”—whether it stood for Maureen or Whisper. While this incident led to David’s increased suspicious of Whisper that ended with the confrontation I have told here, the reference to “Is it an M or a W?” continued to come up in the game, even after both Maureen and David were no longer active characters in the game. My fellow players liked to throw this little inside joke out there any time my character did anything suspicious, and it resulted in laughter from the group as a whole. Goffman (1961) calls such moments of shared emotional response “flooding out” as the emotion of the group can no longer be contained (p. 56).
The “gamers_chick” blog posting also mentions moments when not just one player but an entire group was reduced to tears over a particularly emotional situation. When these times are not shared, they can prove embarrassing, and one player relates retreating to the bathroom for a private cry during a role-playing session. However, another blogger responds, “I had such a phobia of that before it finally happened, and WHEN I finally cried in front of the group I was SOOOO embarrassed! But now all the males in our group have cried or at least gotten teary-eyed at some point or another.” The emotional immersion of the group setting also seems to increase over time and is thus more prevalent in long-term campaigns than in games that last for only one session. The longer I played Whisper, the more the tension increased at moments that were crucial to her survival as a character. Likewise, the longer the group stayed together the more common experiences they had to relate to each other. Thus, emotional immersion exists both because of players’ relations to characters within the story and in response to the social connections among players as they respond to the story.
Social Motive
Comments from both gamers and scholars show a connection between the fictional world of the narrative in the TRPG and the actual world (AW). Not only is the connection between these two worlds key for an enjoyable role-playing experience, but we also begin to see that there is a social purpose behind the TRPG. What is the purpose that ties together the social group of TRPG players? What is the exigence that calls them together to perform this specific activity? Bitzer (1968) explains that an exigence is “an imperfection,” something that needs to be fixed in some way (p. 6). In terms of rhetoric, the exigence must be of social rather than individual concern; Miller (1984) states that “exigence must be seen [...] as a social motive” (p. 158). She goes on to explain that “exigence is a set of particular social patterns and expectations that provides a socially objectified motive for addressing danger, ignorance, separateness” (Miller, 1984, p. 158). But what does this have to do with role-playing? Bebergal (2004), a journalist and gamer, explains that for his group of friends, TRPGs were a means of “creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal.” He also reminds his readers that D&D can help them make stories from the world around them, stories that can lend clarity to current political and cultural situations (Bebergal 2004). Murray (1998) points out that games, like narratives, offer “interpretations of experience” and that they are rituals used to “enact the patterns that give meaning to our lives” (143). Similarly, Mackay (2001) sees TRPGs as a means of bringing unity to the lives of players (p. 116). Games and narratives both “reflect our desire and sorrows with the heightened clarity of the imagination” (Murray, 1998, p. 274). It seems that scholars