Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [75]
I have outlined here the many ways that TRPGs may be immersive, but not all of these immersive qualities pertain to the story. Dice rolling is more a matter of gameplay than story, although the outcomes of dice rolls do affect the outcome of the story. In addition, social connections may cause gamers to be emotionally immersed in a gaming session even if they do not feel a particular connection to their characters. However, the key immersive factor in each of these categories seems to be the control that players feel. Co-creator of D&D, Gary Gygax is quoted as saying that the appeal of role-playing is that average people, who may not have power in their own lives, “become super powerful and affect everything” (as cited in Kushner, 2003, p. 6). It is this sense of control that ultimately meets the rhetorical exigence of the TRPG.
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LEVELS OF AUTHORSHIP— HOW GAMERS INTERACT WITH TEXTS AND CREATE THEIR OWN
I have argued that one of the key features of the tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) is the narrative agency experienced by players. As I have previously discussed, agency is not always a component of interactivity. Readers may interact with a text, like a gamebook, without having agency over that text. Yet, just as interactivity does not presuppose agency, agency does not presuppose authorship. In her study of on agency and authorship in role-playing games (RPGs), Jessica Hammer (2007) explores the complexities of agency and authorship in both tabletop and online role-playing games. She defines agency as the “capacity to take action” and authorship as the “ability to enforce and judge the results of those actions” (p. 72). Similarly, Murray (1998) notes that there is a difference between playing “a creative role within an authored environment” and having “authorship of the environment itself” (p. 152). This distinction is key as we begin to talk about the way that gamers interact with other texts. I argue that in the TRPG, gamers always play a creative role, but they may also have an opportunity to actually author their own environment and narratives.
Although a distinction between readers and authors is important, it is also problematic. Post-modern theory has shown us that all readers, to an extent, are responsible for authorship. This view has been particularly advanced by the reader-response school of criticism. For example, Stanley Fish (1982) maintains that reading is always an interpretive act; therefore, a text does not fully come into being until the reader becomes involved. The classic Fish example is that of words written on the blackboard as a homework assignment for one class that the next class interpreted as a poem. Thus, for him the second class created the poem from the context of the words (it was a poetry class)—nothing in the form inherently made them a poem (Fish, 1982, p. 329). This view has parallels to our earlier look at genre, where we saw that different audiences might interpret the same text as different genres. The author-reader dynamic is problematic in studying traditional texts, let alone games.
There is nothing inherent in any one medium that shifts this dynamic. Rather the relationship between author and reader is defined in terms of the way that we interact with texts. Roland Barthes (1977) distinguishes between works, which are objects of consumption (p. 161), and texts, which can be “experienced only in an activity of production” (p. 157). Fish’s (1982) critique might very well turn every work into a text. Still, in seems that certain forms of media encourage the reader to step out of a traditional consumer role more so than others. In the TPRG, the