Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [94]
Another difference between fan fiction and gaming is that while fan fiction may remain unpublished, it is, nevertheless, consumed by other members of the fandom who read it as a complete text of its own. On the other hand, TRPG stories are often not represented in any physical form. Even when I did write up the adventure at Blaze Arrow, my write-up of the orc adventure was done with the purpose of informing Mary what she had missed in her absence from that gaming session. It is one of only several stories from our Sorpraedor campaign that has been written down, and even these were never intended for an audience beyond the Sorpraedor group. Similarly, when Monte Cook bases gaming modules on his own home campaigns, every detail of those stories is not represented in the module; rather, the module acts as a guide for creating new stories in those worlds. In part, this is because TRPG stories are rarely complete, rather, they continue from session to session. Moreover, it is impossible to replicate the complexity of the interaction that occurs in each frame of the TRPG in a written story. Mackay (2001) explains that players continue to play out of a “desire to return to the presence of emotion” that disappears when the game stops (p. 85). The desire to return to the story that can never end, that can never be consumed, keeps TRPG groups going for years. Mackay (2001) sees this ongoing process as one that “suspends the desire to consume the texts (i.e. commodities) of the spectacle of popular culture” (p. 131). The audience, if they can be characterized as such, resists consumption in favor of production. Because the world and characters of D&D are created in the minds of the players, there is no physical text to consume.
The ability to create texts that cannot be reproduced or commodified is important to gamers. Bebergal (2004) shows that in D&D imagination is key, not pre-written modules and rule books. He comments that looking around at his child’s room full of toys, he wants to shout, “I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!” There is a strong sense of power and ownership involved in creating something that can exist only in a person’s imagination; something that can never be read or consumed by others. Gamer Simon Andrew states, “it’s great being part of an underground world which baffles 90 percent of people you talk to” (as cited in Waters, 2004). While some gamers want to share their stories with the world in forums like www.fanfiction.net, other gamers pride themselves on creating worlds and stories that are incomprehensible to those outside their gaming group. As members of a subculture, TRPG gamers connect through their shared desire to produce texts. Because immersive qualities of TRPGs give players a sense of belonging to a storyworld and interactive qualities give players the sense of actively contributing to this world, players see their gaming as a process of production rather than consumption. By engaging in this type of creative and productive behavior, gamers create a culture of their own that rejects notions of texts as consumed objects.
Post-Subculture: A More Complicated View
While D&D seems to fit neatly into the notion of a subculture (even a fandom), more current studies have challenged the binary between dominant consumer culture and the championed notion of non-consumer based subcultures. This critique has come both from sociology and cultural studies. The idea of post-subculture and post-subculture studies relates to the post-modernist concern with ideas being reduced to binary oppositions. Rupert Weinzierl and David Muggleton (2003) argue that “the subculture concept seems to be