Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [96]
This sort of shift to appeal to fans and involve them more directly in the development of more mainstream texts has been a focus of what Gray, Sandvoss, and Harrington (2007) call third wave fandom scholarship. This wave involves a broadening of perspective to include “a wide range of different audiences reflecting fandom’s growing cultural currency” (p. 8). While Jenkins’s (1992) study may already seem somewhat dated in light of these new views on fandom, some of the ideas expressed in Textual Poachers and throughout Jenkins work are not necessarily incompatible with this more post-modern view of fandom. In particular, I would argue that it is not fandom that has changed as much as it is mainstream culture. The way that fans interact with texts has become more acceptable, and even mainstream. This sort of response to texts is not new. Fandom did not originate with the Internet, or even with television. Pearson (2007), for example, studies fans of Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, and Bach. Yet, Internet technologies have furthered fandom in a way that was previously unfathomable. Although it is problematic to assume coherence among audience groups, it seems safe to say that with the Internet and social networking, dominant culture has shifted to interact more directly with texts. It is not only fans who now Twitter or update Facebook status messages while watching a favorite TV show, or even something as mainstream as the presidential debates or the Super Bowl. More often these practices also relate directly back to the mainstream. Shows, particularly news shows and reality TV shows, may ask audiences to go online and vote on issues while they are watching. While not practiced by every viewer or every demographic within the audience, engaging with texts in a more active manner is becoming more mainstream. Fan culture may, to an extent, still exist as a subculture yet more and more, mainstream culture is becoming participatory.
The Rise of Gaming in Popular Culture
As we remember from chapter 2, D&D served as an antecedent genre for many computer games. However, as computer games have become more and more common, the perception of gamers has moved from that of a subculture to mainstream culture. This shift has been well documented by scholars. Dovey and Kennedy (2006) explain in their book Game Cultures that “in the past a taste for fantasy literature, comics, Dungeons and Dragons role-play and technological gadgets all marked the subject as outside dominant ‘respectable’ taste cultures” (p. 76). They found that these particular interests were common among early computer game designers and that as they made gaming into big business, the view of the game designer shifted to be in the center of dominant culture rather than on the sidelines (Dovey and Kennedy, 2006, p. 76). There is no doubt that computer gaming has transformed the way that gaming is perceived in popular culture. It now permeates our lives, from simple games like Bookworm on a cell phone, to exercising on the Wii Fit, to fully immersive MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. However, just because gaming has become mainstream does not mean that all modes and genres of games are equally accepted. Although certain homogenous groups may assert power, mainstream culture is no more homogenous than a subculture.
We need look no farther than the academic literature on gaming to see that tabletop games, which are often all thought to be synonymous with D&D, continue to be labeled in more marginal terms. From Murray’s (1997) slap at “12-year olds playing D&D” to the more subtle metanarrative of progress found in scholarship on computer gaming, there is a clear move to position D&D as earlier, more primitive than computer gaming. Dovey and Kennedy (2006), for example, spend some time establishing the connection between game designers and their childhood love of D&D (possibly without intent) to establish