The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [2]
In short, we have a lot to learn from each other. This book is as much about my shared experiences with all these different gaming communities as it is an attempt to encapsulate the history of fantasy gaming. It’s my hope that this book will serve as the foundation for future works, so that authors and developers alike will learn the difference between editions of Dungeons & Dragons and know the heritage of the various races and classes that are commonplace in all forms of gaming today. If you’re a developer who is just starting out, a gaming veteran who wants to reminisce, or you just like games ... this book is for you.
INTRODUCTION
The Company of the Ring shall be Nine; and the Nine Walkers shall be set against the Nine Riders that are evil. With you and your faithful servant, Gandalf will go; for this shall be his great task, and maybe the end of his labours. For the rest, they shall represent the other Free Peoples of the World: Elves, Dwarves, and Men [Tolkien 1954:288].
With those words, J.R.R. Tolkien formed the basic structure of an adventuring party in 1954 that has endured endless fantasy tropes and ever-changing mediums. Although the Fellowship started with elves, dwarves, men, and of course hobbits, it has since expanded to include every race of fantasy imaginable. And where it was once simply enough to define one’s allegiance to a Fellowship by nationality, race and class has come to define each hero in the fantasy gaming genre. One can be a ranger, like Aragorn; a wizard, like Gandalf; or a thief, like Bilbo.
And yet the Fellowship in a gaming experience is fundamentally a gathering of people. Although the players can conceivably control more than one character, the Fellowship is a construct uniquely suited to group play. Characters of diverse backgrounds come together to achieve a common goal, just as a variety of players gather together to play the game. The Fellowship construct is ideally suited to new players. It is independent of previous character relationships, just like the players themselves.
In that light, the Fellowship is both an in- and out-of-game framework on which to hang a gaming experience. This book will examine the archetypes and concepts within the fantasy game and the roles and functions of the players themselves. As the fantasy gaming experience has evolved, so too has the medium in which it is expressed, from novel to tabletop, from imagination to miniatures, from textual descriptions of characters to three-dimensional computer avatars, to the players themselves dressing and acting as the characters.
Media Richness
By applying Daft and Lengel’s (1984:191) media richness theory to the fantasy gaming experience, there is much to learn about what constitutes a successful and satisfying game. The media richness theory proposes that communication media have a range of capacity to resolve ambiguity and facilitate understanding. The theory has two main assumptions: that people want to overcome uncertainty in communicating with each other and that different media work best for different situations.
Daft and Lengel’s media richness hierarchy is sorted, from high to low degrees of richness, by the medium’s ability to provide instant feedback; the capacity to transmit multiple cues such as body language, expression, and inflection; the use of natural language; and the personal focus of the medium. We can apply the media richness hierarchy to gaming.
As explained in Table 1, each gaming medium brings