The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [7]
Japanese CRPGs have influenced fantasy games as well. Adventures can include “cute” (kawaii) elements with cartoon-like characters and silly quests side-by-side with serious and threatening situations. This contrast may be jarring to American audiences, but it’s perfectly in keeping with Japanese culture, which has embraced kawaii in everything from fashion to cartoons (anime) to comics (manga) to role-playing games (Barton 2008:208).
Without the history of wargaming to influence gaming culture like it did in Europe and the United States, Japanese CRPGs are a mix of kawaii, action, fantasy, and science fiction. Japanese CRPGs contributed some important changes to how role-playing games are now played electronically, but we’re chiefly concerned with the heritage of the European Lord of the Rings.
And yet, if The Lord of the Rings is European, why did it become so popular in the United States? Part of the answer is that Dungeons &Dragons acted as a translation of sorts for the fantasy genre. Like Warhammer, Middle-earth is steeped in a world rich with lore and history. Dungeons & Dragons added pulp sensibilities to the fantasy game, an important part of American culture. Pulp fiction featured multitalented heroes, nonstop action, exotic locales, and nefarious villains—it was the genre that spawned the modern comic book industry.
Although Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk are positioned as fantasy roleplaying games limited only by the players’ imagination, they are in fact bound by common principles that make fantasy role-playing games distinctly American. As defined by Fine (1983:76), these elements are a force of unlimited good, a world in opposition with sharply defined sides, an evil that favors only violence to perpetrate its ethos, and the value of hard work.
American culture has some nuances that are unique to it, one being the notion of limitless growth for businesses, consumer buying power, and the economy. In Dungeons & Dragons, this ideology is true of dungeon exploration too. There’s always a monster with treasure around the next corner, always a new area to explore, always a new frontier to conquer.
The very nature of adventure is predicated on an age of expansion and heedless of the results of that expansion. Adventurers are not colonial conquerors but heroes to their homeland, with none of the consequences suffered by the non-dominant societies. When you take treasure from someone, someone else must have lost it, but in Dungeons & Dragons it’s usually an ancient culture that no longer can claim ownership. In MMORPGs perpetual growth borders on parody, as hordes of supposedly unique adventurers camp out in front of dungeons that generate limitless amounts of monsters and treasure. The grind paradigm was parodied in Progress Quest, an application that levels up a character with no player input at all (Grumdrig 2008).
In Dungeons & Dragons, good and evil are axiomatic. There are clearly defined “sides” to which players claim allegiance, and their allegiance influences their characters, from abilities to appearance. In America, this “my way or the highway” philosophy has become an increasingly dominant form of discourse, most ardently in politics and the media. It has spread to the communication channels themselves, with different television networks accusing the other of bias, forming their own “alignment” language.
Dungeons & Dragons’ focus on combat harks back to its wargame roots, with pages of rules centered on conflict. And yet despite the combat rules, Dungeons & Dragons does not focus on senseless violence, torture or depravity. When works like the Book of Erotic Fantasy, by Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel and Duncan Scott were released by a third-party publisher, they caused enough of a stir with D&D owners Wizards of the Coast that the Open Game License was revised to prevent other books like it from being published. Wizards subsequently published the Book of Vile Darkness which addressed