The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games - Michael J. Tresca [9]
Live action role-playing, wherein the players physically inhabit a role, is a natural fit for tabletop role-playing games. Players are able to visualize their fantasy because they performed many of those same actions in another gaming format. Whereas Fine limited this comparison to the Society for Creative Anachronism, the definition can be stretched to include anyone with real-life physical experience who uses that knowledge in a role-playing game, including martial artists, military veterans, and improv actors.
Missing from Fine’s review of gamers was CRPGs and MMORPGs, which have since increased in popularity (Taylor 2006:77). In the Wizards of the Coast survey, 46 percent of tabletop role-players also played computer role-playing games monthly (2000).
Dancey concluded that the mythical “hobby gamer” who played tabletop role-playing games, CRPGs, and miniature wargames comprised a “very, very small portion of the total market.” A minority of gamers played more than one category of hobby game and very few played all three. The largest overlap, though still a minority, was with CRPGs and tabletop role-playing games. This places me in the minority, as I have indeed played all three—but I do not play all three concurrently.
Throughout this book I interview many of the players from my tabletop role-playing game campaigns and from RetroMUD. Through their experiences, I hope to compare and contrast the differences and similarities between each gaming medium.
Gender
However gamers come to tabletop gaming, they all share one thing in common—they are almost uniformly male. Fine (1983:62) estimated that in the early 80s only ten percent of the player population was female. The Wizards of the Coast survey indicated that just 19 percent of female gamers played on a monthly basis (2000).
But it didn’t have to be that way. Studies of children (Child and Child 1973) aged 12 and younger found that girls have more interest in imaginative play than do boys. Role-playing involves many of the attributes that are common in other female-youth-oriented games, including shopping to equip characters, character design and customization, the ability to possess and own pets, and playing a more attractive and mature character. So why aren’t there more women involved in role-playing games?
The answer may lie in the duration of play. Tabletop role-playing involves sitting at a table for long periods of time with a group. Boys’ imaginative play tends to run longer and involve larger groups than girls’. As one of the female players in my 3.5 edition Dungeons & Dragons campaign explained:
I had two traditional D&D experiences at age 16 and then again at 26. I enjoyed puzzle solving, but on both occasions I found the delay in discovering opponents’ weaknesses and strengths lacking in excitement of a visual real-time battle. Therefore a character reaction or statement that might be influenced by adrenaline would be easier to come by in a real-time video game. Sadly traditional RPG was about as exciting as jogging from one end of a pool to another for me [Melissa Tresca 2010].
These challenges can be overcome, of course. However, other forms of role-playing that remove the duration of play and the requirement of sitting at a table for long periods of time seem to be more popular with women. MMORPGs, for example, focus on character and object customization, without the requirement for long stretches with a peer group. Conversely, LARPs include all the imaginative play of tabletop role-playing games, but focus more on interaction between individuals than a group confined to a table.
There are other problems that keep females away from gaming that are endemic to any male-dominated form of entertainment. The self-reinforcing