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Player-Character Is What You Are in the Dark the Phenomenology of Immersion in Dungeons & Dragons

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Player-Character Is What You Are in the Dark the Phenomenology of Immersion in Dungeons & Dragons Player-Character Is What You Are in the Dark The Phenomenology of Immersion in Dungeons & Dragons William J. White The idea of role-playing makes some people nervous – even some people who play role-playing games (RPGs). Yeah, sure, we pretend to be wizards and talk in funny voices, such players often say. So what? It’s just for fun. It’s not like it means anything. These players tend to find talk about role-playing games being “art” to be pretentious nonsense, and the idea that there could be philosophical value in a game like Dungeons & Dragons strikes them as preposterous on its face. “RPGs as instruction on ethics or metaphysics?” writes one such player in an online forum for discussing role-playing games. “Utter intellectualoid [sic] bullshit … [from those] who want to imagine they’re great thinkers thinking great thoughts while they play RPGs because they’d otherwise feel ashamed about pretending to be an elf.”1 By the same token, people who don’t play RPGs are often quite mystified about what could possibly be going on in a game of Dungeons & Dragons: There’s no board? How do you win? No winners? Then why do you play?2 Making sense of D&D as Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Read and Gain Advantage Copyright © 2014. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2014. John Wiley Copyright on All Wisdom Checks, First Edition. Edited by Christopher Robichaud. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 82 Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy : Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks, edited by Christopher Robichaud, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uhm/detail.action?docID=1730036. Created from uhm on 2018-10-24 14:31:32. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF IMMERSION 83 an experience can require a good deal of mental effort on the part of the uninitiated, perhaps because of how RPGs weave together the concepts of story and game in an unfamiliar way. But it is exactly that weaving together that makes Dungeons & Dragons interesting from a philosophical standpoint. Philosopher Kendall Walton argues that representation in fictional works has always proceeded from a playful or “ludic” orientation.3 All fiction is a game of make-believe, so the first narrative form to make that connection explicit (as RPGs do) is necessarily worth exploring. And the foregrounding of game over story that begins with the tabletop RPG carries over to D&D-inspired digital and online games as well as electronic literature more broadly. Understanding how Dungeons & Dragons does what it does can provide insight into the operation of what some are calling participatory culture,4 meaning that sort of industrious fandom in which the activity of the audience is more than mere reception, but an active and productive engagement with popular culture. From this perspective, D&D shares an important feature with writing Harry Potter fan fiction, playing World of Warcraft, and dressing up for Twilight cosplay: all of these instances of participatory culture facilitate an immersive engagement with a fictional setting through the lens of character. If we can explain immersion, in other words, then we can talk about role-playing in general and Dungeons & Dragons in particular in a way that both the novice and the skeptical “grognard” (old-school player) can appreciate. The Idea of Immersion Leads to Phenomenology So the idea of immersion is central to understanding how Dungeons & Dragons and other aspects of participatory culture work. Indeed, it can be argued that “immersion is to the 21st- century entertainment industry what illusion was to that of the 5 Copyright © 2014. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2014. John Wiley Copyright 20th.” Game designers and social scientists alike have spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what immersion is, how Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy : Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks, edited by Christopher Robichaud, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uhm/detail.action?docID=1730036. Created from uhm on 2018-10-24 14:31:32. 84 WILLIAM J. WHITE it operates, and how to achieve it. Immersion is a sprawling concept, understood as having to do with being engrossed in the play of a game, or identifying strongly with a character in a story, or feeling as if one were in some sense present in an imaginary setting, for example. It is sometimes associated with psychologist Michael Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow,” in which “optimal experience” is achieved when an undertaking challenges but doesn’t overwhelm us.6 Discussions of immersion among gamers can at times be heated, because of the varying and incompatible definitions held by different people.7 The one thing that isn’t responsible for immersion, according to game design gurus Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, is the increasingly realistic representation of an imaginary setting by technological means – even though some game developers talk as if this were the case. For example, a bit of this view can be seen even in digital media professor Janet Murray’s definition of immersion as “the experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place” (emphasis added).8 Salen and Zimmerman call this the “immersive fallacy,” and argue that immersion is located instead in the minds of the players, in their experience of play, rather than in the technological sophistication, verisimilitude, the “realism” of the medium.9 Once we begin to see immersion as a function of the game-player’s subjective experience, rather than of the technical means used to create that experience, the door is opened to a phenomenological approach to immersion. What Is Phenomenology? Phenomenology is a kind of “philosophy of mind” associated with the works of twentieth-century philosophers Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61), among others. The word “phenomenology,” coined by Husserl, depends upon the sense of the word “phenomenon” that means “appearances” or Copyright © 2014. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2014. John Wiley Copyright “perceptions,” since phenomenology is interested in the world as it is perceived, or “things as they appear in our experience.”10 Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy : Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks, edited by Christopher Robichaud, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uhm/detail.action?docID=1730036. Created from uhm on 2018-10-24 14:31:32. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF IMMERSION 85 The purpose of phenomenology is to describe what it is like to be conscious or to have a given experience. To the phenomenological perspective, “all problems amount to finding definitions of essences,”11 which means that the accounts of lived consciousness that the phenomenologist creates are presented as general descriptions of categories of experience – their essence, that is to say – rather than reconstructions of specific events. The domain of phenomenology encompasses the entire range of experiences in the world, paying attention to what Husserl called “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward particular objects in the world. All consciousness, we are told repeatedly by the phenomenological philosophers, is consciousness of something. Phenomenology is thus a sort of reflexive consciousness, a consciousness of consciousness. So the phenomenologist would ask, What is it like to role-play? or What is it like to be immersed in a role-playing game? The first step in most phenomenological analysis is a sort of attitude check called the epoche, or reduction of the “natural attitude” (i.e., the “general positing of existence” that presumes there is a real world that determines what is experienced). This involves bracketing the question of what is “real” or what is “really there” in favor of focusing on describing the individual’s subjective, lived experience, without stipulating anything about their reality or irreality. Jean-Paul Sartre says “This procedure is … a ‘step back’ from belief concerning what exists in nature… . In ‘stepping backward’ one does not contest any factual belief… . Rather, one ‘steps back’, as it were, from the ‘natural viewpoint’ of factual belief.”12 Phenomenology is thus agnostic about the nature of reality; as Sartre says, “little importance is attached to whether the individual fact which serves as underpinning to the essence is real or imaginary.”13 Having made this reduction or epoche, the phenomenologist then interrogates the data, which in classical phenomenology was usually the personal experience of the phenomenologist. Today phenomenological assumptions and approaches have Copyright © 2014. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved. & Sons, Incorporated. © 2014. John Wiley Copyright been adopted by researchers in sociology, psychology, anthro- pology, and communication studies. So, they may include all Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy : Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks, edited by Christopher Robichaud, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uhm/detail.action?docID=1730036. Created from uhm on 2018-10-24 14:31:32. 86 WILLIAM J. WHITE manner of qualitative (descriptive) sources, such as “interviews, conversations, participant observation, action research, focus meetings, and analysis of personal texts.”14 This “interrogation” amounts to looking for recurring themes, patterns, or motifs in the way that the experience is described, focusing on the act of experiencing or the perception of phenomena. In our case, we are interested in examining accounts of playing Dungeons & Dragons for what they suggest about the nature or character of immersion. For data, we’ll use published accounts of play from a variety of sources – memoirs, short stories, magazine articles, online discussions, and scholarly essays – to see what common elements emerge, and how they contribute to a notion of immersion.
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