The Narrative on the Borderlands:

Contextualizing Dungeons & Dragons’ Aesthetics

for Academic Study

Scott M. Bruner

English 798: Special Study

Dr. Jessica Pressman

22 December 2016 Bruner 1

“RPGs are a form of literature. The only form of literature, as Robin Laws says, [wherein] the artist and the audience are the same person. You aren’t watching or reading the hero’s adventures, you are the hero. You get the all the stuff Aristotle was talking about in Poetics because you aren’t feeling what the character is feeling on the stage, you are feeling what the hero feels because you are the hero. Books can’t do that, movies can’t do that, theater can’t do that. Only RPGs can do that. And that’s what makes RPGs different from all other kinds of games and literature.” – John Wick, RPG Designer (7th Sea, Legend of the Five Rings)

“Send anyone claiming that their RPG activity is an art form my way, and I'll gladly stick a pin in their head and deflate it just to have the satisfaction of the popping sound that makes. One might play a game artfully, but that makes neither the game nor its play art.” – , (RPG Deity, Co- creator of Dungeons & Dragons)

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1: In Search of the Unknown

Thesis and Argument

In 1974, Gary Gygax, and his fledgling company, TSR Inc., released the world’s

“first” role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. (D&D). The game was created by wargamers Gygax and , translocating the popular wargames of the 1960s and

1970s from their realistic battlegrounds (which recreated historical battlegrounds such as

Civil War Gettysburg or Napoleon’s European campaigns) into a world of medieval fantasy, while simultaneously evolving the large, abstracted battles of classic wargames which modeled thousands of imaginary combats into more intimate combats featuring individual heroes against weird and phantasmagorical monsters of legend. The game that they initially invented and released in 1974 would become a tremendous success, and drastically change not only gaming, but also the capacities and capabilities of the imagination within gaming.

The impact of Gygax and Arneson’s game and ideas would also transform popular fiction.

As Michael Witwer asserts in the introduction of his biography of Gygax (the central visionary of D&D), Empire of Imagination, “If you have ever played a first person shooter video game like Call of Duty, a massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMO) like

World of Warcraft, or a computer role-playing game like Final Fantasy; if you have ever logged on to an online virtual world like Second Life or experienced the wildly popular

Game of Thrones television series and books, then you are already tangentially familiar with the work of Gary Gygax” (xii). Bruner 3

However, if the popular and cultural impacts of D&D have been examined and analyzed, academic investigations on D&D’s impact on our aesthetic and literary traditions remains very far from any type of consensus as scholars attempt to understand how to approach games – or whether they should be considered as literature and art at all. There is no doubt, however, that the conversation is growing. Scholars Daniel Mackay (2001) and

Jennifer Grouling (2010) were two of the first to examine D&D’s aesthetic qualities –

Mackay examined the game as a potential new form of performance art (rather presciently) while Grouling’s work focuses on the narratives created through D&D play. Their work (nine years apart) represents the paucity of classic literary scholarship on a game (text?) which has been published non-stop, throughout five editions, for over 40 years; however, the growing field of digital humanities has significantly drawn the spotlight of academic interest sharply back onto D&D because so much of the new avalanche of digital expression is in games.

Video game revenue is now approaching nearly $100 billion annually, and with the popular interest in games has come significant artistic curiosity with the potentialities of games.

Academic interest has followed (as well as simple interest in the new capacities of our digital machines) which has sparked interest in how the mechanics, aesthetics, form and function of

Dungeons & Dragons has inspired the lexicons of our new and important digital games1.

The conversation about D&D is admittedly an awkward one still in search of an appropriate academic home; it’s not a quantifiable literary text (it creates them) and does not feel particularly appropriate to English departments, it’s not a traditional game with quantifiable and predictive outcomes, it’s not exactly a theatre presentation (it combines improvisation

1 The growing tide of genre fiction and cultural studies departments in academia, as university’s excruciatingly slowly adapt to recognize the importance of alternative and popular fictions, hasn’t hurt either Bruner 4 and performance, but for the enjoyment of its actors and not an audience), and while it shares so many features of our new digital toys and entertainments remains frustratingly analog and outside the full purvey of the digital humanities. That being said, the academic approaches of and tools of these disparate academic disciplines are absolutely essential to understanding the chimera that Dungeons & Dragons represents.

Although this thesis is intended to provide an investigation into the multitude of ways that pulp horror and fantasy fiction impacted the creation of D&D’s “world,” and how a narrative diegesis is necessary for D&D role-play, it would be impossible to continue without at least a working definition of D&D. This definition and contextualization of Dungeons &

Dragons within our literary, ludic, and theatric traditions is one that I would heartily invite others to revise, expand, challenge, and junk as necessary, in order that we might reach a workable consensus on what D&D is (and where and to whom it belongs). If there is one thing that is clear about D&D, it is that it is important. Where we have recognized its cultural impact previously, we are only beginning to grasp its impact on how it has changed our modern perspectives on story-telling (even if, in many ways, it simply is a reminder of antiquarian methods of sharing narratives.)

In this introductory chapter, I will argue that Dungeons & Dragons is neither a defined work of literature, nor just a game, but rather a performative mechanism for the creation of communal narratives within the oral tradition. The mechanism of D&D serves, in the definition of Henry Jenkins, as a narrative “architecture,” for players to construct specific and narratives for its reader-authors. D&D provides its players the tools for the construction of completely new and singular fantastic stories in dynamic and responsive imaginary worlds. Bruner 5

Following Mackay’s footsteps, I will also argue that the experience of a D&D gaming session is a singular, and exquisite new form of theatrical performance. Finally, I will also assert that the written texts of D&D provide codes and algorithms for the human mind, in the same way that videogame software does for the personal computer, necessary for the construction of its experiential performance, and the consequential narratives borne from that theatrical execution.

Like the creature with the head of a lion, goat, and dragon featured on page 14 of its

Monster Manual, Dungeons & Dragons is truly a chimera. Only new academic approaches provide any hope for understanding (and slaying?) this beast.

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2: In Search of Adventure

What is Dungeons & Dragons?

The first version, or “edition,” of Dungeons & Dragons published in 1974 is known as Original Dungeons & Dragons (OD&D and sometimes referred to as the confusing 0e, or

“zero edition”). It was published as three separate books (“Men and Magic,”

“Monsters & Treasure,” “The Underworld

& Wilderness Adventures”) which were each individually collated and sealed in a cheaply made box set by Gygax and friends. The initial rules did not even provide all of the necessary rules to begin play; it was assumed that purchasers already had a copy of Gygax’ previous

Chainmail war game (co-designed with Jeff

Perren), which would provide the rules for

D&D’s combat. Although Gygax and Arneson were aware that their game was definitely new, and might be popular within the wargaming communities of the era, neither had any idea of the impact the game would have. The first edition of OD&D did not even use the term or refer to itself as a “role-playing game”2 which would be invented by a competitor trying to categorize this new type of game, in order to connect their game with D&D

2 The subtitle on each of OD&D’s original books reads: “Rules for Fantastic Medival Wargames, Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” This subtitle, which reads awkwardly to a modern audience, was meant to establish D&D’s connection to wargaming for its intended core audience. Bruner 7

(Peterson, Appelcline). Perhaps the most compelling element of this new game, the ability to role-play, or pretend to be, individual characters with different motivations making specific actions outside of a strictly confined rule system, had actually been pioneered Dave Wesely in his “wargame,” Braunstein. It was Arneson who adapted Wesely’s ideas to a medieval format. Although D&D is constructed from a number of gaming ideas and approaches from various sources (such as Arneson and Wesely), it was, of course, Gygax (in a Steve Jobsian fashion) who was able to collate and combine them into an entirely new type of game – that even he did not yet understand the significance of (Witwer).

Explaining Dungeons & Dragons to anyone who is unfamiliar with the concept of role-playing games can be difficult (and it’s why Gygax’ company struggled initially to sell the game to a larger audience, and why even in 2016, D&D still exists on the periphery of

“mainstream” games like Monopoly or Chess.) The game can consist of almost any number of players greater than two, the rules which are used often vary from group to group, and there is no definitive goal for each gaming session, these elements run counter to traditional ideas of gameplay. The game was ostensibly created to provide its players with an avenue for experiencing the adventures of pulp fantasy heroes, such as Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser fantasy heroes (much, much more on them later). Later in the first edition (or 1e) of “Advanced” Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax would explain:

“Swords and sorcery best describes what this game is all about, for those are the key fantasy ingredients. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a fantasy game of role playing which relies upon the imagination of participants, for it is certainly make-believe, yet it is so interesting, so challenging, so mind-unleashing that it comes near reality3. As a role player,

3 Quotations like this, which imply AD&D’s potential power over reality would get TSR in a bit of hot water later, as the popularity of the game, and its potential for being misunderstood by concerned parents, would lead to a Bruner 8 you become Falstaff the fighter…This game lets all of your fantasies come true. This is a world where monsters, dragons, good and evil high priests, fierce demons, and even the gods themselves may enter your character’s life. Enjoy, for this game is what dreams are made of!” (7)

Poetic hyperbole aside, D&D did offer an innovative way to play within the worlds of pulp fantasy. A gaming group for D&D consists of several players who will pretend to be fantasy characters; the options to choose from are as varied as the fantastic literary concepts they have been pulled from. A player could choose to play archetypal classes such as fighter in the Conan the Cimmerian archetype, or a wizard (magic-user) in the mold of the

Arthurian Merlin. They could also choose to play a holy priest (cleric) devoted to a fantastic deity, or possibly even a bard who uses songs instead of spells to inspire his teammates. The players in a D&D session all take on the role of the classic literary protagonist and heroes.

They work together to solve puzzles, overcome obstacles, and defeat monsters as a group

(although like everything in D&D, there are notable exceptions). Each player is responsible for role-playing their character, termed player characters (PC), which means potentially modeling motivations which could in conflict with other characters. (For the sake of this thesis, we will likely need to leave these exceptions by the wayside, but it is paramount to note that in a game as complex, dynamic and fluid as D&D, exceptions to almost all of the rules are legion.) The antagonists of a D&D game session are handled by the Dungeon

Master (DM) of the game, who is required to handle a significant amount of preparation work for each game session. The DM role-plays and models every other element of the

D&D world, from the people (NPCs or non-playing characters) and monsters of the world,

backlash, including the creation of concerned parent groups such as B.A.D.D. (Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons) and a particularly critical (and ignorant) 60 minutes segment implying connections between D&D and young adult suicides. The backlash, of course, only fueled D&D sales for TSR. Bruner 9 to the random events, scenarios and even history of a fantastic world. While the DM must role-play the antagonists (monsters, villains, puzzles, etc.) to the game’s players, she is not their antagonist. The DM sets up the world, scenario and environment of the imaginary game space orally, and the players then respond orally to dictate the actions their specific characters will take. Limits and rule structures for those actions is extremely open-ended, the

D&D rulebooks provide tables, matrices, and direction on how to model a simulated world; if a rule doesn’t exist in the rulebooks, the DM is responsible for determining the outcome of an action or event. There is no “winning condition” for players or DMs. The players goal is to overcome obstacles, which allows them to improve their characters’ abilities through

“experience points,” while the DM’s (considerable) job is simply to provide the world to explore, and meaningful obstacles to overcome. The goal of both players and DMs is to ideally create a shared imaginary experience of a pulp fantasy adventure. There are no counters or chits or gameboard for D&D, the action all takes place within the group’s shared imagination. (Considering Pierre Bayard’s literary argument of the diversity of literary experiences in specific, subjective minds, each D&D session must also be interpreted internally in wildly disparate manners.)

For the purposes of our study of Dungeons & Dragons, we will concentrate on the first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which succeeded “Original” Dungeons &

Dragons. Although OD&D provided the initially iconoclastic ideas for role-playing, the first edition represents when Gygax could fully acknowledge not only the potentialities of the new game, but began to codify and collate its structures into a more workable and unified whole (although accessibility still remained a challenge for TSR, as brilliant a designer as

Gygax was, his organization of the first edition rulebooks is as chaotic as many of the Bruner 10 monsters in his ). We will also concentrate on Gygax’s first edition because it best showcases the pulp fantasy inspirations for the game; as D&D has evolved, grown, and adapted for successive generations of gameplayers, D&D has created its own distinct mythos which has begun to distance itself from its initial literary origins. Successive editions of D&D

(its fifth edition was released in 2014) have continued to re-interpret that initial mythos (and incorporated newer fantastic elements from cinema, games, and other media). It is of course fascinating that D&D has managed to constantly reinvent its mythos for new players, but my examination will focus on the initial creations of its mythos, and the pulp origins that were its original inspirations.

First edition AD&D consisted of three main rulebooks: the Players Handbook (1978) which provided all the necessary information for the players of the game to create and animate their PCs, the Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) which provided rules for the DM to create and simulate a fantasy world, and the Monster Manual (1977) provided an encyclopedia list of monsters and villains the DM could choose to populate the world with4.

These are the three main texts that this thesis is concerned with5.

4 The fact that the Monster Manual release preceded the two main rulebooks is an indication that Gygax and TSR assumed players knew the basics of gameplay from OD&D. However, this also demonstrates their lack of understanding of the larger commercial market and how to access it. 5 For this thesis, I am indebted to Jon Peterson’s magnificent tome, Playing at the World for its an exhaustively comprehensive account of the history of role-playing (and D&D’s primary position within it) as well as Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons for providing invaluable historical context. Bruner 11

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3: Descent Into the Depths of the Earth

D&D as literature

“The core of D&D is storytelling. You and your friends tell a story together, guiding your heroes through quests for treasure, battles with deadly foes, daring rescues, courtly intrigue, and much more.

You can also explore the world of Dungeons & Dragons through any of the novels written by its fantasy authors, as well as engaging board games and immersive video games. All of these stories are part of D&D.” – ’s corporate D&D website

“Role-playing isn't storytelling. If the is directing it, it's not a game.” – Gary Gygax

The three main texts of Dungeons & Dragons are books and they exist as physical texts. Prospective DMs and players are required to access them in order to construct a D&D gaming session. However, (despite what Stanley Fish might argue), they do not tell any type of narrative or story. They are rulebooks for a game which is played solely in the imagination of its players. No reader would confuse the Dungeon Masters Guide, whose chapters include such titles as: “Encounters, Combat, and Initiative”; “Attack Matrix for Monsters”; “Personae of Non-Player Characters”; and “Use of Magic Items,” with a work of literature6.

6 Although modern day gamers and game historians do find a singular poetic sense in Gygax’ prose; contemporary gamers actually do read the original gamebooks for their aesthetic qualities. As D&D became more popular, and ergo more corporately-controlled, the writing also became significantly less compelling. Gygax’ digressions and insights into his gaming philosophies evokes a clearly personal viewpoint about D&D in the early rulebooks. Bruner 13

When academic scholars examine D&D for its potential literary qualities, they explore the narratives created from a game session. As players take on the roles of their PCs, and the

DM confronts them with all manner of monster, villain and puzzle to overcome, stories organically emerge from gameplay. Because these games are played through literal dialog between the players and the DM, the D&D group creates an orally-constructed narrative working together. As Jesper Juul notes, “Games may spawn narratives that a player can use to tell others of what went on in a game session. Games and narratives can on some points be said to have similar traits. This does mean that the strong position of claiming games and narratives to be completely unrelated…is untenable” (Juul).

These narratives, of course, could be as simple as the group working together to defeat a fire-breathing dragon, or as complex as the group conducting a mystery investigation in a seaside town to uncover the “Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh.” Celia Pearce defines the story from a D&D session as an “emergent narrative, a story that evolves over time as a result of an interplay between rules and players” (149). While these narratives are extremely compelling to the players who “experience” them, and the DM who has constructed them as gameplay obstacles, they would rarely7 be of entertainment interest for anyone not playing, or of academic interest to scholars. In the documentary, “The

Dungeons & Dragons Experience, novelist and D&D adventure designer, explained the difficulties: “Developing novels off of game sessions usually doesn’t work because if you’re doing a plot line for a game it tends to go up-down, up-down, up-down,

7 Although not never; it would be arrogant to presume that in the millions of D&D sessions that have been played, no group has ever created an emergent narrative worthy of analysis. It just isn’t the point of (most?) D&D gameplay. The author has actually used a role-playing game system, Ben Robbin’s Microscope, to create a narrative for an academic paper. Bruner 14 up-down, whereas the plotline for a novel goes up steadily up in rising action to the climax then falling action. You don’t get that in a game.8” Weis is perfectly identifying the problem with the narratives created not only through D&D but through most game systems; game mechanics aren’t constructed to create compelling narratives, they’re (usually) constructed to entertain the players as their primary, and singular, mission. “The first and most important thing to know about games is that center on PLAY. Unlike literature and film, which center on STORY, in games, everything revolves around play and the player experience. Game designers are much less interested in telling a story than in creating a compelling framework for play” (Pearce 144). She also argues, that prioritizing game play, as well the necessity of gameplay to be interactive and communal is actually diametrically opposed to the creation of traditional narratives with clear narrative arcs and themes, “The key to game narrative is that it is, by definition, incomplete. It must be in order to leave room for the player to bring it to fruition. This is one of the primary flaws of applying literary or film theory to games; the authorial control, which is implicit in other genres, tends to undermine the quality of the user experience” (146).

The narratives created from a session of D&D are unlikely to justify literary analysis; however, it is the actual act of creation, which is an embedded and intrinsic component of

“emergent narratives” that forge an exquisitely intriguing form of storytelling (a form which, as we will discuss shortly, is becoming significantly more ubiquitous because of the rise of electronic literature and entertainment.) Two factors complicate game narratives. The first is that narratives created through gameplay blur the Foucaultian ideal of primary authorship.

8 Again complicating the generalization that emergent game narratives are not compelling is the fact that Weis, and co-TSR game designer, , actually did write a series of wildly successful novels based on their gameplay experiences. Their series of novels Bruner 15

Jennifer Grouling argues that role-playing narratives mirror another form of narrative currently rising in popularity, “However, in purpose, the TRPG9 is perhaps more closely related to fan fiction. Both gamers and fiction writers engage with popular culture to create their own texts. The sense of agency and authorship that players feel is one of the main reasons they cite for participating in TRPGs” (167). Both fan fiction and the emergent narrative of the role-playing game rely on the players simultaneously “writing” the narrative and “reading” the narrative, as it is shared, shaped, and experience around the gaming table.

The second factor which complicates analysis of emergent gameplay narratives is its intrinsic ergodic characteristics. Espen Aarseth coined the term “ergodic literature” to define works where “nontrivial effort is required to traverse the text” (1). He defines trivial efforts as those “…with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on the reader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic arbitrary turning of pages” (1-2). Although Aarseth’s

Cybertext was meant to provide new definitions for the digital age, his terms are perfectly appropriate for the tabletop RPG as well. All the players of D&D have (varying) powers to alter the trajectory of the story currently being “written/played.” Just as importantly, until the

D&D dungeonmaster presents the game world and the players utilize their ludic agency within it, there is no narrative. Like a computer game waiting for input from a player, D&D is a vacant text until the players realize its potential narratives. As Juul asserts: “The relations between reader/story and player/game are completely different - the player inhabits a

9 TRPG refers to “tabletop” role-playing game, in order to differentiate it from CRPGs or “computer” role-playing games. Bruner 16 twilight zone where he/she is both an empirical subject outside the game and undertakes a role inside the game.”

If Dungeons & Dragons is ergodic, but not literature; if D&D creates stories which are awkward but ontologically compelling as emergent narratives, how do we approach it as literary scholars? How can we conduct analysis without a traditional text? The answer, of course, is by examining the process through which D&D operates, through the title it brands itself with on the box which contains its rulebooks: a game.

“Literature is a combinatorial game that pursues the possibilities implicit in its own material, independent of the personality of the poet, but it is a game that at a certain point is invested with an unexpected meaning, a meaning that is not patent on the linguistic plane on which we were working but has slipped in from another level, activating something that on that second level is of great concern to the author or his society” (Calvino 22).

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4: Vault of the

D&D as a game

“If reading is active to begin with, it is not as different from gameplay as some would argue.

Ergodic texts are not limited to the digital.”

– Anastasia Salter

“The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.”

– Gary Gygax

Dungeons & Dragons is a game, something that its creator, Gary Gygax, was consistently adamant about. Despite the new storytelling mechanics, and emergent narratives of the role-playing genre he helped to invent, he never wanted to lose sight that

D&D’s origins were in wargaming, in the tiny miniature battles that had been pioneered by

H.G. Wells in 1913. D&D was created as a form of amusement; if scholars have become interested in role-playing games that was certainly not role-playing’s intention (but then, has that ever been the primary intention of art?).

The emerging field of digital humanities10 has brought a significant amount of attention to games; many of the first works of electronic literature, from interactive fiction to hypertexts, have been games. In popular culture, the amount of revenue generated by the video game industry dwarfs the film and novel industries. Even the term gamer has begun to

10 Like the scholarship on tabletop role-playing games, the term “Digital Humanities” is also still in its infancy. Ian Bogost’s prescient statement (on Twitter), “the field of digital humanities is the process of defining digital humanities” deftly illustrates this point. Bruner 18 lose any meaning, as games have become an ever present and ubiquitous element in our lives. From social games on phones to interactive games on commercial website, games are everywhere, and everyone is playing. This ubiquity has led to intriguing new scholarship not just on how gaming is affecting our everyday lives, but the aesthetic potentialities of our games (old and new).

In order to understand those potentialities, Ian Bogost’s defined the concept of

“procedural rhetoric” or “the practice of authoring arguments through processes” as a way to understand the singular nature of games to provide avenues for players to experience an author/designer’s point of view/argument, a reader of interactive narratives becomes complicit in the realization of a story by executing their agency to realize it. The reader- author is an actor within an ergodic text, practicing and experiencing procedural rhetoric. A story-telling game is not simply a text to be passively consumed, but a procedure that must be directly experienced. In her seminal book about the artistic possibilities of digital games,

Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray recognized gaming’s singular capacity for providing immersion (players in virtual spaces are surrounded by the fictional world), agency (as above, players are complicit in the realization of ergodic narratives), and transformation for players (through procedural rhetoric, no player can remain unchanged through the experience of a game). She also recognized D&D not only as an inspiration for digital games, but as an essential complement: “This youthful gaming world, which began with twelve-year-olds playing Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s11, has grown by the 1990s to include long-standing, organized role-playing groups composed of dozens of college students

11 Although D&D was certainly popular with “twelve-year-olds” in the 1970s, the game was initially marked toward a much older wargaming audience, and was never intended to be a game for children (even if children vastly enlarged TSR’s market.) Bruner 19 and young professionals…. the players share a sense of exploring a common fictional landscape and inventing their stories as they go along” (42).

While many of Murray’s ideas provide practical tools for academic analysis, she is also disadvantaged by being on the premature vanguard of 1990s techno-utopianism; many of the traits she defines as unique to games, especially immersion, could be applied to classic texts. Murray viewed games and digital entertainment as something entirely new, as offering new capabilities that analog texts and games were incapable of. Of course, as Salter notes, ergodic texts from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

(1759) to the popular “Choose Your Own

Adventure” (CYOA) Books of the 1980s

demonstrate that ergodic and ludic narratives are

neither new nor digital game’s interactive nature

completely innovative. Rather scholars such as

Salter, and Harry Jenkins, argue that games necessitate new approaches for analysis; they cannot be considered in the same way (as Murray often does) as the classic text. “Game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces … it makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects” (Jenkins 121, 129). Jenkins argues that games such as D&D are the “architecture” for the creation of narratives; again, we see games and their rules and limits as the procedural systems which make “emergent narratives” possible. Jenkin offers “…a middle-ground position between the ludologists and the narratologists, one that respects the particularity of this emerging Bruner 20 medium – examining games less as stories than as spaces ripe with narrative possibility”

(119). Jenkins is correct, games require new approaches to scholarship which abandon the

Quixotic quest for a settled and finite narrative within them, but instead respect their capacities for creating narrative; however, as Bogost has demonstrated, it is also not the narrative itself which is intellectually and aesthetically compelling, but rather the actual, constructed experience of play which is worthy of our study and attention.

If our new forms of electronic entertainment (which have inspired this new wealth of academic work on gaming) represent the encroaching, inevitable and inexorable invasion of the digital, D&D represents its analog predecessor, with all of the messiness, lack of refinement, and organicity that comes along with analog systems. The new scholarly tools we are fashioning to examine and explore ergodic and ludic digital texts and games are the same tools we can bring to an examination of D&D. We simply need to respect that where a digital game is processed through the binary equations of the personal computer, the fictional worlds of D&D are processed through the minds and imaginations of its players. “A video role-playing game, in contrast, provides a specific visual world with particular characters to interact with following a set of rules. The game cannot deal with any interactions it is not programmed to handle, unlike a Dungeon Master” (Salter 13). The concepts, however, of procedures and mechanisms at work – and at play – remain exactly the same, whether the processor is cold metal or warm, squishy flesh. “There is not one future of games. Bruner 21

The goal should be to foster diversification of genres, aesthetics, and audiences to open gamers to the broadest possible range of experiences” (Jenkins 120).

In a scholarly study of Dungeons & Dragons, we must first focus on how it constructs the foundations for its narrative architecture and the particular procedural rhetoric arguments that architecture compels in order to determine the effect of the “transformative” experience on its players. This thesis will concentrate on the former concern, by untangling the literary origins necessary for D&D’s singular narrative architecture. Before we entirely consider those origins, there is one trait of D&D which transcends both its narrative and ludic traits. D&D is not played on a fixed board, is not a solitary activity, and is neither simply read or told. In order for a game of D&D to be successful, it must also be performed.

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Part 7: Temple of the Frog

D&D as performance art

“Pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television. People want the convenience and instant gratification of turning on the TV rather than getting dressed up and going out to see a live play.” – Gary Gygax The final area to consider when approaching tabletop role-playing games such as

Dungeons & Dragons as art is their performance aspect, and like so many other qualities of

D&D is neither fluid or definitive. The amount of performance in a session of D&D will vary widely depending on the preferences of each group of players. On one end, there are the thousands of people who have taken the role-playing opportunities of RPGs to the extreme and conduct “Live Action Role-Playing”

(or LARP) games where players dress up in fantasy regalia and physically act out their characters’ actions. On the other

(and more common), are groups where the level of performance barely rises beyond players adopting a fantasy accent (Scottish brogues for dwarven PCs remains mystifyingly popular) for talking in character. Still, as D&D is a role-playing game, most DMs encourage their players to play their role to the level they feel confident doing so, which requires players to perform at some level. Salter asserts that “As a role-playing game,

Dungeons & Dragons relies on the players serving as actors in a rules-based drama with narrative emerging from action” (13). At some level, players model their D&D’s character’s dialog, motivations, and actions (and the DM does the same for the game’s antagonists). Bruner 23

Nathan Shank also asserts how DM and players are, in fact, are forced to maneuver between a pair of dynamic roles: “Unlike actors, though, players also act as themselves, switching back and forth effortlessly between the two identities...The term player-character is especially exemplary of this point, because it attempts to show that the player has two identities. But it is not so simple. The term becomes inadequate to signify the reality of a player’s relation to her characters. The “P” [Player] may change only slightly while the “C”

[Character] may change radically, as a player often goes through numerous characters in a

D&D campaign” (“Productive Violence,” 194). Shank is deftly identifying the identities that all members of a D&D session are moving between, which provides new questions (too large for this paper to answer) of how these shifting identities influence the procedure rhetorical experience of play. These maneuvers certainly antagonize player and DM to create and then consider both the “normal” roles they inhabit daily and the fantasy roles they create to advance the game.

However, like the emergent narrative of the D&D session is not particularly compelling as a literary work, the performance of a D&D session does not rise to the level of a compelling theatrical text. As always, gameplay reigns, and the experience of the player- actors filling their roles is a larger priority than creating a performance for an audience. In this case, the performer and the audience (like Shank’s binary player and character roles) are the same. Daniel Mackay was the first to consider D&D as a work of performance art, drawing attention to the performance aspects and their relation to the entire experience. He characterized these aspects as critical for the creation of D&D as “an episodic and participatory story-creation system that includes a set of quantified rules that assist a group of players and a gamemaster [dungeonmaster] in determining how their fictional characters’ Bruner 24 spontaneous interactions are resolved” (4) mirroring Jenkin’s model of games as narrative architecture. “Performance theorists have described role-playing games (RPGs) as a mode of collaborative storytelling, but the Dungeon Master’s activities start with designing the space – the dungeon – where the players’ quest will take place” (Jenkins 121).

In Mackay’s purview (and echoed by Grouling), however, the story’s participation is more important than narrative; players are asked to live through the experience, and the consequence of any narrative is less than unimportant, it’s irrelevant. By revealing a narrative story through direct and indirect participation, players are creating a new form of performance art, based on collaboration to attain shared (and sometimes antagonistic goals).

Mackay’s investigation focuses on the cultural, formal, social, and aesthetic aspects of the performance, juxtaposing elements of game theory, onto the production of D&D’s live theatre. As Gygax himself has stated, “The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.”

If we accept Mackay and Grouling’s argument that D&D represents a new form of

(performance) art which merges actor and audience while creating new avenues for experiential narrative building, we must then also include these elements into any academic query. We must consider the effect of the performative collaboration and participation of a gaming session on the players-actors who are working together to realize it. Dungeons &

Dragons is truly the three-headed chimera: a narrative-producing game system which requires participatory performance. Bruner 25

8: Temple of Elemental Evil

Introduction to thesis

“Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is a world.” – Gary Gygax

If we consider Dungeons & Dragons, or rather a gaming session of D&D as a form of art, we must recognize it as ontologically post-modern; the aesthetics of D&D resides simultaneously in its emergent narrative, its experiential gameplay, and finally, as an avenue for the performance of participatory collaboration. Even though D&D was designed primarily for the entertainment of its players, it is impossible not to recognize its singular capacities for offering new and transformative experiences in storytelling as an innovative new media, its ideas and strategies now adopted by much of our emerging electronic literature.

My thesis will examine the literary origins of Dungeons & Dragons, especially within the context of “Appendix N,” D&D co-creator Gary Gygax’ list of the texts which directly inspired the diegetic world, and its monstrous denizens, of Dungeons & Dragons. This thesis examines how a game designer appropriates texts for use in an interactive world and play space, how those disparate texts complement or antagonize each other, and why pulp fantasy with its mythic archetypes is so efficacious for the creation of a role-playing play space. As we conduct this investigation, we will always consider it within its three equally compelling aesthetic attributes and constraints (as narrative architecture, within the procedural rhetoric of a game, and as facilitator for transformative performance). D&D is Bruner 26 neither just a story, nor just a game, nor simply improvisational theatre of the fantastic; D&D offers entire alternative worlds to read about, play inside of, and act upon. We will now examine how those worlds came to be, by looking at the stories, and literature, that fueled the imagination which created those worlds.

Bruner 27

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