The Narrative on the Borderlands

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.” – Gary Gygax, (RPG Deity, Co- creator of Dungeons & Dragons) Bruner 2 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 Dave Arneson, 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. Bruner 6 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.

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