Running head: ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 1 The Pictures are So Much Better: Cross-Media Trends and Orality in Dungeons & Dragons Nicholas J. Mizer COMM 663 Texas A&M University Running head: ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 2 “It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, ‘Because the pictures are so much better.” -Gary Gygax (Schiesel, 2008, p. 1) Running head: ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 3 THE PICTURES ARE SO MUCH BETTER: CROSS-MEDIA TRENDS AND ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS Introduction Despite having over thirty years of history with which to work, the academic study of role-playing games (RPGs) has been overwhelmingly synchronic. There is an acknowledged world of difference between the pulp-fantasy influenced original Dungeons & Dragons game of 1974 and its MMO1-derived edition released in 2008, but very little understanding of what those changes actually entail. Many of the changes to RPGs are best understood when examined in light of changes to related media such as film, video games, and literature, each of which have their own dynamic histories that intertwine with the history of RPGs. This paper documents changes in the form of tabletop role-playing games since their invention in 1974 and correlates that development with a shifting relationship to fantasy in other media. Although many role-playing games have played important roles in the history of the medium, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) will provide the case study for this analysis. D&D serves as an excellent focus for two main reasons: as the first role-playing game it provides the greatest time depth in which to study changes to the medium; further, D&D has consistently been the most popular RPG and is the natural choice for establishing a baseline understanding of the medium as a whole. After providing a brief overview of the Dungeons & Dragons and the nature of RPGs I will summarize the relevant work of two authors, Daniel Mackay and Walter Ong. Mackay has the distinction of being one of the few researchers to consider the cross-media dimensions of 1 Massively Multiplayer Online,” a computer game type exemplified by Blizzard’s popular World of Warcraft. Running head: ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 4 role-playing games, although his study tends to emphasize questions of content, rather than those of form addressed in this current study. Ong, while not a game researcher, has developed a robust theoretical framework for understanding media forms. His work on the characteristics of orality will help to illuminate the often underappreciated implications of RPGs' dynamic relationship with orality. Because Ong leaves room for varying degrees of “residual orality” in media it is possible to describe the game as more oral at some points in its history than at others. Following this literature review I will present a quantitative analysis of references to other media in Dragon magazine, a popular hobby publication, from 1975 to 2004. Changes in both the frequency of these references and the specific media referenced provide insight into the cross-media dynamics of this time period. Changes in the frequency and balance of these cross- media references provide a guide for understanding changes to the form of the game itself. Tracking these changes in form can prove a complicated endeavor, because the way players used the game varied between regions, and even between various groups of players in the same area. This variability cannot be dismissed, but the current analysis relies on materials published by the game manufacturers, TSR and Wizards of the Coast for an understanding of the predominant trends. These rulebooks and adventure modules provide, at a minimum, data on prescriptive recommendations for game play. More optimistically, they can also be taken as generally suggestive of the medium as practiced by the majority of players at any given time. Adventure modules offer an especially rich picture of the medium because they are more closely connected with the actual performance of the game. Where rulebooks provide a generalized framework of how the game can be used to create and experience narratives, adventure modules provide blueprints for a specific set of adventures. As the medium has changed, the nature of Running head: ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 5 these blueprints has also changed, reflecting different models of how players could use the medium to generate narratives. The evidence suggests that as D&D developed players increasingly drew on other media to aid both their understanding of the game and to provide models for negotiating the narratives they created through the medium. In this process a shift occurred in which players relied increasingly on visually-oriented media, promoting a gradual decrease in the residual orality present in the original form of the game. This shift affected nearly every facet of game play, but the specific areas addressed below are changes to the negotiation of the game world, the narrative structures produced through play, and the development of characters within that narrative structure. A Brief Overview of Role-Playing Games History of the Medium Role-playing games derive from a combination of miniature war games, fantasy literature, and oral storytelling. Miniature war-games, first documented in 1811 as a training tool for the Prussian military, involve the use of small figurines or tokens that represent military units or individual soldiers in the simulation of tactical warfare (Mackay, 2001, p. 13). These simulated skirmishes are mediated through the use of rules quantifying the relative strengths of opposing forces and typically use dice to simulate the vagaries of chance in determining the outcome of battle. In the twentieth century amateurs took an increasing interest in this form of play, and in 1915 H.G. Wells produced Little Wars, the first war game designed for amateur recreation. This adaptation proved highly succesful, and war gaming developed into a popular hobby over the course of the next forty-five years (Mackay, 2001, p. 13). Running head: ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 6 For most of the history of these games, players re-enacted famous battles from various historical periods, but it was the medieval setting that would prove most influential to the history of RPGs. In 1968 a group of war gamers gathered together in Minneapolis-St. Paul to play “little medieval games, a very dull period of war games” (Fine, 1983/2002, p. 13). The leader of the group, Dave Wesley, modified the standard rules of the game to give each player individual goals and strengths by having them play the roles of specific knights or kings (Fine, 1983/2002, p. 13). One of the players in Wesley’s games, Dave Arneson took this concept to another level: I was the first one to come up with a violation of the basic concept of warfare of the period. We were fighting an ancient game. Very dull again. And I'd given the defending brigands a Druid high priest, and in the middle of battle, the dull battle, the Roman war elephant charged the Britains and looked like he was going to trample the army flat, the Druidic high priest waved his hands and pointed this funny little box out of one hand and turned the elephant into so much barbeque meat (Fine, 1983/2002, pp 13-14). Thus was fantasy introduced into this new, more personal type of wargaming. Arneson went on in 1970 to start what is generally recognized as the first role-playing campaign, Blackmoor. The primary innovation of Arneson's campaign was the introduction of the “dungeon crawl,” in which players took on the roles of individual heroes exploring an underground labyrinth (Fine, 1983/2002, p. 14). At this point Arneson's innovation was limited to his own circle of players, and their form of play had not been fully systematized into a fully organized set of rules. This systematization came about as Arneson began corresponding with a fellow member of the Castles and Crusades Society (a medieval war gaming enthusiast club), Gary Gygax (Fine, 1983/2002, p. 14). Gygax and Arneson collaborated on a set of rules for this new type of play and in 1974 they published the new game through Gygax's gaming company, Tactical Studies Rules (TSR). The full title Running head: ORALITY IN DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 7 was Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, and it consisted of three booklets: Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness. The verbose subtitle hints at how new this concept was within the gaming community, as they had no ready words to afford a simple description. The concept took hold fairly quickly, however, and Gygax and Arneson began expanding and modifying the rules with new releases. Depending on how one tallies these releases, there have been as few as nine or as many as eighteen editions of D&D. Major edition changes under the original published, TSR occurred in 1978 with the introduction of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) and Basic D&D, and in 1989 with the second edition of AD&D. After TSR went bankrupt in 1997, another gaming company called Wizards of the Coast purchased the rights to D&D. Wizards has issued two major editions to the game: Third Edition in 2000 and Fourth Edition in 2008. Some of the specifics involved with these successive releases will be discussed below, but essentially each release of the game represents changes to the medium and how it is used to create narrative and ludic experiences. The Invisible Rules of Play The release of the original D&D, which have been affectionately labeled “the Little Brown Books,” established a basic framework for RPGs that has remained fairly stable even to the present day.