There is little to no
literature from academic sources that discuss role-playing gamers or gaming
directly. What little literature there
is tends to focus in on the specific game, Dungeons and Dragons. Being the single largest game in the
role-playing genre, Dungeons and Dragons, and any studies about it, can
be seen as fairly representative of role-playing games in general.
When role-playing games were
just becoming a huge phenomenon and it was apparent that it was not just a
simple leisure industry fad, Gary Alan Fine approached the role-playing gamer
community, became a part of it (claiming to have played in over 300 hours of
role playing during) and studied it from the inside for three years. The end result was his book Shared
Fantasy (1983). Fine’s book is a
look at the role-playing game as a social phenomenon and he explores the hows
and what’s of the role-playing game and it’s attendant subculture. Through the course of the book Fine does two
truly wonderful things; first he breaks the game and gamers down into frames
and second he looks at the way the members of the subculture interact amongst
themselves and how they recruit and exclude others.
Fine claims
that there are three different frames that the members of the subculture work
within. The first is based on the
everyday perceptions of the world around them, a sort of common sense
frame. The second is in terms of the
game itself; they are aware of the game’s guidelines and must use these to
separate themselves from the common sense frame while playing the game. The last frame is situated about the
characters themselves. Unlike most
games where the pieces of the game are thoughtless, inanimate markers, the
character in a role-playing game is the representation of a living, breathing,
creature that has some sense of will and acts according to its
surroundings. The character is aware of
knowledge that the player may not have and so this must be kept in mind as the
player delves further into the third frame in order to play the character
appropriately (Fine 1983 p. 186). What
makes this so important is that it lays the groundwork for understanding the
various levels at which the members of the subculture interact.
Fine
spends a great deal of time looking at how the members of the subculture
interact and how they increase their numbers while limiting who is allowed
in. His exploration of interaction is
largely based on his multiple frame structure of the role-playing game. He notes that the common sense frame, which
also encapsulate their everyday lives outside of the game, is largely ignored
by the subculture except where it impacts the game itself (i.e. the real world
keeps the individual away from the game for a time). This is true to the point that the gamers within a group may know
very little about the life of any other player outside of the game itself (Fine
1983 p. 55). The social interaction of
the group mostly takes place within the last two frames through discussion of
the game or the interaction of characters.
Recruitment,
according to Fine, comes from three different source; “change in culture” –
wargamers slowly converted to role-playing as the hobby developed; “common
interest” – role-playing gamers often share interests with other subcultures
such as sci-fi / fantasy literature, military history and the Society for
Creative Anachronism; “Interaction Opportunities” – someone they knew
introduced them or they saw it in a store (Fine 1983 p. 47-50). Any one or more of these conditions could
lead to a person trying out role-playing games and becoming a member of the sub-culture. Interestingly, Dancey claims from survey
data that it appears that a person is most likely to stay a part of the culture
if they play for at least a year while those who do not rarely even try to
return (Dancey 2000). This suggests
that Fine’s suggestion falls short in that there also seems to be a duration
constraint for inclusion into the sub-culture.
When
it comes to exclusion from the subculture, Fine focuses primarily on the
absence of women in the role-playing gamer culture. He believes that women tend to be excluded for the most part
because of the violent and often sexist behavior of the characters within the
game. He points to instances of
slaughter and rape as prime examples.
He goes on to suggest that women gamers make the male majority
uncomfortable, forcing them to reign in their regular character activity and
making them dislike female participants (Fine 1983 p. 65-71). Fine notes that the majority of women gamers
are either the spouse or girlfriend of a male participant.
Although
his book is nearly twenty years old and role-playing games and role-playing
gamers have changed since he performed his study, Fine’s Shared Fantasy
remains a benchmark in academic work on the subject and is considered a
baseline upon which most later studies of the subject were built upon.
Daniel
Dayan’s review of Shared Fantasy, titled “Copyrighted Subcultures
(1986),” focuses in on the questions that Fine’s work suggests. What Dayan sees as horribly lacking in the
book is any developed discussion of the psychological aspects of the sub-culture,
noting that the closest Fine gets is his introspective look at his reaction to
certain events that he witnessed in the course of playing the game. He references multiple areas that could be
better understood through the use of some psychological profiling (such as the
discomfort felt by male gamers when women are playing).
The
other area that Dayan feels Fine did not pay enough attention to is cultural
interpretation. He believes that the book would have been more complete if Fine
had attempted to develop an explanation for its place in society and how it
interacts with other cultural phenomenon.
Dayan does not leave this bit unanswered and gives examples of how the
settings presented in most fantasy settings are medieval in nature and
represent a social climate where, ruthless and violent behavior is not only
allowed but encouraged. In his example
he implies that the popularity of such an environment in the subculture
suggests that there is a desire for such conditions in the real world. When looking at the changes in some popular
culture Dayan suggests that role-playing games have had a tremendous impact on
modern culture or they are a “very sensitive index of the transformation
undergone by [modern] culture (Dayan 1227).
Another approach to the
role-playing game has been to look at it as an art form. In an article by David Novitz titled
“Disputes About Art (1996),” it is suggested that the role-playing game is a
new, if unaccepted art form. He
suggests that the reason it has not gotten acceptance is really two-fold, first
it is a game and therefore considered not capable of being art and second that
most adults do not have the emotional, chronological or mental capital
available for role-playing games and as a result it tends to be dominated by
adolescent boys and young men. He
believes that the interaction and imagination involved in the process
classifies it as art as much the same way that poetry, music and a theatrical
performance would be considered art.
Daniel Mackay expands on
Novitz’s idea in his book The Fantasy Role Playing Game: A New Performing
Art (2001). Mackay’s intent for the
book is to show how role-playing games should be seen as an art form and he
does so by attempting to create a basis for further discussion on the topic of role-playing
games and their attendant culture through the understanding of four different
areas; the cultural, formal, social and aesthetic structures.
In discussing the cultural
structure he looks at the history of the role-playing game, its development and
its interaction with other forms of popular culture which he says a number of
forms, including role-playing games, have become part of an “Imaginary
Entertainment Environment” (Mackay 29).
By placing role-playing games as a part of this environment alongside
other art forms such as movies, literature and comic books he has leant it a
sense of credibility that place it in the auspices of art.
It is the rules and playing
of the game that Mackay looks at for his section on the formal structure. He argues that when broken down the
role-playing game is like a play that is being written as it is performed. The rules set certain boundaries, although
they are mutable, but the character interaction reads like a script and it is
the performance of the players in the part of these characters that bring it to
life and make it art.
When Mackay
discusses the social structure he takes the three-framed view of Fine and
expands upon it. He adds a fourth frame
(for narration), but insists that frames are too rigid a concept. He notes that through the course of
performing a role-playing game the people playing interact in all of the frames
at once, flowing in and out of frames at will with seemingly little distinction
being made or needed by the other players.
He goes on to discuss the enjoyment received from the game and the
positive social interaction that takes places during a game, further qualifying
it as art.
The
final section on the book, which discusses the aesthetics structure ties the
other sections together and binds them with an argument about the qualities of
the narrative as a performing. In time
I believe that this book will gain the appreciation as a new benchmark for the
study of role-playing games, as it discusses how the role-playing gamer
sub-culture interacts with other cultures and opens the door for further
consideration.
A
considerable amount of work written about role-playing games and the people who
play it has to do with the negative representation of the topic. Many approaches are psychoanalytical in
nature such as Armando Simón’s report “Emotional Stability Pertaining to the
Game Vampire: The Masquerade (1998),” Douse and McManus’s “The
Personality of Fantasy Game Players (1993)” and Carter and Lester’s study
“Personalities of Players of Dungeons and Dragons (1992).” Through the course of these studies it was
found that those who play role-playing games do not suffer from higher levels
of depression, suicidal tendencies or psychoticism than the average
person. However, it was found that they
tended to be more introvertive and had lower sense empathic concern for
others. Certainly these studies tend to
point away from some of the negative stigma that has been attached to
role-playing games and those who play them.
For a sociological approach
to the negative view of the sub-culture I turned to Kurt Lancaster’s article
“Do Role-Playing Games Promote Crime, Satanism and Suicide Among Players as
Critic Claim (1994)?” In the article
Lancaster explores the question posed in his title by looking at some examples
of discrimination against gamers based on suppositions of wrong doing or
potential wrong doing, as well as the arguments for and against such games. Having looked into the arguments posed by
different religious and personally afflicted groups he directs his attention
towards the various studies conducted to determine whether or not these claims
were true. In all cases the results
showed that there was no evidence of role-playing games, no matter how often
played, would lead to behavior that would induce a player to commit a crime
join a cult or kill themselves.
Not all research has been into the negative effects of role playing. Separate reports by John Hughes (1988) and Wayne D. Blackmon (1994) suggest that role-playing games can be used for positive therapeutic treatment. In both studies role-playing games were used to deal with debilitating depression and obsession and ultimately created breakthroughs in the treatment of the mental health issues of the individuals studied. The requirement of role-playing games of visualization and character development seemed to be of the greatest assistance in their treatment.