On one narrative form's reliance on improvisation and participation
The Idolum Quarterly
Winter 1995
At first-glance, role-playing games seem to exist in a definitional gray area of sorts. We use the word "game" to describe them, but the comparison falls short under examination. When we think of games, we think of activities that define an end and establish clear criteria for winning and losing. Role-playing games provide nothing so structured; in fact, their extremely loose, subjective format is what turns some off from the entire idea. Some dislike that you can never really win a role-playing game; others want their games to concretely end. Some get stuck on the very first question: "What do you do in a role-playing game?" This is an easy question to get stuck on, because, genre expectations aside, the rule is, succinctly, "You do whatever you want to do." It is a rule dense with ambiguity and possibility, and when a lot of people play games, those aren't the kinds of rules they want.
So if role-playing isn't really a game, what is it? We could simply call it a hobby or pasttime. However, that wouldn't truly explain the intensity of engrossment that it can create. Nor would it take into account the activity's inherent reliance on story that is obviously absent in other hobbies such as RC model building or fishing. No, role-playing is art. A look at its potential as an art form, as well as what makes it different from other mediums, will help us use it to its fullest potential.
Two grossly simplified characteristics which define art are useful for this discussion. First, an art form is capable of carrying thematic content; it comments on the world outside of itself. Art exists for art's sake, but it is still inherently an interaction with the world, and it is the reality of the world that gives art power. The exact meaning of "thematic content" is obviously contestable, but it can be as accessible as desired. A Hollywood romance film's thematic content is obvious: love conquers all, to thine own self be true, etc. Conversely, abstract art also depends on content, although the audience unfamiliar with the conventions of abstract art may have difficulty seeing any.
Role-playing can obviously carry thematic content. A willing observer can find comments about violence, glory, and loyalty in even the most pedestrian role-playing session.
Second, appreciation of an art form demands an emotional investment on the part of its audience. The efficiently written word processing program is not art; it can be certainly be appreciated, but in a way that depends on more logical principle. The audience besides the artist may not truly exist, but it always implied.
Enjoyment of role-playing depends on emotional investment on the part of its players. Certainly, role-playing is a fundamental failure in other aspects. It is a poor substitute for the exacting realism of simulation games, and its lack of structure makes it barely passable as a purely competitive activity. Even the simplest role-playing, motivated only by treasure and experience, still requires an emotional investment. Enjoying that treasure and experience, after all, requires an identification with your character that is never expressly required in the rules.
In the case of role-playing, the characteristics of thematic content and emotional investment exist due to the primacy of story. The importance of story over rules is what distinguishes role-playing from the traditional game.
The traditional game is based upon the premise that all players will work for a pre-established goal. The goal, whether competitive or cooperative, provides both the structure and the motivation for playing.
Players do often attribute meaning to traditional games. On an abstract level, this occurs with games such as chess or go, because, much like the tarot deck and the I Ching, they are so innately symbolic that they are highly predisposed to individual interpretation. 1 On a more concrete level, this occurs often with games that are close simulations of a recognizable reality, such as war games.
Simulations often create an interesting tension between meeting goals and telling a story. This tension often appears in Car Wars, which can be played as role-playing but is most popularly a traditional game. As a traditional game, Car Wars' objectives are quite simple: Destroy lots of other cars, try to be the last surviving car. In a purely calculating manner, it would make sense to hold out for the chance of winning in every game. However, many players will play in a suicidal manner when confronted with sufficiently slim odds. As opposed to preserving their odds and letting the others fight it out, they would rather have no chance and choose the most possible dramatic death, whether it be head-on collision or fiery explosion.
At the moment, the Car Wars player becomes a poor traditional game player but a good role-player. At the cost of completely playing the game, the player chooses instead to tell a story, albeit one of limited scope and depth. Infusing a traditional game with thematic content is certainly an enjoyable way of playing, but doing so is not actually part of the game itself; it is instead another level of interaction above the game rules. A computer can (or will soon be able to) play traditional games as well as most humans, because such games are fundamentally contests of luck and calculation.
Role-playing, on the other hand, has no established goals. The conflict between playing the game and telling a story is eliminated and the lack of a winning condition fuses the two purposes into one. To tell the story is to play the game. For a role-playing game to be a satisfying experience, it must be engrossing, even though the engrossment does not have to be total or continuous. 2 It isn't limited by genre; you don't have to be engrossed in "a bold adventure across a forbidding land to rescue a beautiful princess." You just have to be engrossed in whatever the story is. This is, of course, the point of participating in any narrative art form, as audience, artist, or both.
Establishing role-playing as art is more than semantic bickering; such an evaluation has consequences of its own. If we are to welcome role-playing into the often pretentious, occasionally transcendent universe of art, we should evaluate how it stands up to other mediums; we should consider what makes role-playing fundamentally different from other ways of expression.
A unique aspect of role-playing is its reliance on the random. Randomization is usually avoided in most artistic work, but improvisation can be considered random enough for our purposes. The making of split decisions is not truly random, but the more improvisational a performance becomes, the harder it is to predict its next turn with any accuracy.
The point of improvisation is to force the performer out of comfortable habits, in the hopes that her split second decisions will cause her to express herself in a way that might never have been planned. The actions of players and referees in role-playing cannot be predicted perfectly, and their reactions to one another are a perfect example of improvisation at work.
The second and more obvious example of the random in role-playing is the use of dice. This is hardly inherent to the activity, as the recent interest in various diceless forms of role-playing prove. However, it is widespread and ingrained enough to deserve consideration.
Unlike the actions of other participants, the rolling of dice is entirely random. Game rules are, of course, applied to match dice rolls with our expectations. Nonetheless, dice rolls are essentially uncontrollable, and many stories have been drastically altered from what any player intended by a chain of lucky or unlucky rolls. If the referee does not overrule these rolls outright, the participants are forced to improvise, scrambling to realign the story into something coherent.
In addition, there is room for interpretation, and this interpretation forces another level of improvisation upon the players. Dice and the numbers they rely on are meaningless. There is obviously nothing inherent in the '20' side of a 20-sided dice to make it more valuable than the '1', but if you play a game where it signifies a critical strike on your opponent, it may become a valuable side to you, to the extent that you might bless you dice, or "train" them by setting them '20' side up when not rolling them. 3
Most role-playing rules systems are developed sufficiently to guide players as to how to interpret dice in most cases. Still, there are always a lot of gray areas. If a player makes a skill roll by a large margin, for example, the referee may wish to interpret that as the character succeeding in her skill by a correspondingly large margin. This is a deceptively difficult problem, even though it corresponds to what we know about the real world and the variable nature of success. For once you, as the referee, have decided to rate all successes, you have placed a tremendous burden of interpretation upon yourself. This is usually overwhelming for the beginning referee, but a skilled referee can, just like any good improviser, ride the tide of luck and player whim alike, adapting continually until the story is finished. Hopefully, the provided story will be better, not worse, for the strain of constant interpretation.
It would be misleading, however, to romanticize the role of dice. They are ostensibly for conflict resolution, and often relieve the referee of the burden of considering every single variable. Still, almost any use of dice can force a player to consider details that might have otherwise gone unconsidered. In his supplement Central Casting: Heroes of Legend, Paul Jaquays relies extensively on this fact of role-playing. He provides copious charts for randomly creating a character for medieval genres, yet never overlooks the importance of interpretation: "The dice rolls establish random links between ideas that I would otherwise overlook. The dice don't do the thinking for you, they instead give you things to think about." 4
Another unique characteristic of role-playing is the importance it places on participation. Role-playing traditionally has no outside audience, and this is easy to understand given the fact that it depends largely on imagination and provides little for an outside audience to observer. The players and the referee provide the audience, and two implications follow from this. The first is the possibility that role-playing is inherently an art form suited only for participants, and can only be enjoyed in that capacity. We usually perceive art as being a relation between a clearly separated artist and audience. Art which considers only the artist as audience, such as doodling in notebook page margins in class, is usually perceived as much more casual. If role-playing is inherently only suited for self-directed art, then perhaps its potential is limited somewhat as a result.
The other implication is the question of what level a player needs to be at to enjoy role-playing. The outside observer is only separated because he is not directly involved in the creation of the story, but this is the normal demand made of the audience. If role-playing can only be enjoyed by a participant, then it would seem that while the story is important, it can hardly be interesting without the thrill of being personally involved. This level of involvement is unique to role-playing among art forms.
This level of involvement, however, creates an interesting tension between group interaction and individual character development. The vast majority of role-playing games are played with a group of players, as opposed to simply one or two. This accentuates both the chances for interaction inside the game and the sociability of the activity in the real world.
Role-playing becomes problematic, however, when it reaches the level of the individual character development that is the cornerstone of other narrative art forms, such as prose and film. Individual character development depends on a concentration of both game time and real time on one character, and the concentration on one character and player will bore the other players. In a novel or a film, this is never a consideration. If, while directing Hamlet, the director were confronted by the actor playing Horatio with a demand for more lines, it would be considered ridiculous. The play is simply about Hamlet, not Horatio, and some roles are subservient to others.
Role-playing creates different expectations. Players quite reasonably demand that their characters have roughly equal importance in any session, and, failing that, they demand that they at least get an equal portion of playing time.
There are a few ways to conceptualize this. Role-playing can be considered a pragmatic art, comparable to architecture or fashion. It is an art form, yet it must also serve its external demand of including all participants, just as a work of architecture must be physically inhabitable. In this way, including all players equally can be considered an external demand which the story must occasionally serve.
From another angle, such an expectation can be considered arbitrary, interfering with role-playing's artistic potential. From this point of view, there is a similarity between players' demands that they have equal playing time and action film audiences' demands that there be at least one climactic explosion. This implies that role-playing would be improved if players simply accepted the possibility of, based on character development, having a lot more or a lot less playing time than others.
However, if we accept the possibility that role-playing as an art form depends inherently on the participation of its players, and that the artistic experience actually recedes when players aren't directly playing, then participation is more than an external demand or an arbitrary expectation. With that belief, participation becomes the very reason you role-play in the first place. Certainly no role-playing can reasonably involved every player at every instant, but if you aren't participating enough, you might as well be reading a book, or watching a movie, or listening to music.
Despite the efficacy of this concept, it still presents a problem. Obviously breadth of participation is not the last measure of role-playing. Participation must be judged by quality as well as by minutes. And for a story to be believable, it usually requires that some players not play at times, unless you believe that a group of five adventurers would be so chummy as to do absolutely everything at the same time for every day of their lives. So participation must be balanced against believability and depth of story.
Role-playing is an art form, but is not just any art form. Because of its reliance on improvisation and participation, it offers a unique aesthetic experience. Attempts to improve the quality of role-playing have to take this into account—it is not enough to try to make it like a movie or a play. It is unique among art forms, and recognizing that fact is the first thing that needs to be done.
1 Dave Sim's comic book Cerebus offers a few poetic and interesting examples, in which a philosopher treats life as a chess game, defining the innate meaning of each piece (Flight), and a Pope defines the world in terms of Diamondback, a fictional card game created by Sim (Church & State I).
2 Gary Alan Fine, Shared Fantasy, p. 4. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1983.
3 "The beliefs of game players [about the control of dice results] are akin to belief in magic ... Players recognize that this is a 'superstitious' belief; yet, because they need to control the uncertainty, they do believe, at least within the context of the game." Fine, ibid., p. 92.
4 Paul Jaquays, Central Casting: Heroes of Legend, p. 11. Jaquays Design Studio, Jackson, Michigan, 1988.