Michael Hancock is the Book Reviews editor on First Person Scholar. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Currently, his grey matter is engaged in writing a dissertation on the use of image-based and text-based rhetoric in videogames.
“What has been learned from games can and should be used to envision more of our world than the odd hours occupied by the actual playing of games” (355). – Chuk Moran, Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-playing Game. Ed. Gerald A. Voorhees, Joshua Call, and Katie Whitlock.
Disclaimer: One of the essays in this volume, “The Lord of the Rings Online: Issues in the Adaptation of MMORPGs,” was co-authored by Neil Randall, director of the Games Institute, and a close affiliate with First Person Scholar.
If you’re immersed in game studies long enough—or just interested in videogames in general—you’re bound to pick up certain acronyms. FPS. RTS. MMO (or, if you’ve really been around long enough, MOO or MUD). And RPG, the abbreviation for role-playing game. In consideration of the quotation above, just what does the RPG have to offer us in terms of thinking about contemporary living? The answer may be a negative one; on the one side, the RPG has its roots in Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy stories, and those roots in turn lead to J. R. R. Tolkien, who famously declared that the use of fantasy was escapism. And on the other side of the Dungeons and Dragons relation, you have statistics and numbers, which lead to horror stories of obsessive grinding and wasteful time commitments. In their anthology on RPGs, Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game, editors Gerald A. Voorhees, Joshua Call, and Katie Whitlock provide no definitive answers, and, indeed, any definitive answers for such a complex question should be suspect. What the book offers instead is three sections, sixteen chapters, some four hundred pages on how games commonly labeled as RPG are “designed, played, and made relevant to contemporary society and culture” (18). And while the book tends to dwell on particular areas of the RPG catalog more than others, the quality of the essays make it worth reading for anyone working on a game that fits under the RPG umbrella—and their variety offer several very interesting yet very different potential answers to our question.
Chapter-by-Chapter
The book starts with a brief introduction, or rather, two brief introductions, the first of which introduces the series on genre and videogames with a quick discussion of the history of genre discussions in videogames and an admission of how slippery the term can be. The second gives a brief history of the RPG and lists some of its common factors, including fantasy and science fiction settings, statistic-based leveling systems, and a commitment to narrative or dramatic underpinnings, as well as outlining the major sections and chapters of the book. The first section is “Game Master,” and consists of five essays loosely based around the theme of design. The first of these is Adele H. Bealer’s “Eco-Performance in the Digital RPG,” in which she coins the term “gamescape,” a method of studying games that emphasizes ecocriticism, space, and performance. Her game of choice for exploring these connections is Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits, a 2003 PlayStation 2 game. In particular, the game’s use of dual protagonists fighting over environmental scarcity encourages the player to explore the consequences of opposing groups failing to manage a dwindling resource. Joshua Abboud’s “The Pathways of Time: Temporality and Procedures in MMORPGs” is an ambitious attempt to use World of Warcraft to explore, through Derridean deconstruction, how temporality works in MMORPGs. In particular, he argues that the gaps in time created by people constantly going offline and online, waiting for quests, and so forth means that time is never quite continuous on an individual player’s level—but it can be considered continuous in terms of the feedback loop between player and game, demonstrating in a minor way how games explore new concepts of time.
Alice Henton, in “Games and Narrative in Dragon Age: Origins,” argues that the game foregrounds the failure of archives, which in turn makes the player consider what it means for a digital technology to rely on such devices; as one example of many, she offers the dwarves of Orzammar, whose rigid approach to their archives represents and reinforces their society’s cultural stagnation. As Henton notes, Lev Manovich characterizes the archive as database as in conflict with narrative, but RPGs such as Dragon Age, with their in-game codex and out-of-game wikis, demonstrate how the forms can work together. In “When Language Goes Bad,” Douglas Schules investigates the linguistic confusion erupting from the poor localization of the 2009 DS game Lux-Pain, which is so muddled that the game itself seems uncertain whether it takes place in North America or Japan. However, Schules argues that the resulting dissonance allows a new perspective of a game, by confronting the player with the ideological assumptions that the linguistic errors expose. Finally, rounding up the section, Neil Randall and Kathleen Murphy explore adaptation in Lord of the Rings Online. After a careful consideration of how adaptation theory can, in turn, be adapted to game studies, they argue that LotRO demonstrates a comprehensive expansion, elaborating on the majority, if not all, of the lore depicted by Tolkien.
The book’s second section “In Character” is about playing RPGs, and the first essay of the section is Katie Whitlock’s “Traumatic Origins.” Whitlock argues that the amnesiac trope in Japanese RPGs such as Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy VII, and Final Fantasy X is used to walk the player through a consideration of trauma and loss in relation to memory. Moreover, each game takes a slightly different approach to memory, presenting it as a matter of recollection, involuntary force, and haunting, respectively. The seventh chapter is Andrew Baerg’s essay on neo-liberal rationality and the computer RPG. Using Neverwinter Nights 2 as his main example, Baerg argues that not only is the classic D&D-based RPG rooted in, above else, maximization and risk management, but also that in doing so, it’s simply imitating contemporary culture. He concludes on the point that no matter how much one tinkers with the quest narrative form, if the underlying mechanics maintain their neo-liberal roots, then the execution will be mired in quantitative risk management. In another Derridean-based analysis, Zachary MacDowell adapts Chang’s version of “postal” to argue that the Fallout series is less a post-apocalypse in the sense of coming after the end times, and more in the sense of an infinite approach to total revelation. The player always experiences the configurations of the game through the avatar, that which is and isn’t the self, which in turn means that the experience with the game continues, but is never complete.
In the second half of the section, Benjamin Friedline and Lauren B. Collister use a qualitative study to investigate the intersection of power and language in World of Warcraft. Through a close study of four in-game transcripts, they find that in-game prestige grants players the privilege of being more aggressive or collaborator y as they see fit, but even low-ranked players can amass power by using language in subversive ways, such as insisting on using all-caps to exchange pleasantries in a trade channel. In her essay on Dragon Age: Origins, Zook argues that the game employs two primary cognitive narratives: life is blood, and, as a generalization of that, the body is a container. The metaphors surface in different ways, such as in blood magic, the Warden initiation ritual, and the frequent body-shifting and possessions featured through the game. The section ends with Roger Travis’ epic style, wherein he states that there is a connection between the oral bardic tradition and Bioware RPGs, in that in both cases, players and singers make specific choices set against the backdrop of the overlying narrative system. The difference is that in Bioware games, the player’s relation is quantified through some form of a slider measurement, and, Travis argues, the player’s relation to this slider reflects their relation to the game’s main cultural topic, whether it’s the light/dark measurement and society or self in Knights of the Old Republic; paragon/renegade and North American exceptionalism in Mass Effect; or the relationship measures and the powers of State in wartime in Dragon Age: Origins.
The book’s third and final section is “Out-of-Character,” and consists of five essays. First is Vorhees’ essay on neo-liberal multiculturalism in Mass Effect, in which he argues that the first two games in the series promote multiculturalism, but only as long as multiculturalism can be related to the player’s sense of value; he reinforces this point by noting how the game’s final scene ties directly to paragon/renegade point accumulation, and how the multicultural mix of a player’s squad team is based on who is most useful in a given combat situation. Christopher Douglas continues the multicultural discussion, by claiming that World of Warcraft—and WoW scholars—fail to distinguish between culture and race, and in doing so, it’s following the lead of major literary figures from Maxine Hong Kingston to Toni Morrison. Trent Hergenrader, in “From Meaning to Experience,” claims that Digital RPGs can do a better job in teaching students to write than the workshop method, and elaborates by describing how he used Fallout 3 and its sprawling online wiki to teach students to focus on experience, character, and decision. Joshua Call considers how narrative fulfillment and game progress both motivate players, with a discussion of metagaming knowledge, and obtaining the best ending in Suikoden II. Last, the book concludes with Chuk Moran’s essay on generalization, capacity, and the digital RPG. Essentially, he claims that capacity, what a game will allow a player to do, tends to overshadow other registers of identities in a given game, and players become overly focused on enhancing that capacity, through better equipment or the accumulation of experience via retroactive merit rewards. In a bit of a turn, he ends the essay claiming that there are similarities between this capacity configuration and social networks like Facebook, a key difference being that Facebook is more about systematizing social fantasies and gaining merit through post frequency and accumulation.
Conclusions
Some essays are a bit heavy on the jargon side, and some appear to have only a slight connection to a given game they’re discussing, but that sort of thing is almost inevitable in a sufficiently large anthology book. As I mentioned in my review of Utopic Dreams and Apocalyptic Fantasies, a successful collection of essays must balance unity of topic with diversity of perspective. On that basis, this book is a success. Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens has a fairly broad topic, but a unified one in its study of RPGs, and between Foucauldian studies of neo-liberalism in Neverwinter Nights 2 and qualitative analysis of World of Warcraft, I think it covers diversity of perspective fairly well.
What’s curious, however, is that there is slightly less diversity in the choice of games. Of the sixteen chapters, there are two feature Fallout, three World of Warcraft, and five center around games developed by Bioware. These games are, of course, worthy of study and it can’t be argued that they hold particular significance in contemporary gaming. But their emphasis makes the book’s absences more notable; the earliest game that receives a large amount of attention is the 1999 Suikoden II, and games ranging from Ultima to Planescape: Torment to Chrono Trigger could certainly have fit in this volume for their relevance to RPG history and on their own merits. Further, the games considered are ones that are definitely RPGs (with the possible exception of Mass Effect for its FPS mechanics). Given the series’ focus on genre, a consideration of more borderline RPGs including the puzzle story game Catherine, the high school simulation game series Persona and even The Sims (it has a leveling system, after all, and a narrative drive) would have been interesting test cases to consider what it means for a game to be given the RPG label.
That said, the essays included certainly raise enough discussion fodder on their own. The other element that struck me as particularly interesting about the essays, as a group, is that they weren’t for the most part using game studies. That isn’t to say that they didn’t quote very esteemed game scholars in the appropriate places, from Jesper Juul and Tanya Krzywinska to Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. But their theories were never the backbone of discussion; rather, the authors preferred to take their theoretical bases from other realms, including Foucault, Derrida, anthropology, performance studies, and so on. I don’t think it’s a failure on the authors’ part—rather, I think it’s more productive to think of it as a failure of game studies as a discipline, and as an interdiscipline, whatever that may mean. To return to my original question, what does the RPG have to offer us in terms of thinking about contemporary living, I think these essays offer several possibilities. Hergenrader demonstrates the creative pedagogical potential. Douglas and Vorhees offer the implicit cultural reflections. And Vorhees, Baerg, and to a lesser extent, Moran, provide powerful arguments for how the very form of RPG mimics larger societal ideologies like neo-liberalism. That all of these engagements happen with game studies at the periphery may suggest that either game studies has failed to address these issues, or that there has been a failure to convince a greater scholarly body that it can address these issues. Personally, given the presence in game studies of theoretical approaches including Ian Bogost’s persuasive rhetoric, Mary Flanagan’s activist games, and McKenzie Wark’s gamer theory, I think and hope it’s the latter.
But I’m drifting rather far from the book at hand at this point. To sum up, then: Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens is a book of considerable size and quality. While the individual section divisions don’t quite work, and individual essays have their flaws. On the whole, the variety of arguments and approaches do credit to their subject. While I personally would have preferred a bit more depth in terms of the games they covered, both in age and in variety, I can’t deny that this is a very impressive collection and one well worth demonstrating the depth and significance of the digital RPG.