Fictional Actual Play

[Tav_Behemoth]

I've been making an effort to read some modern genre fantasy, and one of the ones I picked up was Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame, which I originally read when it was published in '83 as The Sleeping Dragon. I dug it when I was younger because it's a classic RPG wish-fulfillment fantasy: college students playing a RPG are magically transported into the world of the game.

What struck me on re-reading it is how dysfunctional the gaming group is. It's run by an autocratic professor-GM who won't let players into the game if they're a minute late and terminates campaigns without warning, and there's intense social/romantic rivalry and dominance behavior between players. Rosenberg writes that the group has "All the dynamics of a kindergarden", and presents & analyzes them pretty unflinchingly.

Now, this provides dramatic steam for the novel, but I have to think it also reflected the author's own experience of roleplaying, and that he expected it'd resonate with the audience for the book. Certainly, it didn't stick out in my mind when I was 13 the way it does now.

The other example of roleplaying in fiction that I can think of is Poul Andersen's novella "The Saturn Game". The group here is quite well-adjusted as I recall; the idea is that roleplaying helps astronauts pass the time & escape the confines of their ship during a multi-year trip to Jupiter. Andersen wrote this at around the same time (early '80s), but it seems likely to me that his experiences were more based on the SCA than  tabletop play, which may have been a more healthy social milieu.

In his novella it's the activity of roleplaying itself that's dysfunctional - inspired by correspondences between the Saturnian moons and the world of their fantasy, some of the astronauts drift into diceless play over their suit radios on a mission, causing an accident. It's hardly a blanket inditement of roleplaying, though, more a wistful meditation on how fantasy & lyric creativity can be incompatible with the adventures of real life.

Anyone else know of examples of roleplaying in fiction that might provide insights into how it used to be done/portrayed?

[clehrich]

Andre Norton, Quag Keep.  I don't remember much about it, except that the transported players only half-remember that they were ever anything but the fantasy characters.  Oh, and they have these little unremovable bracelets that have polyhedral dice that spin sometimes....

[rafial]

Melissa Scott, Burning Bright.  A far future RPG played in VR under the auspices of a RPGA like organization comes into conflict with real intrigue outside the game.

[Blankshield]

Niven and Barnes: Dreampark (and it's sucessors).

I would say there isn't disfunction per se (certainly not in a GNS-sense of the word), but more that there is the full range of character archtypes that one could/would expect from a mystery novel set in an RPG/sci fi setting.  It's certainly a wealth of information about how gamers are often perceived, or were in the late 80's/early 90's.

thanks,

James

[Tav_Behemoth]

I haven't read that Melissa Scott; will have to check it out. How closely do you think it's modeled on real-life roleplaying experience and culture?

Dream Park is definitely an important example and shows some clear grounding in gaming convention culture. It's also a good early statement of a super-common trope in fiction about VR -- "it started as a game, but now people are really getting killed for (one more-or-less plausible reason or another).

It might be interesting to think about why this trope is necessary: why does fiction about gaming so often draw its electric charge by shorting out the gap between the player- and character-levels of the narrative -- by making the fantasy the characters are acting out become real via magic, murder, etc? Even "The Saturn Game" does this in an oblique, sophisticated (and somehow thus not as vicscerally satisfying) way.

[jdagna]

It might be interesting to think about why this trope is necessary: why does fiction about gaming so often draw its electric charge by shorting out the gap between the player- and character-levels of the narrative -- by making the fantasy the characters are acting out become real via magic, murder, etc? Even "The Saturn Game" does this in an oblique, sophisticated (and somehow thus not as vicscerally satisfying) way.

This is just the nature of any entertainment media - make the issues as charged, personal and immediate as possible.  It's why the news would rather report a fatal apartment fire than an abandoned warehouse burning down and why technology of any sort is more often portrayed as threatening than friendly (when the reality is that most technology is neither - it's just there).

So I wouldn't try to draw too many inferences about an author's actual gaming experiences based on how they write about it.

[rafial]

I haven't read that Melissa Scott; will have to check it out. How closely do you think it's modeled on real-life roleplaying experience and culture?

Well, here's Melissa Scott talking about her influences:

Where did this one come from? Well, for once not from books I was reading, but from my long-standing love of role-playing games, coupled with a visit to the Iowa Playwrights Festival where my partner was one of the critic/responders. Listening to playwrights, actors, and directors talk about the collaboration that goes into making a play sounded like some of the same things that go into making a role-playing session work, and brought me back to RPGs. So I read a lot of them (didn't get to play many, alas): GURPS and its supplements, Cyberspace, Pendragon, Shadowrun, AD&D, Space 1899, Vampire, etc.

It's been a while since I read it, but I recall I found it more convincing than many of the "RPG gamers live their game" books that I have read.

[clehrich]

Oops.  Guys, we forgot Rona Jaffee, Mazes and Monsters, which turned into a TV movie with (I think) Tom Cruise (a very young Tom Cruise).  It sucks, but it does fit the category.

Interestingly, it does also bring up a couple of classic dysfunctional tropes.  From this discussion (and others), I see two big ones, which aren't always quite the same thing but often come as a pair; I also see a couple of smaller ones:

1. The GM is a domineering, arrogant, and in some sense charismatic individual.  Almost invariably male.  Has some sort of power and authority over the players that goes farther than just running the game.  Very often significantly older than the players.

2. The line between "fantasy" and "reality" blurs or disappears.  This is a constricting cycle: far from liberating the players to their desirable fantasy world, the projection traps them into a world of cycling violence and horror.  Actual people get killed or badly hurt, not just characters.

And...

3. Sexual tensions among players manifest clearly in play.

4. Players' personal difficulties and problems become character drives (I recall the dwarf berserker in Rosenberg's thing whose player is in a wheelchair; he digs down into his personal rage and frustration at his trapped state in order to produce the berserker fury).

I think clearly 3 & 4 are variants of 2.

Note that I've never heard of Melissa Scott, much less read her.

Certainly this is all in some sense dysfunctional, but I don't know that it's necessarily inaccurate either.  I have seen 1, 3, and 4 in actual play, albeit not 1 to such an extreme as in Rosenberg.  I know lots of players who genuinely get tetchy when 2 raises its head; I myself find LARP stuff totally unattractive partly for that reason.

#1: The Cult of the GM
#3: The GM's Girlfriend; also, the Couple Who Play Their Spats
#4: (I forget, is this a Drama Queen?)

Surely this issue has been discussed on other threads to some degree; anyone have good search-fu?

[Paul Czege]

Hey Tav,

Another one is Hobgoblin, by John Coyne.

Paul

[Mike Holmes]

Oops.  Guys, we forgot Rona Jaffee, Mazes and Monsters, which turned into a TV movie with (I think) Tom Cruise (a very young Tom Cruise).

Heh, I talk about this film all the time: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084314/

It's Tom Hanks in the lead role. Of all people. :-)

The thing that always gets me about the movie is how I thought it was a really odd representation of RPGs, because the players spoke in the second person: "Kalmar the thief checks for traps." Basically play in the movie sounds like what I think a session of Puppetland is supposed to sound like.

The interesting thing is that, years later, I now do a lot of the same things. Moreover, I now realize that it's odder to say, "I check for traps." I think the traditional first person is far odder than the second person, now that I have more perspective.

That said, it was also the ritualistic tone that the movie takes with play. Which is how it explains to the average viewer how somebody could get so hooked as to become suicidal over such a thing.

Like Chris says, terrible film in some ways. But absolutely fascinating in a sort of historical context.

Mike

[John Kim]

For film, there is also Cloak & Dagger ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0087065/ ).  More minorly, role-playing appears in E.T. ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0083866/ ) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 ( http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0083866/ ).  

On the one hand, I think that most fictional views of subcultures are going to highlight the dysfunctional aspects -- like, say, regional theater in Waiting for Guffman or folk music in A Mighty Wind.  On the other hand, it seems like the views of role-playing are more mean-spirited than these -- lacking a positive side.  Role-playing is seen as a retreat, a poor substitute for real life.  To my mind, sexual tension and bringing in personal issues are sources for positive aspects of role-playing, not dysfunction.  If one were to make a positive movie about role-players, it would have to show positive affects on real life -- i.e. finding love, working out personal issues, etc.

[Vaxalon]

It's really rare for a subculture to be portrayed positively in an element of mainstream culture.

[Mike Holmes]

Oh, that reminds me of a related movie, Gotcha! (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089222/)

Basically a movie about a game of "Killer!" that becomes something more. Anthony Edwards and Linda Fiorentino as college students.

And, yep, the gamer is a virgin. Classic.

Mike

[M. J. Young]

It might be interesting to think about why this trope is necessary: why does fiction about gaming so often draw its electric charge by shorting out the gap between the player- and character-levels of the narrative -- by making the fantasy the characters are acting out become real via magic, murder, etc? Even "The Saturn Game" does this in an oblique, sophisticated (and somehow thus not as vicscerally satisfying) way.

If the movie is going to be about gaming, it has to create some kind of conflict from the gaming itself. E.T. contains D&D in part of it, but there's nothing particularly interesting about the fact that a batch of high school kids are playing D&D. How do you get conflict surrounding a role playing game?

I'm reminded that there was an episode of The Greatest American Hero in which a foreign prince was the target of kidnappers, but no one could find him because he was involved in some sort of vast campus RPG/LARP that had him all over the place. No one in the game would tell them how to find the kid, so they had to play the game to figure out where he might be. At one point they brought in the game's designer to help them figure out where everything was, and he was something of a major geek. In that case, though, the conflict was created by having the safety of a person threatened but the supposed secrecy of the gaming group was protecting him from the villains, from the knowledge that he was in danger, and from the help that was trying to reach him. The gaming itself, although very different from any RPG I'd ever encountered (it was heavily LARP but was an ongoing campaign with a very gamist agendum) didn't seem socially dysfunctional, and many of the gamers seemed like ordinary people involved in a sometimes goofy campus game.

So there's an example in which dysfunction wasn't the drive to the story. The game created the setting in which the events of the story occurred, and so was very much part of what was happening, but it could as easily have been an elaborate scavenger hunt or something.

--M. J. Young

[Latigo]

LOL at "Hobgoblin"...a classic "geek revenge" story line.

I seem to remember that the main character / GM in Hobgoblin would cheat in any way needed to keep the girl in the book interested in gaming with him.  The girl was portrayed as not being able to understand the rules, but was a clever player who would think outside the box.

As far as other D+D inspired works?  If we have "Mazes & Monsters" on the list, then I have to submit the classic "Dark Dungeons" pamphlet by Jack Chik http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.asp

Best,

Pete