The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art

by Daniel Mackay

Overview

Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu.

Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780786408153
Publisher:	McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Publication date:	03/14/2001
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	215
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.43(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Daniel Mackay holds an M.A. in performance studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	xi
	Foreword	xiii
	Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Role-Playing Game	1
	The Role-Playing Game: Defined, Described, and Systematized	4
Part 1	Cultural Structure
	Origins: From War Games to Role Games	13
	Novel Ideas: AD&D and Dragonlance as a Case for the Role-Playing Game's Reciprocal Relationship with Fantasy Literature	17
	A Recursive History: The Role-Playing Game's Dialogue with Popular Culture	20
	A New Category of Popular Entertainments and a New Kind of Sandbox: Playing in Imaginary-Entertainment Environments	26
Part 2	Formal Structure
	Interface Design: The Machinery Manufacturing the Ghost in the Machine	37
	Enabling the Performance in Every Way: Everway as a Case Study in Role-Playing Game Interface Design	40
	Spheres of Performance: A Taxonomy	48
	Drama: Inscription, Transcription, Prescription	49
	The Theater and Performance of the Game: Frames of Interaction	53
	One Word, Two Ears: How the Theater of the Role-Playing Game Narrative Exists within the Sphere of the Role-Playing Game Performance	57
Part 3	Social Structure
	The Structural Foundation of the Role-Player's Subjectivity	63
	The Role-Playing Game Convention: Festival Subculture	69
	Context [right arrow] Intertext [right arrow] Hypertext: Role-Playing Games as Systems of Cultural Allusion	73
	The Structuralist Activity within the Cultural Sphere: Making the Score in the Liminal Mind	76
	Strips of Imaginary Behavior and the Assemblage of the Character	79
	The Theater of the Mind: A Phenomenology of the Role-Played Performance within the Theater Sphere (the Performative and Constative Frames)	85
	The Imaginary Script: A Phenomenology of the Role-Played Performance within the Script Sphere (Narrative Frame)	87
	If As If: The Role-Played Performance within the Script Sphere (Narrative Frame)	88
	Structures of Power	92
	What Leaks? The Archiving of the Player-Character	98
	Mopping Up: The Archived Player-Character in the Ongoing Narrative	106
	Shared Substance, Emancipation, and Discipline	107
	The Efficacy of Entertainment	109
	Becoming the Spectator	117
Part 4	Aesthetic Structure
	The Theater of Events: Narrative as Aesthetic Object	121
	The Implied Narratee: The Role-Playing Game Performance and Ergodic Literature	131
	Ars Ludica, Ars Significans: Wherefore the Insistence of Aesthetics?	135
	Dividing to Conquer: Demiurge in the Mind	136
	Aesthetic Dementia: Frosting and Defrosting the Windows of Otherworldliness	150
	Epilogue: The Paradigm for Analysis of a New Performing Art	157
	Afterword	161
	Notes	165
	Bibliography	185
	Index	193

Editorial Reviews

veritable cookbook of gameology. Buy it...there is no other book out there that covers this topic so accurately, with so much application to actually gaming...Mackay really tells it like it is...detailed”—Rpg.net; “the most serious book on its subject so far”—Interzone.

From the Publisher

"the most serious book on its subject so far"

Interzone

veritable cookbook of gameology. Buy it...there is no other book out there that covers this topic so accurately, with so much application to actually gaming...Mackay really tells it like it is...detailed

Rpg.net

A scholar in performance studies, Mackay argues that a major part of role-playing and the role-playing game is a performance art. He offers a framework for a critical model to understand the genre, especially in terms of aesthetics, and identifies the cultural, the formal, the social, and the aesthetic structures. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews