Munchkins, Lit-Snobs, and Role-Playing

First Edition Basic Set (by Bryan Costin)What is it about the activity of role-playing that makes non-gamers scoff? Is it the game’s association with overweight, drooling, thirty-something social rejects who lock themselves in their mothers’ basements for hours on end? I grant that these individuals do exist and continue to thrive as Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and its hordes spew out collectible card gaming supplements every month. These filthy gamers are bloated rules-leeches, the offspring of Magic the Gathering, power-gaming, munchkin min-maxers obsessed with exploiting trivial game mechanics. Like all sex-obsessed egoists, these gamers get a rise out of winning the one form of competition they know they cannot lose. Tolkien said in his essay “On Fairy Stories” that “Mythology is not a disease at all, though it may, like human things, become diseased.” There is much to be said about the nature of munchkins without having to resort to criticizing WotC’s overlords (Hasbro in particular) for catering to the video-gaming crowd in order to better their games’ mass-market appeal. For one, real role-players are not gamers. That is, “real” role-players do not role-play because they want to game.

I’ll qualify the claim. Role-players indeed play games. In fact, they love games; it’s their primary form of entertainment. “Gamers” like board games, card games, video games, computer games, tile-based games, word games, war games, miniature games, games of logic, games of wits, and games of strategy, although they are generally disinterested with traditional games, detest games of physical prowess and shy away from party games. “Gamers” are a reclusive breed of people who find the game mechanics of the ostensibly real world to be fairly mundane, as the characters (read: themselves) who they’ve been “assigned to play” were screwed out of good physical attributes during character creation (e.g., Charisma). Begrudgingly, we make room for the occasional outliers, such as Vin Diesel or Daryl Hannah, because these robust super-gamers might as well be fiction.

Dreaded Third Edition (by Tony Case)

Fantasy arises from something I like to call “mythic truth.” The difference between mythic truth and factual truth is the difference between subjective and objective reality. Mythic truth is verifiable only by an imaginative intelligence—it exists simultaneously alongside factual truth in the world of everyday experience. All the stories we create, including the fantastic ones, have a discernible source in factual truth and yet they tell us something about ourselves plain facts can’t express. Role-playing exists entirely to articulate the meaning of the mythic image, and, like storytelling, operates in the world of mythic truth. Tolkien got to the heart of what role-players want out of the game when he wrote about “sub-creation.” Tolkien said this was more than just Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”:

What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it… If you are obliged … to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying … to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed.

The Wizards of the Coast (by Robert Scales) Role-players are not gamers because the term role-playing game (RPG) is a misnomer. Though Dave Arneson and company more or less invented the recreation as we know it circa 1970, what I’m interested in here is not the “game” part. Role-playing is about telling stories in collaboration; in role-playing, the traditionally solitary craft of the author becomes a social performance. By “craft,” of course, I mean the writing of the story. The author of a text normally interacts with a “Reader,” who the author assumes (whether consciously or subconsciously) exists as she writes her text. The unique situation in role-playing is that the assumed “Reader” is an actual Reader, because the dungeon master (DM) is writing for her players. But unlike the author’s text, the dungeon master’s text does not need to be complete in order to be consumable by its readers. The story is actively shaped by the DM’s players, who are, in the sense of Author-Reader relationship preexisting readers, as she collaborates with them. For the DM, the act of storytelling is different than the act of creating a “secondary world” in one fundamental way; instead of having to escape into the secondary world, the DM and her players enable a world of mythic truth to coexist with its objective counterpart.

Among literary elites, I know that the aversion to role-playing stems from its association with “speculative fiction.” To these readers, science fiction and fantasy are not classified as “literary fiction” because of their fantastic ambitions. Like role-players, literary elites constitute a self-loathing niche of institutionalized outsiders, who, unlike role-players, rebuke these genres as generally lacking in “multidimensionality” of meaning (a criterion for canonical texts that holds that everything must be subject to nauseatingly endless interpretation). The “writer-artist” shuns popular fiction with the same bias that the non-gamer shuns role-playing. And so according to both parties, the literary domain of RPGs, which is both the domain of past and future, dwells in the lowest rung of Dante’s Inferno, past the falsifiers and among the betrayers, just beneath Satan’s ass frozen in Cocytus.