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+ Ritual Discourse in Role-Playing Games
+
+ by Christopher I. Lehrich <[8]clehrich@bu.edu>
+
+Introduction
+
+ Theoretical analysis of RPG's remains largely cut off from other
+ theoretical discourses, a situation that tends of itself toward sterility.
+ Two reasons for this isolation predominate. First, RPG theorists come from
+ a wide range of educational backgrounds, and as such have no shared body
+ of theoretical models or discourse on which to draw. Second, RPG theory
+ hopes to serve a constructive function, rather than a purely analytical
+ one: where the anthropologist for example traditionally understands
+ herself as necessarily exterior to the people and situations she analyzes,
+ the RPG theorist wishes to employ the results of his analysis to improve
+ his own gaming.
+
+ The former difficulty need not concern us unduly. So long as theoretical
+ models from outside current RPG discourse receive adequate formulation and
+ explication in RPG terms, only an a priori hostility to other theoretical
+ constructs would dismiss them out of hand. It is worth considering that
+ such hostility does appear mutual -- that is, much RPG discourse
+ formulates itself in opposition to academic theoretical discourse, while
+ many academics continue to express disdain and scorn if not outright
+ hostility for role-playing games as an activity -- but resolution of this
+ can only come about in a historical situation as yet hard to imagine. Thus
+ I shall set the issue aside, stating only that I intend to explain fully
+ whatever theoretical constructs I deploy.
+
+ The second problem, however, inheres in the nature of RPG's themselves. A
+ purely theoretical analytical model of RPG's, i.e. one without any
+ practical application whatever, will generally be received poorly, if at
+ all, within RPG communities. Indeed, even RPG theorists who go to
+ considerable lengths to formulate the practical implications of their
+ models are sometimes derided as airy pseudo-intellectuals. Fortunately,
+ some recent RPG publications by members of the theoretical community have
+ received accolades,[9][1] and this will presumably have the long-term
+ salutary effect of legitimizing theoretical work within the hobby at
+ large.
+
+ At the same time, analyses of RPG's have come to formulate practical,
+ essential divisions and categories, and argued that these may be
+ unbridgeable. For example, Ron Edwards's tripartite GNS model rests upon
+ the notion that the three categories must remain discrete in order to
+ avoid paradigmatic clash and attendant misunderstandings among players,
+ leading in turn to poor play. That is, a group of players with strongly
+ Narrativist tendencies should be wary of playing a strongly
+ Gamist-structured game, or introducing into the group a player with such
+ an approach. While "hybrids" -- games that effectively serve more than one
+ of the three major play-types -- are conceived as possible, a central
+ point for Edwards is that Narrativist-oriented play is not well-suited to
+ Gamist-oriented games, and that groups who attempt such may need to revise
+ the game extensively to fit their needs. Similarly, a single player who
+ cannot conform to the paradigmatic norms of the group in which she plays
+ will probably find herself continually at odds with other players, leading
+ to social conflict; this player would be best advised to find another
+ game.[10][2]
+
+ In his recent article "Story and Narrative Paradigms in Role-Playing
+ Games,"[11][3] John Kim argues that underlying such categories we find two
+ approaches: "Collaborative Storytelling" and "Virtual Experience." These
+ tend, like Edwards's categories, to remain divided. In what Kim calls
+ "Paradigm Clash," we find a naturally-occurring conflict between
+ perspectives:
+
+ To the storytelling point of view, the experiential view seems to result
+ in an unnecessarily limited set of techniques. . . . Experiential play may
+ also seem passive, letting events happen rather than actively controlling
+ them. . . . [Conversely,] To the experiential point of view, storytelling
+ play seems to be creating a product for a nonexistent reader. . . .
+ Experiential players faced with storytelling play may complain about
+ breaking suspension of disbelief, or lack of depth.
+
+ Conflict arising from disjuncture, narrative or otherwise, is not only
+ theoretical. Most gamers have experienced it, and one great strength of
+ Edwards's model (derived from the earlier Threefold Model developed in the
+ Advocacy newsgroup[12][4]) is to emphasize recognition and classification
+ as means to avoiding the problem. In both his and Kim's models, players
+ and groups who recognize their preferences in a categorical sense can
+ select games to fit their desires, or revise them so, leading to enjoyable
+ play with a minimum of fuss and trouble.
+
+ While I support this general constructive point, and do not presently wish
+ to challenge the classification itself (a much-contested issue), I suggest
+ that a hard-line division within analysis leads toward weaknesses in a
+ general understanding and formulation of how RPG's really function. By
+ drawing on some theoretical models outside of RPG's, I would like to
+ propose a more unified model of RPG narrativity.
+
+ A word about practicality: I do not, in the present article, formulate the
+ practical implications of this model for game design or play. I do not see
+ this as a weakness in itself: if the model serves analytically, it can
+ have synthetic value. But the two operations have at least a notional
+ distinction, and can operate well in isolation. If theory must face a
+ practical proof-critique, then all analysis is already crypto-synthesis;
+ logically speaking, there is thus insufficient distance postulated to
+ ensure the validity of the analysis. In short, without the ability to
+ distinguish at least heuristically between theory and practice,
+ theoretical work can never have real logical force, lending weight to the
+ criticisms mentioned at the outset.
+
+ A further point: I intend to propose a ritual model for RPG play, based
+ upon recent understandings of ritual within the academic discourses of
+ anthropology, sociology, and history of religions. This model would appear
+ to fall squarely into the common discourse of analogy as theory, of
+ proposing that RPG's are "like" something else in order to help emphasize
+ a point otherwise unclear. Such analogical reasoning is founded upon an
+ essential methodological principle: the analogy is not identity. Thus
+ response to the proposal is constrained to two related moves. On the one
+ hand, one may move to expand the analogy, picking up additional aspects of
+ the metaphorized object or activity and further relating them to RPG's; on
+ the other, one may move to limit the analogy, demanding that the metaphor
+ not be taken to the point of absurdity.[13][5]
+
+ Some find this mode of analysis useful, primarily in a creative sense. If
+ one "gets" the analogy, in its logical extension and intension, one thinks
+ about the hobby in a somewhat new way, perhaps leading to new creative
+ engagement with design or play. But if one does not "get" the analogy, the
+ tendency, naturally, is to dismiss it as unhelpful, or to reformulate it
+ endlessly until one does "get it." Either way, the reason to analyze such
+ a metaphor is generally synthetic, to create new ways of engaging with the
+ hobby. In other words, the proposal of yet another analogy serves no
+ analytic function.
+
+ In proposing a ritual model of RPG's, I do not wish to add another analogy
+ to the lists. I do not mean that RPG play is like ritual at all; I mean
+ that it is ritual. Therefore classical and recent tools of ritual analysis
+ apply fully to RPG's, for analytical purposes, for making sense of RPG's
+ as something other than an entirely isolated hobby, indeed for seeing
+ RPG's as a human cultural product not particularly distinctive to modern
+ society. If to some this seems a claim that RPG's are not special and
+ extraordinary, I suggest on the contrary that this grants to RPG's a
+ legitimacy and "specialness" attendant upon their roots in wider humanity
+ and culture.[14][6]
+
+Ritual
+
+ An obvious first step in proposing this model is the formulation of a
+ definition of ritual. Unfortunately, perhaps, such definitions have been
+ the focus of extensive debate for more than a century now, with no clear
+ end in sight. More models have been proposed of what ritual "is" than many
+ readers might believe. I have no intention of summarizing this whole
+ history; I will instead simply propose a starting-point.
+
+ The above-mentioned disjuncture between "Collaborative Storytelling" and
+ "Virtual Experience" parallels, in a number of respects, two recent
+ emphases in ritual theory.
+
+ Virtual Experience correlates well with Ronald Grimes's and Victor
+ Turner's focus on "performance," which ultimately amounts to a notion of
+ total involvement in ritual activity.[15][7] In ritual, according to this
+ perspective, humans engage the totality of hearts, minds, and bodies,
+ setting them to work creatively and dynamically to produce effects within
+ the social and mental worlds of the participants. Thus in zazen (Sitting
+ Zen), one does nothing but sit, generally in an approved posture; one's
+ mind and heart should be similarly focused on nothing but sitting, not in
+ the sense that one should think continuously, "I'm sitting," but rather
+ that one's mind should be in a state parallel to the body's state,
+ thinking nothing, resting, yet remaining alert and awake, receptive to
+ outside contact. In the Catholic Eucharist (Mass), to take a quite
+ different sort of example, liturgical tradition emphasizes that the
+ communicant should be fully involved in the process, such that when the
+ miraculous transformation of the substance of wafer and wine
+ (Transubstantiation) occurs, and when in fact the communicant receives
+ these into the mouth, it is not only one's body that receives the body and
+ blood of Christ, but the totality of body, mind, and soul. Thus this
+ understanding of ritual emphasizes what in RPG terms is called
+ "immersion," a total involvement in the activity. Failure on this score
+ would be seen as ineffective (zazen), impious (Eucharist), or shallow
+ (RPG).
+
+ The Collaborative Storytelling model is less obviously commensurate with a
+ ritual model. Two directions, however, support this formulation. First,
+ there is Claude Levi-Strauss's structuralist interpretation of mythic and
+ ritual thought as bricolage, and second, there is the movement largely
+ associated with Pierre Bourdieu, Sherry Ortner, and Catherine Bell toward
+ understanding ritual as "practice" (or "praxis" in the more overtly
+ Marxist formulations).[16][8]
+
+ Levi-Strauss's idea, in simple terms, is that cultures think like oddly
+ artistic hobbyists. [17][9] Imagine you have a basement full of stuff from
+ which to build whatever you like. You have bits of old machines, things
+ your neighbors threw out, scraps of wood, and tail-ends of old projects,
+ as well as the taken-apart bits of all your old projects. Now you decide
+ to build something, and you have some ideas -- aesthetic and practical --
+ about how that should be done; you are very skilled and talented, and can
+ see possibilities in all sorts of things. But you do not have a Home Depot
+ available, or you consider it "cheating" to go buy things. At any rate,
+ you have to build the thing you're going to build from what you already
+ have in your basement.
+
+ A nice example is a Rube Goldberg cartoon, though those are deliberately
+ silly. You fly a kite, and the kite string pulls a lever, and this pushes
+ an old boot, and that turns on your iron, and the iron burns some old
+ pants, and smoke goes into a tree, and.... A brilliant example is the
+ recent Honda advertisement called "the cog," which can readily be found on
+ the Internet.[18][10] The point is that one constructs an elaborate
+ machine out of bits and pieces already owned.
+
+ Levi-Strauss's point is that each object used contains its own history;
+ that is, the iron has already been used for something and the bricoleur
+ then gives it a new use. The iron, to focus on the single example, is a
+ local source of heat; it can burn pants, or make a grilled-cheese
+ sandwich, and of course can press a shirt. But it cannot be a
+ refrigerator. And if, clever person that you are, you pull the heating
+ coil out of the iron for some project that requires a heating coil, your
+ iron now contains the history of its usage: it is now a heating coil and a
+ heavy weight.
+
+ Every sign in myth and ritual, says Levi-Strauss, is like this iron, and
+ every living mythic culture is like this bricoleur. When faced with a
+ (social) situation, an intellectual problem of whatever kind, the
+ bricoleur begins by running through his memory (the basement) to see what
+ he already has that can be used to solve the problem. He then builds the
+ machine that solves the problem, in the process incorporating the entire
+ history of every object in question, and furthermore altering (however
+ slightly) each object so used; when he goes to build something else, later
+ on, the current project will be part of the history of each object.
+
+ Technically speaking, every sign is thus constrained and yet free. On the
+ one hand, it is not constrained to the degree of a percept, a particular
+ contingent mental encounter with an actual object; this percept is what is
+ called a "perception" in the formalist model to which Kim refers. A
+ percept is entirely constrained, because when a person looks at a given
+ object on two successive occasions, his or her mental equipment has
+ altered -- to use a cliche, one cannot enter the same river twice. At the
+ same time, a sign is not fully liberated, as is a concept, an idea arising
+ in reaction to a particular person's connections to a percept: when I look
+ at the lamp on the table, I may think of my grandmother (who perhaps owned
+ a similar lamp), and thus "grandmother" is a legitimate conceptual link,
+ but no such connection may arise for you, and even if it did, it would be
+ a different grandmother. So a sign (Levi-Strauss means the Saussurean
+ version of the sign) is both constrained (the iron cannot be a
+ refrigerator) and free (it can do a whole range of things involving local
+ intense heat). In Levi-Strauss's linguistic analogy, this iron is a sign
+ in the same way as a word is: the word "iron" can mean a range of things
+ (the metal, the instrument) but it cannot mean anything at all.
+ Furthermore, this word only acquires meaning by its relations to other
+ words: if I say "iron," you do not know until I go on with "a pair of
+ pants" what sort of meaning I intend, even whether it is a verb or a noun.
+
+ The other approach I want to bring up, "practice" theory, arises from a
+ number of rather technical difficulties with structuralism, and amounts to
+ an attempt to understand manipulation of signs and symbols in strategic
+ yet controlled ways. With respect to ritual, practice theory argues for a
+ continuity among behaviors, as against the disjuncture of ritual from
+ other modes of action. The signs used in ritual, that is, acquire meaning
+ from their extra-ritual contexts, and furthermore the special meanings
+ accorded to them in ritual carry over into other modes of life.
+
+ From a practice perspective, every ritual contains within itself a number
+ of structures, just as in structuralism; these structures are in essence
+ the Rube Goldberg machines constructed by the bricoleur. As we know from
+ Levi-Strauss, the iron can be replaced by any other source of local heat,
+ since its only function in the machine in question was to create smoke by
+ burning a pair of pants. Thus the machine has a structure, requiring a
+ number of elements, but the specifics of which objects or signs are used
+ to fill those element-slots are open. What interests practice theorists is
+ strategic choice: how do people decide whether to use an iron or a space
+ heater?
+
+ Broadly, the question in practice theory is how people choose, from a
+ limited range of culturally-available options, which techniques to apply
+ at a given moment. This depends on strategy: we want to maximize rewards
+ in a specific situation. But in order for strategy to work, we have to
+ play the game; that is, one cannot go outside the structure of the system
+ to manipulate signs as one likes, because to do so annuls the power of the
+ strategy in the first place. Thus every strategic use of signs is at once
+ a free, liberated exercise of power by a situated person, and at the same
+ time a contribution to keeping the system stable and intact without
+ significant change. The possibility of real change is thus undermined by
+ the very strategies which seek to change the system, because they depend
+ for their efficacy upon the structures in question.
+
+ If the dichotomy between virtual experience and collaborative storytelling
+ parallels that between performativity and what we might call the practice
+ of bricolage, as yet this parallel serves no analytical or synthetic
+ function; it is once more an over-theorized and over-determined metaphor.
+ In addition, it is as yet under-explained, in that the theories may be
+ formulated but their application to the specific situation of RPG's is not
+ yet clear. In short, while we can see a parallel division within both the
+ two discourses and the two modes of behavior, this does not answer the
+ question: why are RPG's ritual?
+
+Semiotic Modeling of Ritual and RPG
+
+ I have noted that Kim's use of the formalist
+ perception-discourse-conception model parallels the semiotic or structural
+ percept-sign-concept model. The difficulty with the formalist model for
+ this purpose, however, is that it is focused primarily on an interpretive
+ perspective, in which the analyst stands in a perceptive relationship to a
+ givendiscourse; like the circular model in hermeneutics,[19][11] the
+ central issue is how an interpreter can make sense of a discourse already
+ present, how we approach meaning through interpretation of texts and signs
+ already distant from their producers (authors). Thus a central
+ preoccupation of both formalist analysis and of hermeneutics has been the
+ analysis of ways in which the reading situation is not conversational, in
+ which reading a text is not having a conversation with the author. But in
+ RPG's, the situation is normally conversational in an obvious sense, and
+ thus this mode of analysis focuses on problems seemingly distant from
+ those in RPG's.
+
+ The structural model of signification, from which the practice theory also
+ arose, is by contrast primarily concerned with the use of signs by a
+ current producer, a situation more obviously commensurable with RPG play.
+ The question, in short, is not how players read a text produced for them
+ by a game-master, but rather how the whole group in combination produces
+ signs and texts that they themselves read. The structural model of
+ signification fits well here, as the primary issue is to understand ritual
+ or mythic activity as a mode of discourse production.
+
+ In ritual, participants manipulate a range of signs within a constrained
+ structure. That structure can change through such manipulations, but only
+ within narrow limits. Every Catholic Eucharist differs significantly, in
+ that the place, people, and physical environment of the ritual vary, but
+ this variation is officially read by participants as within a fixed
+ structure. The post-Vatican II use of the vernacular in the Mass, for
+ example, was at once a major transformation of the structure of the
+ ritual, and at the same time theorized as not radically transformative:
+ even in the vernacular, according to the Vatican II council, the Eucharist
+ retains its sacramental efficacy. From a semiotic perspective, the
+ linguistic alteration represents a new negotiation of liturgical language
+ as a discrete sign, where Vatican II agreed that the differences between
+ Latin and the vernacular should not be understood as an essential
+ structure of the ritual, but rather a relatively arbitrary sign amenable
+ to conversion without undermining ritual structure itself.
+
+ At this same level of semiotic manipulation, we can see in RPG
+ reconstruction and revision a parallel analytical discourse. Taking to its
+ extreme the Edwards et al. formulation that "system matters,"[20][12] the
+ claim is a clearly structuralist one: transformation of system elements in
+ RPG's effects concomitant transformation of gameplay and orientation. For
+ example, a combat system dominated by so-called "realism", usually meaning
+ a high prioritization of real-world simulation in modes of action and
+ effects of violence, is not a discrete sign that may be removed from a
+ given game and replaced with an entirely stylized, anti-"realist" combat
+ system. Because such a system element is structural, it links to all other
+ parts of the total game structure and its transformation thus strongly
+ affects the whole. Mike Holmes has made this point well, arguing that a
+ "realist" combat system colors the whole game, such that all activity
+ occurs with reference to such a preoccupation with violence;[21][13] as
+ Kim puts it,
+
+ [E]ven if a gun is never fired during the game session, the mechanics for
+ that [weapon] may influence the story -- because they shape how the player
+ conceives of guns within the fictional world. If the mechanics make all
+ guns exceptionally deadly, it increases the tension in a scene where a gun
+ appears even if the gun is never fired.
+
+ Thus the "system does matter" principle argues that system elements are
+ motivated signs, and thus contain structure; their transformation affects
+ the totality of the structure.
+
+ Between the Vatican II approach to language and the Forge approach to
+ system, however, we must recognize that the difference is not absolute;
+ furthermore, the distinction drawn is ideological, not "factual." There
+ can be no question, for example, that the use of the vernacular in
+ Catholic Mass has significantly changed the ways in which Catholics
+ experience the ritual; indeed, were this not so, there would have been no
+ reason to make the change in the first place. Vatican II asserted a matter
+ of aesthetic and theological priority: however far-reaching the effects of
+ this transformation, they argued, the essential core of the ritual
+ (transubstantiation in a broad sense) would not be affected, and whatever
+ aesthetic loss of force might be entailed by the loss of the affective
+ qualities of Latin (as traditional, foreign, ancient, powerful) would be
+ more than made up for by gains in broader spiritual involvement (through
+ understanding the liturgy intellectually, thus affectively through content
+ rather than through an aura of ritualism). Indeed, Martin Luther's move to
+ the vernacular was intended partly to combat the affective dimension of
+ Latin as itself powerful, arguing that this amounted to a kind of
+ fetishism or idolatry: the focus should be, he thought, on the content of
+ the words spoken, rather than on their linguistic medium.
+
+ In Forge RPG theory, conversely, there is an implicit distinction between
+ system elements and other elements. It is certainly plausible that the
+ radical transformation of the combat system of Dungeons and Dragons from
+ the AD&D system to the recent d20 system considerably changes all elements
+ of gameplay, even those not overtly connected with combat; to replace the
+ combat system with a more freeform model akin to The Pool would presumably
+ effect further changes. But first of all, it seems clear that transforming
+ other elements of the game (setting, background, character generation)
+ would also entail drastic concomitant changes in gameplay; for example,
+ d20 games not based on Dungeons and Dragons genre and story conventions
+ exist in considerable numbers, and certainly do not play exactly the same
+ way as does Dungeons and Dragons. In short, it is unclear how one is to
+ classify elements into arbitrary and motivated, into those which can be
+ shifted without large-scale structural effects and those which
+ cannot.[22][14]
+
+ More interestingly, RPG theorists (taken in the broadest sense) generally
+ make a series of divisions among elements in their games, and implicitly
+ argue for relative arbitrariness. That is, the notion that a "combat
+ system" is in any sense a discrete element, a discrete structure, should
+ not be accepted uncritically. If the Forge "system matters" principle
+ argues that even apparently discrete structures like this are motivated
+ and not arbitrary, we must recognize that this presumes a tendency to see
+ such systems as arbitrary, that they are apparently discrete. By
+ emphasizing that "system" is motivated and structural, the Forge theorists
+ further suggest a prioritization of elements, where motivation is taken as
+ superior to arbitrariness, so that theoretical analysis and synthesis
+ should focus on structure rather than sign. To put this differently, it is
+ implicit that RPG's consist of a vast group of interrelated elements,
+ falling into a natural hierarchical order; those nearest the trunk of the
+ tree, as it were, are relatively motivated and theoretically important,
+ while those nearest the branch-tips are more arbitrary and of lesser
+ theoretical weight.
+
+ At the same time, few would argue that the arbitrary, non-structural signs
+ are trivial or unimportant. Such arbitrary elements as Color (essentially
+ affective set-dressing in imagined space) or snack choices by players are
+ not irrelevant, and may in particular instances be elevated to structural
+ elements: the game-concept Long Pig The Role-Playing Game made snack
+ choice and usage into a system element, while Ars Magica troupes
+ interested in medieval history may make set-dressing a primary focus for
+ play.[23][15] But the claim is that it is by shifting such elements from
+ arbitrary to motivated, from incidental to system, that they become
+ analytically important; in general, the analyst does not focus
+ classification on such elements, but rather begins with system.
+
+ The important point here is that whether the issue is the relative weight
+ of meaningful dimensions of liturgical language or the classification of
+ structural elements in RPG's, the understanding is in both cases
+ ideological, intended not only to classify and analyze the ritual in
+ question but also to emphasize and push for improvement in the activity,
+ thus making normative claims about what the ritual should be about.
+ Precisely at this point, predictably, the ideological weapon of
+ "practicality" often comes into play in RPG discourse: because a more
+ purely analytic classificatory model (e.g. the polythetic comparative
+ model proposed for the humanities by Jonathan Z. Smith[24][16]) eschews
+ normative claims in the form of practical suggestions for game design or
+ ritual construction, the RPG theorist codes such classification as
+ impractical, thus valueless. This is equivalent to a Catholic liturgist
+ saying of an academic theorist's analysis that it is irrelevant because it
+ does not help formulate new dimensions in Mass. For the academic, however,
+ this is precisely the point: she may be interested to see the results of
+ her analyses serving a constructive use to the liturgist, she does not
+ wish to impose her perspective upon those she studies. Ronald Grimes, for
+ example, believes deeply that ritual theory can be of constructive value
+ for people seeking to formulate or reformulate their rituals, but as a
+ rule he does not tell them how to go about it.[25][17] A ritualist who
+ denounces Grimes for not proposing a "how-to" makes an entirely
+ ideological -- and ultimately incoherent -- claim: if Grimes does not
+ propose a "how-to," his work is useless; if on the other hand he does tell
+ ritualists how to "fix" their rituals, he will (and should!) be denounced
+ for telling others what they ought to believe.
+
+ I have come a long way around, but the notion of RPG's as ritual can now
+ be asserted directly. Between RPG theory and RPG practice there exists a
+ dynamic relationship structurally identical to that between the theory and
+ practice of ritual within lived ritual communities. RPG theory, by this
+ logic, is only commensurable to academic theory and analytical method
+ through a deeper and more complex formulation; a relatively direct
+ correlation links RPG's to rituals in their actuality.[26][18] In order to
+ recognize this link, we must accept the duality of theory and practice as
+ integral to ritual performance itself; in other words, rituals are not
+ actions or activities performed in isolation from their cultural worlds,
+ but rather performances related to theoretical concerns in the same way as
+ game-play relates to the theory and system-construction that surrounds it.
+
+ To put this differently, and more specifically, RPG play enacts theory, in
+ the sense that standing behind and prior to play is a series of
+ theoretical constructs: system design, GM notes, pre-play agreements and
+ social contract, genre expectations, and other theoretical tools. From
+ this perspective, RPG play acts out this prior structure; this is
+ equivalent to the old reading of ritual as acting out a liturgical text.
+ At the same time, the prior structure is to a degree open to challenge
+ within game play, and furthermore does not fully constrain particular game
+ actions, determining a range and a set of priorities rather than laying
+ out a script. As has been recognized for some decades now, the same can be
+ said of the most formal ritual: within apparent constraint there is scope
+ for contestation, not only of the various issues and questions related to
+ a particular ritual's situation within the social context, but also of the
+ ritual itself with all its symbols.
+
+ Nevertheless, these two views are always in dynamic, creative tension: the
+ available range of manipulations of ritual signs stands within a
+ structural context only slightly accessible to interior challenge. For
+ example, radical transformation of Catholic liturgy cannot proceed from
+ within ritual performance itself, while small-scale local transformation
+ and contestation are fully expected. Radical transformation of liturgy, as
+ we have seen with Vatican II, must come from a theoretical discourse
+ exterior to performance. Conversely, such discourse acquires its ability
+ to challenge ritual structurally by sacrificing its analytical and
+ normative force at the local level; that is, while Vatican II could change
+ liturgical language, a structural change not available to a given
+ congregation at the moment of performance, the congregation can manipulate
+ particular performances to effect social meanings inaccessible to the
+ Vatican. For example, a particular wedding ritual may be used, at a given
+ moment and in a particular contingent historical situation, to enable deep
+ consideration within the congregation about the traditions of marriage,
+ divorce, and childbirth; these same issues can be discussed by the College
+ of Cardinals, as indeed they are, but not at the level of particular
+ people in particular time, since they can only formulate principles and
+ cannot apply them individually.
+
+ Precisely the same dynamic obtains in RPG discourse. While a given
+ structural situation of notes, game system, theoretical models, and so
+ forth formulates a contextual model within which play occurs, such
+ structures do not extend to the level of individual particularity that is
+ central to play experience; that is, no game structure can be so logically
+ intensive as to dictate every action and speech by every participant at
+ all times, because to do so (even were it possible) would annul the entire
+ nature of the game as game. In fact, this limitation of theoretical
+ efficacy is granted the status of a virtue in Forge theory, through the
+ double formulation of "practicality" as a rational anchor and the
+ hierarchization of the relative motivation of system structures as
+ relative theoretical importance. Not surprisingly, we find that the usual
+ model of RPG discourse has it that performance (play) is the "real" anchor
+ of RPG's, and that theory is understood by its proponents as a potentially
+ liberating source of creativity and energy for "real" play.
+
+Liminality in Ritual and RPG: Preliminary Classification
+
+ If we recognize in RPG's a dynamic interaction of theoretical and
+ practical reason, between structure and event, it is not clear how within
+ the practical sphere the active, strategic manipulation of signs actually
+ works. That is, we have seen that in religious ritual, situated people
+ deploy signs and structures within the context of larger, only partly
+ flexible structures, and that RPG play stands within a similar context; we
+ need now to understand how RPG players manipulate signs and structures for
+ strategic reasons, and how such strategies are both free and subject to
+ constraint.
+
+ For this purpose, I would like to propose a specific analogy, that of RPG
+ play to a particular mode of ritual behavior. At the outset, however, I
+ should note that this is analogy and not identity; that is, while RPG is
+ (and is not merely like) ritual, it is nevertheless a distinct and
+ specific kind of ritual, one with no exact equivalent in other ritual
+ spheres. Thus this analysis must be effected within a deliberately
+ constrained comparative model, in order to evade the methodological
+ problems attendant upon the loose metaphoricities described in the
+ introduction.
+
+ Every modern scholar of ritual is familiar with the liminal model of rites
+ de passage (passage-rites), originally proposed by Arnold van Gennep in
+ the eponymous book, and elevated to a critical analytical model in
+ especially the earlier work of Victor Turner.[27][19] In its classic
+ formulation by van Gennep, such passage-rites as initiations consist of
+ three stages. First, the neophyte is separated from the symbolic and
+ social structures which normally surround him; second, the neophyte passes
+ through a liminal phase, in which a series of new and powerful symbols
+ known as sacra are presented to the neophyte for consideration and
+ reflection; and finally, the neophyte is aggregated back into the social
+ structure, now in a new status.
+
+ For example, in boys' puberty initiations, the boy is removed from boyhood
+ and society in general, perhaps secluded in a special initiation hut or
+ otherwise physically removed; in addition, he is visibly marked as
+ unclassified, e.g. having his head shaved, being painted black or white,
+ stripped of clothing, and so forth. Once separation from boyhood has been
+ effected, the neophyte is in a condition of liminality, "betwixt and
+ between," neither this nor that; neither boy nor man, he is
+ unclassifiable, a condition generally expressed through symbols marking
+ status as not participating in even a larger range of classes: he may be
+ dressed as an androgyne, marking him as neither male nor female (and
+ both); he may be forced to lie on the ground in a posture normal for
+ corpses, marking him as neither dead nor alive (and both); and so forth.
+
+ In this liminal phase, various sacred symbols (sacra) are presented to the
+ boy and his co-initiates (such initiations usually involve several boys at
+ once), in the form of monstrous and bizarre masks, objects, or behaviors,
+ presented to the neophytes by already-initiated men. All these signs serve
+ as objects of thought, and are commonly distorted to emphasize reflection
+ on particular issues; for example, a figurine or dancing costume might be
+ shrunken and blurred in all its parts, but bear a wildly exaggerated
+ phallus, encouraging reflection on sexuality and male sexual identity.
+
+ In an example discussed by Turner,[28][20] Bemba girls are presented with
+ an earthenware figurine of an exaggeratedly pregnant woman who carries
+ four infants, two at her equally exaggerated breasts and two on her back;
+ other features of this figure (arms and legs, for example) are shrunken to
+ stubs. The figurine in this case is accompanied by a riddling song about a
+ mythical midwife, and initiated women say the riddle's point is
+ straightforward: Bemba tradition demands that after giving birth women
+ abstain from sexual intercourse for a year. But a woman's husband may
+ object to this, and one's mother or mother-in-law may also demand that the
+ young woman get pregnant again, as the older woman wants grandchildren and
+ the husband wants sexual satisfaction. The point of the sacrum, then, is
+ that a wife who does not respect the tradition of abstention will become
+ like the figurine, dominated to destruction by babies and their care.
+ However much a woman may wish to give in to her husband or mother -- or
+ her own desires -- she must abstain. Thus the use of exaggerated symbols
+ in the liminal phase focuses attention on traditional culture, its reasons
+ and purposes, and ultimately promotes conformity.
+
+ Once this instructional phase has concluded, aggregation usually begins
+ with more or less permanent markers of the new status, followed by social
+ presentation of the neophyte to the relevant communities (initiates, then
+ society at large). For example, a boy may be circumcised, marking him
+ permanently as an initiate (thus fully male), then dressed in men's
+ clothing (not unlike the old British practice of a boy's changing
+ permanently from short to long pants); the initiates are then presented to
+ the men, who welcome them into the men's longhouse or equivalent male
+ structure from which they were previously forbidden, and they depart this
+ house to be greeted by the women of the community as men rather than boys.
+
+ The emphasis in the current analysis is, as for Turner, the liminal. There
+ is no difficulty spotting separation and aggregation in RPG's. Depending
+ on a particular group's habitual practices and preferences, separation may
+ begin at the front door of the host's house or apartment; this is
+ particularly apparent in more LARP-oriented play, where entry into the
+ broadly-defined play space is marked by a transformation of manner and
+ affect, even of clothing. But the most limited table-top play generally
+ marks a separation between game-play and out-of-game behavior. This is
+ perhaps most obvious negatively, in objections to players who do not focus
+ on the game and continually introduce "irrelevant" topics (television
+ shows, video games, current events, etc.) into play.
+
+ I have marked the term "irrelevant" with quotes for a reason: these topics
+ are only irrelevant if and to the degree that a given group marks them so,
+ a point generally negotiated through piecemeal social contract means. The
+ LARP example, as an extreme of the Virtual Experience model, may tend to
+ object to any introduction of topics or behaviors not previously
+ formulated as "in-game." A smaller-scale variant of this general dynamic
+ is the issue of "in-character" as distinct from "out-of-character": in
+ some groups, speech should be performed in-character, in that anything
+ said by a given player should be taken as the speech of that player's
+ current character; sometimes this takes the form of linguistic constraint,
+ notably the demand that players speak of their characters in the first
+ person rather than the third.
+
+ At a more strategic level, groups may make a sharp distinction between
+ in-character and out-of-character knowledge, raising as a problem whether
+ a player may act in-character upon knowledge presumably not available to
+ his character. That is, if Alan (playing Thror the Barbarian) knows that
+ Marler the Wizard (played by Barbara) has been captured by an evil
+ sorcerer and is held in a deep dungeon below the castle in which Thror now
+ stands, and Alan knows this because as a player he was present when
+ Marler/Barbara was captured, but Thror was not on the scene and thus has
+ no particular way to know what has occurred, a group must consider whether
+ Alan may have Thror head for the deep dungeon to rescue Marler.
+
+ The question is complex, and may be handled strategically at any number of
+ levels. For example, some groups feel that, so long as Thror's rescue of
+ Marler would make an exciting story, the fact that Thror "knows" nothing
+ about the capture is irrelevant. Even within this perspective, however, we
+ might note a distinction between Alan having Thror "happen accidentally"
+ to head downwards, postulating an in-game coincidence to cover the
+ out-of-game implausibility, as against Alan having Thror declaim in
+ ringing tones that somehow he knows what has occurred, postulating a
+ backwards revision of plot and thus annulling disjuncture. Another
+ strategic choice, of course, would have Alan simply ignore what has
+ happened to Marler, since Thror is "actually" ignorant of it; Alan and
+ Barbara may hope that events will transpire such that Thror can rescue
+ Marler, but the interior logic of the game-world in this case does not
+ permit Alan's use of out-of-character knowledge to alter events in this
+ fashion.
+
+ At a theoretical level, the same issues obtain, particularly in the
+ aesthetics of game design. Some groups prefer to keep rules and systems as
+ far in the background as possible, because they see such structures as
+ irrelevant to the game-world; that is, since Thror himself cannot be
+ imagined thinking that he has a +7 to hit but a -2 to damage if he swings
+ his fist, while he has a +3 to hit and a +6 to damage if he swings his
+ sword, the strategic choices made by Alan in selecting the appropriate
+ attack for the situation can be read as interfering with the interior
+ game-logic. Other groups see such activity on Alan's part as an essential
+ aspect of gaming as an activity. For example, one can treat a Dungeons and
+ Dragons "dungeon-crawl" as a competition by the players, as strategic
+ manipulators of an intricate mechanical system, against the Dungeon Master
+ who has similarly manipulated the system to construct a difficult
+ challenge; in this case, Barbara's choice to cast Magic Missile rather
+ than Fireball because she makes a trade-off between damage inflicted upon
+ a chosen target and the collateral damage which comes from the fireball
+ spell, not to mention the specifics of range, casting-time, and material
+ components, is anything but irrelevant: indeed, at one extreme, this may
+ constitute much of the fun of play.
+
+ In any event, the problem of negotiating the bridge between in-character
+ and out-of-character is founded upon the structural separation effected at
+ the outset of ritual. The social aggregation at the close of play thus
+ amounts to an undoing of this separation: players step back from the
+ in-character world (to whatever extent they postulated themselves as in
+ it) in order to receive rewards or accolades, rehash enjoyable events, and
+ generally begin shifting from a relatively discontinuous and separated
+ game-time to an ordinary social event, itself marked eventually by the
+ dispersal of the participants to their everyday lives.
+
+ We have already seen that within the liminal phase, the "game itself,"
+ classification, and identity are sites of considerable contestation and
+ difficulty. But it is when we take into account the question of sacra and
+ response that the parallel to initiation becomes particularly valuable. In
+ particular, when we consider the interrelation of freedom and conformity,
+ i.e. the political nature of liminality, we can begin to dig under the
+ surface of gaming to discern the social relations and contracts which make
+ play possible.
+
+Liminality in RPG's: The Social Rituals of Play
+
+ One of Turner's great achievements in the study of ritual was his
+ explication of the socio-political implications of ritual activity; while
+ he was hardly alone in formulating this general perspective, Turner has
+ the advantage for present purposes of having a relatively clear model that
+ does not depend on extensive prior reading in the literature of
+ anthropology or sociology.
+
+ As liminality theory shaded into the origins of "practice" theory, it gave
+ rise to a stock type of analysis. The symbols of a given ritual,
+ particularly its liminal phase, would be explicated for purposes of
+ situation, giving sufficient data for the reader to make sense of the
+ further argument. The analyst would then attempt to demonstrate the
+ following dynamic at work: within the liminal phase, neophytes -- and by
+ extension, the society as a whole -- employ symbols and structures to
+ challenge, test, and even undermine the structures and norms of authority;
+ through the ritual process, however, particularly as the liminal phase
+ moves towards conclusion in aggregation, all this "testing" ends up
+ serving the purposes of established authority. Thus the ritual gives the
+ illusion of freedom and choice, but actually enforces conformity; ritual
+ is thus read as a technique of mystification by which cultural authority
+ can be produced and reproduced by deceiving participants in all walks of
+ society into accepting these authority structures as natural, given, and
+ ideal.
+
+ There is certainly truth in this reading. For example, numerous
+ carnivalesque rituals (Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carn`aval, Saturnalia,
+ etc.) do indeed construct a special space and time in which to express
+ discontent, disorder, radicalism, and challenge, all of which is then
+ often deployed in a larger cultural context to emphasize the "rightness"
+ of hegemonic discourses of authority. But more recently scholars have
+ begun to grant that this reading is simplistic: Mardi Gras has on numerous
+ occasions been used precisely to foment revolt, for example. Thus recent
+ practice theory, when it has focused on ritual and liminality, has tended
+ to admit that ritual does produce conformity through the illusion of free
+ choice, but at the same time to grant that particular agents in particular
+ historical situations have the ability to manipulate symbols to their own
+ advantage, despite the apparent constraints (and apparent freedoms) of
+ ritual structures.
+
+ At present, I will not push the socio-political reading of RPG's beyond
+ the narrow, local community. It would be interesting to consider how RPG's
+ as ritual necessarily participate in and reconstitute the structures of
+ society at large, but the data-set required to do such analysis
+ meaningfully is prohibitively large. In addition, ethnography of
+ game-sessions has barely begun, if indeed it can be said to have begun at
+ all, and thus we have only the most dubious sort of anecdotal data. My
+ concern, then, is with the socio-political workings within a gaming group,
+ which amounts to an analytic perspective on the social contract of such a
+ group as it intersects with other structures of gaming.
+
+ It is worth noting here that the dominant Forge theory generally takes
+ social contract to be a maximally distanced structure, standing at the
+ upper extreme of the hierarchy of RPG structure. While there has been
+ discussion of social contract and means by which it can be negotiated in
+ order to avoid paradigmatic or personal conflict, the emphasis fits
+ squarely within Edwards's overall approach. That is, because social
+ contract is seen as at a considerable remove from in-game play issues, the
+ most efficient way to deal with contractual problems is to discuss them
+ outside of play, e.g. by confronting a problem player outside of game
+ time, by formulating explicit social expectations before play, and so
+ forth. But the fact remains that these problems generally arise within
+ game play, and prior constraint cannot fully predict or forestall such
+ difficulties. I suggest, in fact, that precisely because RPG's are ritual
+ behaviors, social conflict is inherent in the form. At the same time, from
+ a practical perspective, it is worth recognizing that because structural
+ and sign-manipulation achieve their maximal expressions within liminality,
+ with extra-ritual commentary discourse primarily functioning to protect
+ ritual tradition against challenge, acting disjunctively to separate
+ possible challenges from the fragile yet powerful matrix of ritual
+ performance, play itself will necessary be the central locus of social
+ contestation, and importantly it is only within its structures that
+ conjunctive solutions are possible. In other words, while extra-gameplay
+ discourse may try to protect a game against social contract problems
+ arising within gameplay, such strategies cannot of themselves achieve
+ consensus; the means by which a group can resolve such questions must be
+ sought within play.
+
+ Extending from this point, we may note a common tensive relationship
+ between extra-ritual assertions of hegemony over performance on the one
+ hand, and on the other a concomitant counter-balancing of the manipulation
+ of ritual as a site for resistance. Simply put, it is often the case that
+ as authoritative discourse tries to increase control over what happens
+ within ritual performance externally, resistant elements become increasing
+ empowered within performance and have greater efficacy without. In an RPG
+ context specifically, it seems not unlikely that increasingly emphatic
+ assertions of hegemonic control of appropriate play and in-game discourse
+ will tend to evoke increasing resistance within play, which is to say that
+ players within the game will tend to challenge strong norms asserted by
+ the game-master (or the game text, the received tradition of appropriate
+ play, etc.) the more forcefully they are expressed. One classic example
+ returns us to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: the more Gary Gygax asserted
+ his authority and authenticity in laying down constraints about "the right
+ way to play," the more particular groups and players were drawn either to
+ revise the game, to play other games, or to challenge Gygax's principles
+ from within play. With respect to more ordinary assertions of authority,
+ e.g. "railroading,"[29][21] the more overt the railroading the greater the
+ tendency to resist; that is, if GM railroading involves providing genuine
+ incentives to follow the predetermined plot structure, resistance may be
+ minimal, while if a GM simply blocks all choices but the "correct" one
+ through ad hoc and increasingly ridiculous means (deus ex machina
+ maneuvers, etc.), players may find themselves led to beat their heads
+ against the imposed limitations rather than find creative and enjoyable
+ means by which to "play along."[30][22]
+
+ My point is not simply that strong formulations of norms in play style and
+ social interaction may produce the reverse of the desired effect, though
+ this is worth consideration. Rather, I wish to emphasize that semiotic
+ manipulation within play reacts to functions in the given structural
+ context, such that assertions of social or technical norms naturally
+ constitute important objects of gameplay contestation. As in initiation
+ ritual, the imposition of social structures through such means as sacra or
+ rules systems demands challenge and consideration within ritual; attempts
+ to eliminate such semiotic manipulation within ritual liminality,
+ including gameplay, can only provoke two kinds of response: resistance to
+ the norms or elimination of ritual effectiveness. Thus the nature of
+ gameplay as ritual activity necessarily determines its focus on
+ manipulation and challenge of given structures.
+
+ If RPG play can be read as reactive, it is neither mechanical nor passive,
+ and a great strength of both structural and practice theories is the
+ emphasis on dynamism in the relationship. If on the one hand ritual
+ imposes upon its participants a series of interlinked structures and
+ motivated signs, to which participants are then forced to react by the
+ normative view of ritual activity and thought, at the same time those
+ participants actually have considerable flexibility in doing so. This is
+ where some of the earlier Marxist approaches overestimated the hegemony of
+ authority-structures: they assumed that the imposition not only of signs
+ but of structures through which to think them fully constrained initiates
+ (for example) to conform to a rigid status quo; ritual could thus be read
+ as a means of combating in advance nonconformity, resistance, and the
+ potential for revolution, because it mystified the arbitrary, cultural
+ nature of authority structures by transposing them into tradition, and
+ then constructing a notion of tradition as natural and "given" in nature
+ or meta-nature (the gods, the spirits, etc.). But as numerous critics of
+ such ritual theories noted, this implies a special division in society:
+ there are those who create authority-structures, who to some degree know
+ that these structures are merely inventions, and then there are those who
+ are simply slates inscribed upon by such authority structures through
+ ritual; the only flexible part of this formulation would be the first
+ part, in that it is possible that authorities too are entirely subject to
+ what they take to be given structures and traditions, such that everyone
+ is enslaved by ignorance of the functions and methods of their own
+ society. Good Marxism this may be, but it does presume that people are
+ entirely controlled and dominated by what they are told, and never think
+ flexibly.[31][23] In fact, the approach deconstructs itself: if this is
+ all true, how can the academic analyst spot the problem at all?
+ Presumably, academia would constitute a constrained discourse that
+ recognizes itself as an object of critical analysis, in which case how did
+ it become so? The logical conclusion essentially would assert that the
+ members of critical academic discursive circles are a different sort of
+ people than those constrained by discourse, such that radical elitism
+ becomes a naturalized and normative structure -- precisely that which the
+ analysis desired to challenge in the first place.
+
+ In RPG's, flexibility is relatively obvious: few if any players or
+ observers would assert that gameplay is so constrained as to prevent
+ flexibility in semiotic manipulation of any kind. At the same time, this
+ creativity is still generally taken as a marker of the distinctive or even
+ unique character of RPG's. Quite apart from the fact that this entails RPG
+ theorists' participation in the reproduction of authoritarian notions of
+ ritual behavior, a complex logical circle inserts itself in this
+ understanding, common it seems from the inception of RPG's as a discrete
+ ritual form. With the explication of this circularity, it will become
+ clear why I emphasize an analogical parallel to liminality in religious
+ ritual.
+
+Creativity as Circularity
+
+ Overt acceptance of creativity and flexibility within RPG play is indeed
+ unusual in ritual. Importantly, however, it is not the existence of such
+ dynamism that marks a distinctive ritual mode, but the fact that
+ participants of all levels recognize and accept this. By contrast, the
+ modern Catholic Eucharist permits considerable scope for flexibility and
+ creativity in each and every performance, by every participant at every
+ level, but this is not commonly accepted as either present or desirable;
+ we might note that the common disdain for Neopagan ritual invention among
+ relatively knowledgeable mainstream religious Americans includes (but is
+ not limited to) a distinction between "real" or "traditional" ritual as
+ opposed to those which Neopagans "make up."[32][24] In this context, we
+ can read the ideological split as a claim against creativity within the
+ special context of ritual, importantly different from how RPG discourse
+ consciously constructs itself as creative and dynamic.[33][25]
+
+ To put this in terms of initiation, we find that the liminal phase
+ involves flexibility and invention on the parts of not only the neophytes
+ but also the entire society; at the same time, such flexibility is
+ commonly denied by the hegemonic discourse, as already indicated by the
+ tendency to conceive of neophyte interaction with sacra as "instruction"
+ rather than creative engagement. Similarly, we find numerous discourses
+ about carnivalesque ritual formulated in terms of what has been called a
+ "hydraulic" theory: carnivals act as valves, allowing participants to
+ "blow off steam" rather than harness it to antisocial ends. By permitting
+ marginal elements of society to "act out" their frustrations, authorities
+ retain control of real power and maintain the stability of those they
+ dominate. Real challenge or engagement with social rules is annulled,
+ because it "doesn't count" in ritual space.
+
+ Thus the demarcation of ritual space and time -- that formal construction
+ of division between ritual and everything else central to what Catherine
+ Bell calls "ritualization" -- lends itself to protection of social norms.
+ In RPG's, with their discourse of invention and creativity, such
+ protection seems non-present or at least marginal. But this accords with
+ expectations: by asserting that RPG gameplay constitutes a protected space
+ in which to deal with the limited range of issues at stake in a given
+ game, RPG's naturally tend to assert not only that gameplay permits
+ flexible engagement with social norms but also that the effects of
+ exterior norms on players do not play a significant role in the game. For
+ example, the protection of RPG's allows a male player to play a female
+ character, a heterosexual player to play a homosexual character, without
+ its being read as relevant to the player's out-of-game identity; we do
+ not, that is, assume that a male player who chooses a female character is
+ actually conflicted about his sexual identity. At the same time, this
+ entails that the female character in question, if she appears as a
+ chauvinist stereotype, cannot "officially" be read to imply chauvinism on
+ the part of the player.
+
+ While for majority players -- white, male, middle-class -- this freedom
+ may not appear problematic, it entails real difficulties when (especially)
+ female players enter the game situation, most especially if such players
+ have a romantic and/or sexual affiliation with another player. Indeed,
+ female players often find themselves read as "not serious," "just the GM's
+ girlfriend," and so forth. When such players experience events in
+ game-time, whether plot events effected by other players or overtly
+ structural elements constructed within the game rules, their responses may
+ be read as problematic for in-game discourse. To take an extreme example,
+ if a female player reacts (in-character or out, in-game or out) negatively
+ to a rape scene perpetrated upon her (or any) character, some groups will
+ interpret this as a failure by the player to recognize the lines
+ separating gameplay from ordinary discourse; more insidiously, perhaps,
+ the player may feel that she should not overtly respond negatively,
+ precisely because she accepts that other players grant this absolute
+ division of discursive spaces, de-legitimizing her own emotional response
+ as confirmation that she is not a "serious" player.
+
+ The common RPG theoretical response to such a situation, at least in
+ recent times, is to grant the legitimacy of the player's response. But
+ this is formulated as a special case: certain types of in-game discourse
+ "cross the lines" or "go overboard." By implication, normative in-game
+ activity does not require such responses, and thus this theoretically
+ symptomatic treatment of the situation continues to emphasize that
+ gameplay constitutes a protected space by constructing new social-contract
+ rules to prevent specific problems. That is, theoretical criticism of the
+ rape situation proposed above amounts to this: RPG groups and games ought
+ to have rules that say that players' characters cannot be raped. But this
+ misses the point. On the one hand, it constrains RPG discourse to a
+ limited range of social issues, making commentary and criticism of rape
+ (for example) simply a prohibited discourse, undermining the very dynamic
+ freedom which is supposed to permit a player to deal with situations that
+ he or she would or could not encounter in real life; on the other, it
+ retains and protects the hegemony of RPG discourse as something within
+ which players may not respond personally or emotionally by making those
+ situations in which such responses are legitimate into abnormal cases.
+
+ Continuing the comparison to initiatory ritual in particular, we have here
+ an extra-ritual response to contingent historical circumstance through
+ limitation. In the case of the Bemba girls' initiation mentioned above,
+ let us suppose that a girl responds to the figurine by saying, "If I
+ become like the figurine, the white organizations that provide support and
+ health services will give extra assistance even outside of infant care;
+ therefore for my family in the current situation the appropriate answer to
+ the riddle is that I should throw over tradition and use pregnancy to
+ create a cargo-cult reciprocity with whites."[34][26] Here we see a
+ creative, dynamic response to the symbolic structures proposed, but with
+ an ultimate response at odds with the hegemonic intent. An obvious
+ counter-response would add additional symbols and instructions to prevent
+ this response by future neophytes, and perhaps provide extra-ritual
+ instruction of this particular neophyte so as to annul the validity of her
+ solution.
+
+ In RPG ritual discourse, the same structure of constraint through
+ piecemeal placation consistently obtains. To the extent that RPG players
+ understand themselves as creative and dynamic, not controlled by
+ encultured norms, they are enabled to reproduce challenged norms within
+ gameplay as protected space. That is, the liberation and protection
+ afforded players with respect to uneasy social issues tends only to enable
+ players who (often unconsciously) represent majority discourses to reenact
+ the violence of those social categories in a hegemonically protected
+ fashion, defended by the structure of the RPG as separated and distinct.
+ If the white, male player's black, female character enacts stereotypes,
+ the notional freedom explored merely reproduces dubious social norms, an
+ effect seen overtly in fantasy and science fiction book cover images (e.g.
+ the work of Boris Vallejo), with their manly men with weapons and
+ voluptuous women in revealing clothing.
+
+ To shift the modalities of play from reproductive to transformational may
+ be desirable, but it is unclear how this might be effected. While RPG
+ ritual liminality permits exploration, its structured and constrained
+ nature acts to defend stereotype reproduction as "freedom" while blocking
+ challenges thereto as failures of player technique or understanding.
+ Logically, practical game-construction cannot merely strive to forestall
+ deployment of stereotypes, but must work actively to undermine their
+ function within gameplay; it is here that critical formation of
+ counter-hegemonic moves (e.g. feminist game design) must focus effort, at
+ the same time recognizing that simply formulating a game that
+ pre-determines the boundaries of appropriate and inappropriate structure
+ challenges cannot achieve anything.
+
+Disjuncture and Continuity
+
+ As we have seen, the liminal phase of passage ritual, or more broadly the
+ "sacred space" effected by social disjunctures outlining any ritual
+ practice, affords a privileged site for examination and contestation of
+ extra-ritual concerns; this sacred space in RPG's is found in gameplay,
+ often understood as a "safe" place for exploration, and distinguished from
+ other active spaces by a number of explicit and more subtle formations. So
+ far, I have focused on how such privilege and safety becomes a
+ double-edged sword, permitting some forms of experimentation while denying
+ others legitimacy, and also undercutting the radicalism of experiment to
+ render it harmless. But as with any ritual, the protective structures that
+ reproduce hegemonic discourse formations are themselves genuinely
+ threatened by in-ritual challenges. It is worth considering how such
+ challenge may be formulated through semiotic manipulation in gameplay.
+
+ In The Savage Mind, Claude Levi-Strauss suggested that ritual tends to be
+ conjunctive, as opposed to the disjunctive, classifying emphasis of myth.
+ His meaning is best expressed, perhaps, in a discussion of the difference
+ between game and rite:
+
+ All games are defined by a set of rules which in practice allow the
+ playing of any number of matches. Ritual, which is also 'played', is on
+ the other hand, like a favoured instance of a game, remembered from among
+ the possible ones because it is the only one which results in a particular
+ type of equilibrium between the two sides. The transposition is readily
+ seen in the case of the Gahuku-Gama of New Guinea who have learnt football
+ but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary
+ for both sides to reach the same score. This is treating a game as a
+ ritual.... Games thus appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the
+ establishment of a difference between individual players or teams where
+ originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the
+ game they are distinguished into winners and losers. Ritual, on the other
+ hand, is the exact inverse: it conjoins, for it brings about a union ...
+ or in any case an organic relation between two initially separate
+ groups....[35][27]
+
+ The point is that a game like soccer or Monopoly takes a group of people
+ not initially distinct in game terms and divides them into at least two
+ classes (winners and losers). By contrast, the ritual performance of
+ soccer described here does not conclude until all players have been made
+ equivalent; latent in Levi-Strauss's formulation is that the natives
+ project their preexisting social divisions upon the game by picking teams
+ upon non-arbitrary given grounds. For example, they might decide that each
+ team will be made up exclusively of initiated men of a given moiety, so
+ that the teams represent moieties; through the ritual process, they then
+ construct a situation in which this difference is asserted as
+ non-absolute. This is arguably the point of the modern Olympic Games:
+ national participation through representative athletes is supposed to
+ assert that all men are brothers, that superiority is individual and not
+ national, and so forth.
+
+ Setting aside the numerous quite serious problems with L vi-Strauss's
+ theory with respect to ritual as a broad range of behaviors -- indeed, I
+ doubt he intended that it be taken as a general principle in the first
+ place -- we can see this dynamic at work in a major RPG discourse,
+ particularly that which emphasizes the collaborative nature of play. As we
+ have already seen, in Kim's Collaborative Storytelling model "play is
+ understood as multiple authors producing a single discourse and a single
+ story." The same model discourages secrets among participants, and judges
+ success partly by whether "all of the participants significantly
+ contributed to that discourse." Following up Levi-Strauss's notion, we can
+ see here a striving toward conjunction and unity, as against disjuncture
+ in the form of "winning" or limited player dominance of the discourse. In
+ other words, one of the distinctive characteristics of RPG's as opposed to
+ more traditional games is precisely that they fit a ritual rather than a
+ game model.
+
+ At the same time, a more serious deployment of structural and practice
+ perspectives on the semiotic elements of both religious and RPG ritual
+ must recognize the oversimplification inherent in this
+ conjunction/division split. First, that there are no winners or losers
+ cannot be accepted uncritically. Precisely because a dominant RPG
+ discourse denies such divisions, we must consider the possibility that
+ play imposes upon players a notional unity by denying the option to seek
+ or even accept division. After all, if we extend this rhetoric of unity,
+ it can be taken as a claim that in-game, all players are equal and in fact
+ equivalent, which may be deployed strategically by situationally- or
+ socially-dominant players to assert that complaints are anti-group and
+ thus mark bad players. In this context, the discourse of collaboration and
+ unity can support the problematic use of hegemonic authoritarian or
+ oppressive discourse, as discussed previously in the context of
+ chauvinism.
+
+ But not all such challenge necessarily supports authority or serves as an
+ instrument of oppression. To take a simple example, the rhetoric of unity
+ and conjunction may be deployed to block favoritism or to identify problem
+ players as those who either try to dominate play or refuse to participate
+ at all. Especially in the latter case, the unifying effect of ritual
+ process may enable a group to draw out a timid player, emphasizing further
+ the liminal "safety" of game space.
+
+ More interestingly, however, the conjunctive nature of ritual process may
+ act together with the aggregation of ritual closure to effect genuine
+ social alteration. A play group is often formed on an ad hoc basis, where
+ some players do not know each other well outside of the game context, and
+ indeed may not have met. Through successful ritual collaboration in a
+ shared space understood as distinct from other social spaces, a new social
+ group forms, enabling friendship and other forms of collaboration that
+ refer to the constructed game-space rather than to other social
+ structures. That is, precisely because gameplay is at once divided from
+ other social spaces and nominally focused upon a limited set of
+ predetermined issues, and because such rituals do act conjunctively by
+ taking given divisions and annulling "winner and loser" categorizations,
+ gameplay tends naturally to formulate an alternative social framework.
+ Particularly for those who find mainstream, dominant social frameworks
+ problematic or dangerous, gameplay can constitute a controlled social
+ space in which to succeed and seek liberation.
+
+ However psychologically supportive and validating such an alternative
+ framework may be -- and it is worth noting that some psychologists have
+ pointed to RPG's as valuable for self-exploration and validation among
+ (especially) teenagers -- from a broader social perspective we should
+ recognize that this essentially entails a continuation of the initiation
+ discourse. Turner notes that it is common that the neophytes, whatever
+ their extra-ritual socio-economic status, are as part of the liminal
+ leveling considered equivalent. While friendships among those
+ simultaneously initiated often extend beyond the ritual situation, social
+ status, factored out within liminality, is not particularly affected by
+ such friendships. That is, it could be argued that the shared space of
+ ritual, although it permits and even demands reflection upon social
+ inequalities, ultimately acts not only to affirm these inequalities as
+ natural and given, but also deludes those in inferior positions into
+ thinking that they achieve a measure of equality that is in fact
+ nonexistent. From this perspective, we can see that RPG's may act
+ simultaneously to affirm and assist players psychologically, and at the
+ same time discourage them from acting upon or challenging the inequities
+ of modern social dynamics. Anecdotally, at least, we seem to see this in
+ stereotypes of RPG players as "geeks" or "nerds" who, by participating in
+ gaming, in conventions, and generally in a subculture, are thereby
+ diverted or distracted from real social action or mobilization. To
+ formulate a rather overstated Marxist reading, the recognition of RPG's as
+ ritual is confirmed by its ability to serve as an opiate for the
+ oppressed.
+
+Conclusions: Toward an RPG of Practical Reason
+
+ At present, RPG theory primarily acts as an exterior, supporting discourse
+ referred toward the "real thing" -- gameplay. Ironically, criticism of
+ some RPG theory as irrelevant or trivial, on the ground that it is not
+ practical for play goals, actually serves to grant power and hegemony to
+ theoretical discourse: the very fact that gameplay so strongly formulates
+ the barriers between in-game and out-of-game, play and system,
+ in-character and out-of-character, reproduces the mystification of
+ theory's active role in discourse construction. As a way of concluding
+ this somewhat dispersed series of analyses, then, I should like to propose
+ some new directions in theory, directions which I think contain the
+ possibility for real practical change.
+
+ First, theory must recognize a distinction between analysis and synthesis.
+ While it is important that such a distinction not become the object of
+ fetishism, as it in a sense already has, the mystification of the aspect
+ of RPG's traditionally associated with hierarchy and power can only lead
+ to abuse on the one hand, analytic sterility on the other. As Kim points
+ out for Collaborative Storytelling, "It considers the rules system to be
+ outside of the meaningful product. Rules are judged on their results for
+ shared play, not on how the participants view the process." This
+ perspective sets aside the impact of system and theory upon gameplay,
+ asserting player freedom and collaboration instead. While such a view may
+ seem liberating, and indeed may be so as against old-fashioned GM
+ authoritarianism, it implicitly claims that RPG performance occurs outside
+ of structure, not in reaction to it. But since social structures and
+ presumptive traditions of play at the least are necessarily at work in RPG
+ performance, there can be no doubt that gameplay has a structured context;
+ were this somehow not the case, and gameplay fully liberated from exterior
+ structures, there could be no possibility of conflict or its resolution,
+ as no player would have a context within which to react conflictually.
+ Thus while a particular group or style may wish to formulate a liberated
+ play modality as ideal, this has an ideological function and serves to
+ replace one authoritarian structure (GM authority, game-system authority,
+ etc.) with yet another. In order for theory to advance the improvement of
+ gameplay, then, it must work to distinguish between analytical activities
+ and constructive or synthetic ones, and furthermore strive to bring this
+ to consciousness within actual play.
+
+ Second, RPG theory needs to take seriously the contributions and insights
+ of other disciplines. Eventually this should be a reciprocal engagement,
+ but this will require acceptance by academic and other mainstream
+ intellectual theorists; insofar as RPG theory can support such a move, it
+ must do so by engaging actively and constructively with such theorists, in
+ language acceptable to their traditions. In the meantime, RPG theory must
+ set aside its tendency to see its analytical object as unique and thus
+ special. William James reminds us forcefully,
+
+ The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along
+ with something else. But any object that is infinitely important to us and
+ awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and
+ unique. Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage
+ if it could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and
+ thus dispose of it. "I am no such thing," it would say; "I am MYSELF,
+ MYSELF alone." [36][28]
+
+ James's point is clear: while we are willing to make all sorts of
+ classifications within RPG's, we tend to think of RPG's as unique and thus
+ special. But "unique" is simply a logical category that can be applied to
+ any object of analysis supporting formulation as a categorical object. If
+ RPG's are unique, that does not mean they are not ritual, or social
+ behavior; it only means that they can, from a particular perspective, be
+ formulated as having some distinctive characteristics. So long as RPG
+ theory continues to formulate itself otherwise, as unique in an illogical,
+ strong sense with respect to other behaviors, such theory will continue to
+ be marked by two unfortunate properties: first, it will be perpetually in
+ the position of many religious discourses of having continually to defend
+ its boundaries against the incursions of other discourses and analytical
+ methods; and second, it will be incapable of real analytical force because
+ it has built into its very self-definition essentialist biases that again
+ require constant and vigilant defense. Arguably, the tendency of much RPG
+ theory toward rigid hierarchization and toward discourse-circle hegemony
+ would thus constitute a parallel to more obviously religious dogmatisms.
+
+ Third, RPG theory requires models founded upon a productive and
+ reproductive, as opposed to interpretive and receptive, situation of
+ narrativity. Two obvious examples, Kim's already-cited article and Liz
+ Henry's "Power, Information, and Play in Role Playing Games,"[37][29] are
+ admirable moves toward intelligent application of exterior models, but
+ find themselves at odds with the purposes of those models. Kim's awareness
+ of this problem is clear:
+
+ There are many differences between RPGs and books [upon which the
+ formalist model is built], but some are more subtle than others. It is
+ clear that RPGs have no division between author and reader. Each
+ participant both expresses and interprets. Further, this calls into
+ question what the story is. The answer depends in part on what we define
+ as the discourse or "text" of RPG play.
+
+ These questions are essential, and require answers; indeed, even cursory
+ examination of recent RPG theory reveals a constant concern to formulate
+ authorship, textuality, and so forth with respect to RPG's. But these
+ debates mostly run around in circles, die out, and get revived with new
+ energy but no really new formulations, with endless repetitions of the
+ cycle. The problem, in short, is that formalist and hermeutical models are
+ founded on confronting the genuinely difficult problem that interpreting a
+ text is not comparable to a conversational situation; intricate and
+ elegant strategies are deployed to make sense of how we make sense of
+ text, if you will, given that it is not conversation. But RPG's are
+ conversational; the problem does not arise directly. By attempting to read
+ RPG's through such lenses, we are caught in circularity: conversations are
+ like books (except that they are not face-to-face), and books are like
+ RPG's (except that the latter are face-to-face). Why not drop out the
+ sidetrack and recognize RPG's as active, dynamic, conversational forms of
+ symbolic manipulation? I have attempted a beginning here, but a great deal
+ more needs to be done. [38][30]
+
+ Fourth, stemming from the last point, RPG theory must take into account
+ the social issues at stake and at work within the smallest, most
+ apparently arbitrary activities of play. That so much discussion of
+ "problem games" focuses on social difficulties -- problem players or GM's,
+ paradigmatic clashes, etc. -- reveals that the central issues in play are
+ social. To the extent that RPG theory tends to work hierarchically, from
+ top-down (broad categorical strokes before specific game issues), it
+ mistakes the actual dynamics by incorporating its analytic framework into
+ problems needing resolution; this is another means by which theoretical
+ discourse mystifies itself and its contributions, and it can most
+ effectively be challenged from within theory itself.
+
+ Fifth, RPG theory must, through engagement with broader social theory --
+ particularly the mode of anthropological theory labeled "practice" --
+ become aware of symbolic and structural manipulation as a strategic part
+ of everyday life, a set of techniques also employed (and refined) within
+ the specifically RPG context. This occurs at every level of play; there
+ can be no absolute divisions between in-game and out-of-game, for the same
+ reasons that the only absolute division between a Catholic Eucharist and a
+ Catholic's everyday life is an ideological one.
+
+ Finally, RPG theory must move beyond hierarchical classification as a
+ technique. There is no question that classification is a valid, even
+ necessary goal for serious analytical work. But as in so many disciplines,
+ most notably the study of religion, the tendency is to use the scientific
+ character of classification to construct an aura of objectivity; we see
+ this in discourses that stress "correctness". The natural upshot of such
+ an endeavor is to reify the categories as ontologically legitimate,
+ mystify their constructed character, and thus naturalize the
+ authority-claims latent within such structures. Classification must
+ recognize that the object does not exist outside of the construction of
+ taxa; "religion" or "ritual" do not exist, but are means by which
+ historically situated and motivated people classify certain behaviors.
+ Similarly, "RPG" is not a thing, a singular object, unique and discrete
+ from others, and Narrativist orientations do not differ from Simulationist
+ or Gamist ones except insofar as we construct them so. Classification is
+ the basis of comparison, not of truth or certainty. Until RPG theory takes
+ on board serious recognition of its comparative nature, it will remain an
+ ideology and not a science.[39][31]
+
+ --------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Notes
+
+ 1. E.g. Ron Edwards' game Sorcerer (Chicago: Adept Press, 2001; see
+ [40]www.sorcerer-rpg.com).
+ 2. Edward's views have been formulated in several articles, all of which
+ may be found at The Forge ( [41]http://www.indie-rpgs.com). Apart from
+ the library articles, a useful recent discussion started by Edwards is
+ "The whole model - this is it"
+ ([42]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8655).
+ 3. Stable URL:
+ [43]http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/narrative/paradigms.html
+ 4. Stable URL: [44]rec.games.frp.advocacy.
+ 5. The Forge has hosted lengthy discussions of how RPG play is like
+ playing in a band (with the gamemaster playing bass), how RPG play is
+ like playing a pinball machine, and so on. Examination of the range of
+ such discussions will show the two discursive thrusts: the drive for
+ clarification and precision in the metaphor, and the extension of the
+ analogical range. As a rule, such discussions end when those who find
+ the analogy helpful have formulated a version that is clear to them
+ personally, when those who do not find it so grow tired of trying, and
+ when most become frustrated with those who try to extend the analogy
+ to ludicrous, literalist extremes. These discussions are not worthless
+ -->analytical models, such metaphors must be formulated rigorously,
+ with their boundaries precisely set. For more casual discussion, on
+ the other hand, one of the best qualities of a forum like the Forge is
+ that it permits this sort of open speculation and play; indeed, a
+ close analysis of the ludic dimension in such RPG discourse would be
+ valuable for understanding the interrelations of RPG play and theory.
+ 6. On the issue of the "unique" as special, and its problematic
+ applications to serious analysis within classificatory discourse, see
+ Jonathan Z. Smith, "Fences and Neighbors." Imagining Religion
+ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1-18.
+ 7. See Ronald L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies (Washington, D.C.:
+ University Press of America, 1982); Victor W. Turner, Dramas, Fields
+ and Metaphors (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UP, 1974); Turner, From Ritual to
+ Theater: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts
+ Journal Publications, 1982). Essentially all of Grimes' work work
+ since the late 1970's fits the model am describing here, as part of
+ what he has dubbed "ritual studies". Turner's work, however, took a
+ strictly performative and dramatic turn; his earliest works, while
+ excellent, do not directly fit this model, and can only be made to
+ accord with the performative perspective with considerable hindsight
+ and, I think, distortion.
+ 8. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of
+ Chicago Press, 1966); Levi-Strauss, The Naked Man, trans. John and
+ Doreen Weightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Pierre
+ Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford:
+ Stanford UP, 1990); Sherry Ortner, "Theory in Antropology Since the
+ Sixties", Comparative Studies in Soiety and History 26.1 (Jan. 1984),
+ 126-66; Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (Oxford: Oxford
+ UP, 1992).
+ 9. The French idea of bricolage is not directly translatable into
+ English; we simply have no category quite like it. The bricoleur is a
+ hobbyist of a sort, but elevated to a high artistic level. For the
+ Levi-Strauss formulation, see The Savage Mind, chapter 1, "The Science
+ of the Concrete"; the translation is execrable, and those with a good
+ command of French would be well advised to read La pensee sauvage,
+ chapter 1, "La science du concret."
+ 10. Stable URL: [45]http://194.29.64.17/thecog/movie.html
+ 11. I shall not go into detail on hermeneutics, as it is founded primarily
+ on philosophical negotiation of the problems of interpretive
+ reception, problems relevant but not central to the analysis of RPG's.
+ On this model, see Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences
+ (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981). See also Umberto Eco, Interpretation
+ and Overinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992); and Hans Georg
+ Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
+ University of California Press, 1977). Also useful, though less
+ approachable, are Eco's The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington, IN:
+ Indiana UP, 1994) and A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
+ UP, 1979).
+ 12. A central tenet of hegemonic Forge theory.
+ 13. See Mike Holmes, "Mike's Standard Rant #3: Combat System"
+ ([46]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2024). Holmes'
+ essential point is this: "If you don't want combat to be the focus of
+ a game, do not include special rules for it. Especially if you don't
+ include special rules about anything else." This "standard rant" has
+ been discussed periodically on the Forge.
+ 14. It should be pointed out that the Forge "system matters" principle
+ does not claim that other elements do not matter; the question is one
+ of emphasis, and is here an analytical distinction rather than a
+ polemical one.
+ 15. See iago [Fred Hicks], "Long Pig the RPG: Would You Play It?"
+ ([47]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6091).
+ 16. Jonathan Z. Smith, "Fences and Neighbors," Imagining Religion: From
+ Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988),
+ 1-18. The polythetic system is hardly perfectly objective, but as
+ Smith argues persuasively, it is less inherently inclined toward
+ normative claims and slippages than the monothetic, taxonomic sorts of
+ systems founded on hierarchy.
+ 17. Although see his Deeply Into the Bone: Reinventing Rites of Passage
+ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), the
+ purpose of which is explicitly to formulate ritual theory as a
+ constructive discourse for people wishing to invent or reinvent their
+ own rites of passage.
+ 18. The commensuration of ritual discourses and discourses about ritual,
+ between ritual in fact as analytical discourse and academic analysis
+ as in fact ritual, is outside the scope of the present paper. The
+ argument, founded upon a grammatological engagement with practice,
+ performance, and structural analysis, juxtaposed to early modern
+ magical practice and the theoretical dramaturgy of Zeami's Noe, will
+ be part of the core of my book Magic in Theory and Practice, where I
+ do not connect it with RPG's per se.
+ 19. Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedon and
+ Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961);
+ Victor Turner, "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Phase in Rites de
+ Passage," Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, Symposium
+ on New Approaches to the Study of Religion, 1964:4-20; Turner, The
+ Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Aldine de Gruyter,
+ 1969); Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual
+ (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1970).
+ 20. "Betwixt and Between," 13, citing Audrey I. Richards, Chisungu
+ (London: Faber and Faber, 1956), 209-10; the new edition is Richards,
+ Chisungu: A Girl's Initiation Ceremony Among the Bemba of Zambia
+ (London: Routledge, 1982).
+ 21. "Railroading," for which there are numerous more or less equivalent
+ terms, is the practice of a GM essentially scripting the majority of
+ plot events and structures within a given play session or series of
+ such. For example, the GM may decide, prior to play, that he wants the
+ PC characters, all cowboys, to engage in an OK Corral-style gunfight
+ as the climax of play; when the PC's choose (via their players, of
+ course) to ride out of town to investigate a lost silver mine, the GM
+ uses various strategies to prevent them from doing this, because he
+ needs them in town in order for the gunfight to take place. Such
+ strategies range from subtle hints to overt assertions of authority; a
+ possible example would be to inform the players that several of their
+ horses are lame and cannot be ridden, then to have no horses available
+ at the town stable, then to ensure that nobody in town will sell his
+ or her own horse. By the time the players have negotiated this many
+ options, it is generally clear to everyone (though very often not
+ stated) that no matter what they do, the PC's will be prevented from
+ riding out of town.
+ 22. This point has been emphasized in various RPG discussions. One common
+ suggestion is that if, for some reason, the GM actually needs her
+ players to follow a set of railroad tracks, the GM should react to
+ repeated attempts to jump the rails out-of-game, by saying something
+ like, "Okay, guys. I'm really not that prepared, actually, and I kind
+ of need you to go and do X. Is that okay?" While this may act
+ practically to achieve the desired effect, it depends upon the
+ rigidity of in-game/out-of-game divisions to acquire efficacy, and
+ cannot in itself be deemed a resolution of a more fundamental
+ difficulty.
+ 23. I would agree with these thinkers that people never think truly
+ independently, that is unconstrained in any manner by encultured
+ structures; the point here is that even constrained thought and action
+ has tremendous flexibility and ranges of possibility, and is not
+ simply scripted or railroaded in the RPG sense.
+ 24. This division is reproduced in strictly academic contexts not only
+ with reference to ritual but also to myth: myths are not "really"
+ myths if they are invented for that purpose (whatever such a purpose
+ might be), just as rituals as not "really" rituals if they are
+ consciously invented so. The intrusion of dubious ideas of
+ consciousness, ontology, and category only deflect from the central
+ point: academics by formulating critique in this fashion reproduce the
+ ideology of authenticity that authorizes and legitimates certain
+ religious behaviors as stable and non-inventive, as against the
+ "wannabe" inventions of recent "flakes" and "crazies". In a sense, we
+ might see the division here as between those who are creative within
+ an authorized framework and those who create their own framework. The
+ critique thus becomes reflexive, as indeed we should have suspected it
+ always was: the academic is really saying that she herself, by being
+ creative (doing new analytical work) within an authorized or
+ traditional framework (academic and disciplinary traditional
+ discourse) is legitimate and critical, while "crazies" (those
+ proposing unexpected critiques) fall outside the authorized framework
+ (do not have Ph.D.s, for example) and thus need not be taken
+ seriously.
+ 25. It would be interesting to consider whether the apparent (though
+ entirely anecdotal) overlap between RPG communities and Neopagan ones
+ might be at least partly rooted here. In the absence of serious
+ sociological data, I suspect that an effective technique here would be
+ close analysis of White Wolf's various Neopagan-oriented games
+ (especially Werewolf: The Apocalypse and several of the Ars Magica
+ supplements) with respect to ritual/magical creativity, criticism of
+ religion, and criticism of what the authors refer to as "traditional"
+ games in their explanations of how their games are special and
+ different.
+ 26. This is a purely hypothetical construct; I know of no such actual
+ response among Bemba, and the example is deliberately over-simplified
+ for heuristic reasons.
+ 27. Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 30-32; the reference on the Gahuku-Gama
+ is to K. E. Read, "Leadership and Consensus in a New Guinea Society."
+ American Anthropologist 61.3 (1959): 429.
+ 28. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York:
+ Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), 9. See also Jonathan Z. Smith,
+ "Fences and Neighbors" for a penetrating discussion of the "unique" in
+ theoretical discourses.
+ 29. [48]http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/liz-paper-2003/
+ 30. The same point might be made about Edwards's dependence upon Lajos
+ Egri's constructive models for creative writing, models poorly suited
+ to analytical purposes. In essence, Edwards asserts that Egri's models
+ fit RPG's, except that the product is entirely different, authorship
+ is shared, and really the Threefold Model is analytic rather than
+ constructive. More recently, Edwards has noted that Egri's model
+ (especially with regard to "premise") only applies properly to
+ Narrativist play.
+ 31. Here I take science to be a reflexive and self-critical attempt to
+ differentiate and understand its analytical objects. There can be no
+ question that modern science, in the usual sense, does not always
+ fulfill these criteria, in particular because it tends to claim
+ objectivity instead of constructed reflexivity. But given the need for
+ such reflexive awareness, the goals and ideals of science remain
+ worthy of theoretical discourse; see the introduction and first
+ chapters of Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice for a brilliant (if
+ dense) formulation of scientific analysis that recognizes and takes
+ seriously its own constructed nature. For comparison as a discourse
+ and a method, Jonathan Z. Smith's Imagining Religion should be the
+ starting-point of any attempt at theoretical construction.
+
+ --------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+ Christopher I. Lehrich <clehrich@bu.edu>
+
+ Converted to HTML by John H. Kim <jhkim@darkshire.org>
+
+ Last modified: 19:13 AM 10/01/2005
+
+ The Forge created and administrated by [49]Clinton R. Nixon and [50]Ron
+ Edwards.
+ All articles, reviews, and posts on this site are copyright their
+ designated author.
+
+References
+
+ Visible links
+ 1. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/
+ 2. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/about/
+ 3. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/donate.php
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+ 8. mailto:clehrich@bu.edu
+ 9. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note1
+ 10. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note2
+ 11. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note3
+ 12. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note4
+ 13. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note5
+ 14. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note6
+ 15. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note7
+ 16. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note8
+ 17. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note9
+ 18. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note10
+ 19. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note11
+ 20. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note12
+ 21. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note13
+ 22. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note14
+ 23. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note15
+ 24. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note16
+ 25. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note17
+ 26. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note18
+ 27. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note19
+ 28. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note20
+ 29. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note21
+ 30. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note22
+ 31. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note23
+ 32. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note24
+ 33. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note25
+ 34. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note26
+ 35. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note27
+ 36. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note28
+ 37. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note29
+ 38. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note30
+ 39. file:///home/fabien/data/projets/jdr/harmonies/work/ecjdr/draft/ritual_discourse_in_RPGs.html#note31
+ 40. http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com/
+ 41. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/
+ 42. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8655
+ 43. http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/narrative/paradigms.html
+ 44. news:rec.games.frp.advocacy
+ 45. http://194.29.64.17/thecog/movie.html
+ 46. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=2024
+ 47. http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=6091
+ 48. http://www.darkshire.net/%7Ejhkim/rpg/theory/liz-paper-2003/
+ 49. mailto:webmaster@indie-rpgs.com
+ 50. mailto:sorcerer@sorcerer-rpg.com