Authors: Daniel Mackay, Marshall Blonsky (Afterword), Brooks McNamara
ISBN-13: 9780786408153, ISBN-10: 0786408154
Format: Paperback
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers
Date Published: February 2001
Edition: New Edition
Many of today's hottest selling gamesboth non-electronic and electronicfocus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokémon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPs), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu.
Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the artespecially in terms of aestheticsof role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.
Author Biography: Daniel Mackay holds an M.A. in performance studies from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.
A scholar in performance studies, Mackay argues that a major part of role-playing and the role-playing game is a performance art. He offers a framework for a critical model to understand the genre, especially in terms of aesthetics, and identifies the cultural, the formal, the social, and the aesthetic structures. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Acknowledgments | ||
Foreword | ||
Introduction: Toward an Aesthetics of the Role-Playing Game | 1 | |
Pt. 1 | Cultural Structure | |
Origins: From War Games to Role Games | 13 | |
Novel Ideas: AD&D and Dragonlance as a Case for the Role-Playing Game's Reciprocal Relationship with Fantasy Literature | 17 | |
A Recursive History: The Role-Playing Game's Dialogue with Popular Culture | 20 | |
A New Category of Popular Entertainments and a New Kind of Sandbox: Playing in Imaginary-Entertainment Environments | 26 | |
Pt. 2 | Formal Structure | |
Interface Design: The Machinery Manufacturing the Ghost in the Machine | 37 | |
Enabling the Performance in Every Way: Everway as a Case Study in Role-Playing Game Interface Design | 40 | |
Spheres of Performance: A Taxonomy | 48 | |
Drama: Inscription, Transcription, Prescription | 49 | |
The Theater and Performance of the Game: Frames of Interaction | 53 | |
One Word, Two Ears: How the Theater of the Role-Playing Game Narrative Exists within the Sphere of the Role-Playing Game Performance | 57 | |
Pt. 3 | Social Structure | |
The Structural Foundation of the Role-Player's Subjectivity | 63 | |
The Role-Playing Game Convention: Festival Subculture | 69 | |
Context [actual symbol not reproducible] Intertext [actual symbol not reproducible] Hypertext: Role-Playing Games as Systems of Cultural Allusion | 73 | |
The Structuralist Activity within the Cultural Sphere: Making the Score in the Liminal Mind | 76 | |
Strips of Imaginary Behavior and the Assemblage of the Character | 79 | |
The Theater of the Mind: A Phenomenology of the Role-Played Performance within the Theater Sphere (the Performative and Constative Frames) | 85 | |
The Imaginary Script: A Phenomenology of the Role-Played Performance within the Script Sphere (Narrative Frame) | 87 | |
If As If: The Role-Played Performance within the Script Sphere (Narrative Frame) | 88 | |
Structures of Power | 92 | |
What Leaks? The Archiving of the Player-Character | 98 | |
Mopping Up: The Archived Player-Character in the Ongoing Narrative | 106 | |
Shared Substance, Emancipation, and Discipline | 107 | |
The Efficacy of Entertainment | 109 | |
Becoming the Spectator | 117 | |
Pt. 4 | Aesthetic Structure | |
The Theater of Events: Narrative as Aesthetic Object | 121 | |
The Implied Narratee: The Role-Playing Game Performance and Ergodic Literature | 131 | |
Ars Ludica, Ars Significans: Wherefore the Insistence of Aesthetics? | 135 | |
Dividing to Conquer: Demiurge in the Mind | 136 | |
Aesthetic Dementia: Frosting and Defrosting the Windows of Otherworldliness | 150 | |
Epilogue: The Paradigm for Analysis of a New Performing Art | 157 | |
Afterword | 161 | |
Notes | 165 | |
Bibliography | 185 | |
Index | 193 |