Recent Reads : Shared Fantasy: Role-playing games as social worlds, by Gary Alan Fine.

Pablo and I have sometimes been wont to theorize, speculate and otherwise wax garrulous on the social and psychological significance of role-playing games in the world at large and in and the lives of those who play them. Apparently we aren't the first to do so.

Way back in the ancient age of 1977-1979, Gary Alan Fine, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota, decided to observe and report on this strange subculture which had just reared its head among the wargamers and college students of the country. For approximately two years he participated in both isolated gaming sessions and extended campaigns in and around the university, and interviewed players and referees. This book, published in 1983 and reissued in paperback in 2002 by the University of Chicago Press, reports his observations and interpretations.

The first chapter is a useful short history of the development of role-playing games, concentrating on the development of Dungeons & Dragons from earlier military simulations but also touching upon other games such as Traveller, Chivalry & Sorcery, and U of Minnesota professor M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne. Subsequent chapters discuss the observed characteristics of players and referees, observations about their interactions both as characters (within the game) and as players (outside the game), and a more detailed examination of Barker's Tekumel, the imagined world of Empire of the Petal Throne. Since Barker's long-running game campaign set in Tekumel is something of a legend among gamers, this in itself is worth the price of the book.

I was somewhat disturbed by the outright attitudes of sadism and misogyny displayed by some player characters described by Fine in part of chapter two. However, it's consistent with what I observed among some players when I was in high school. Perhaps it's inevitable that when adolescent males are given the opportunity to vicariously act on whatever fantasy they please, fantasies of power and sex unrestrained by responsibility, morality or long-term personal involvement come to the fore. It may be that the relatively young ages of the players observed by Fine had something to do with this. (He comments at one point on the disruption wrought when the median age of a certain gaming group dropped from 20 to 15.)

Fine also describes, in later chapters, the greater degree of personal and dramatic involvement displayed by older players, especially with regard to role-playing aspects of a characters' personality which are harmful to the character's prospects of "winning", and otherwise becoming engrossed in the game world as a complex imagined secondary reality instead of "just" a game to be played for immediate entertainment or simplistic wish-fulfilment. This, again, is consistent with my own experiences. The last gaming campaign in which I was involved was in a mixed group of men and women, all of whom were in their mid to late twenties and most of whom were members of a conservative church. All of these characteristics are atypical according to Fine's observations from the groups he observed. In this long-running campaign, there was far less concentration on hack-and-slash fighting, and far more concentration on the building of long-term storylines involving personal and political relationships than in previous games I'd encountered.

I wonder if the same kind of shift has occurred on a wider scale, and if so, how it may have affected the "typical" behavior of RPG players. This assumes, of course, that there is a homogenous group of "typical" gamers to be measured, an assumption which may no longer be true as role-playing games have evolved out of their original niche among military wargamers, passed through the demimonde of bored college students' entertainment, and metastasized throughout the world of popular culture and science-fiction and fantasy fandom.