D&D in a Digital Age

The pieces by Henry Jenkins and Janet Murray that we read this week, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” and “From Additive to Expressive Form,” mentioned in passing something that also came up in one of our earlier discussions about the definition of games: Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been thinking a lot about D&D in the past couple of years, as it’s seen what seems to be a significant resurgence in popularity. The New Yorker published an article titled “The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons” late last year, and, just anecdotally, it’s started to feel like the majority of people in my social networks also play or have played, and that there’s a lot of interest specifically among other queer people, and women, and in general people who don’t necessarily conform to the old stereotypes about who a D&D player is. It’s left me thinking about why exactly it’s popular now, and what its relationship to digital media like videogames is.

On the one hand, D&D seems in an obvious way to be a sort of predecessor to digital media, both in form and content. Both pieces mention the early game Zork, and how it functions as a kind of artificial dungeonmaster, something that could certainly be said of other, more recent games as well. The content as well as the form of many videogames also seems like an echo of D&D, or at least to participate in the same tradition. Pseudo-medieval “fantasy” tropes have a persistent presence in contemporary media that seems to run back through D&D and twentieth-century genre fiction to Tolkien and the like. When Galloway wrote about a “return to romanticism,” in The Unworkable Interface (27), I don’t think this is actually what he was talking about, but I’ve been curious for a long time about the origins and persistence of what seems to me to be the kind of Romantic turn in contemporary popular culture—by which I mean a fixation on a specific kind of pseudo-medieval or fairtytale aesthetics and related tropes, with princesses and enchanted swords and the like. Why has such a rich and specific subculture built up around these things in the past, say, century, and why has it had such a presence in videogames in particular?

To return to D&D though, one of the things that’s always seemed kind of utopian about it to me—and that makes it in a way unsurprising that it’s become so popular—is that it’s one of the very few activities I can think of that invites adults to get together and share space, interact, that isn’t based around consumption, or passively viewing something, or any kind of concrete productive goal, or even competition—just play. The New Yorker article uses this to argue that it’s popular as a kind of alternative to digital media for people who want an escape from screens and isolation. I tend to be skeptical of the kind of popular journalism that reflexively attributes dire social consequences to digital media, but I do think there’s something potentially radical and interesting about games like D&D. One thing that might be interesting to think about is what aspects of it exactly make it different from videogames with similar themes and styles of play. The in-person aspect? Not necessarily—people sometimes play by videoconference. The multiplayer aspect? No—obviously some videogames in this genre allow for collaborative multiplayer campaigns. What seems unique about it to me is its truly radical open-endedness, which I think Jenkins maybe undersells when he says, “Performance theorists have described RPGs as a mode of collaborative storytelling, but the Dungeon Master’s activities start with designing the space—the dungeon—where the players’ quest will take place.” (121) Obviously dungeonmasters do put a lot of creative work into designing spaces, but the DM of my first campaign made a point of telling us that if the party wanted to settle down somewhere in the countryside and start a tavern for orcs or whatever instead of going on quests, that was up to us. Whereas in, say, Gone Home, I couldn’t even use the matches I found sitting on the table to light one of the candles and carry it into the basement with me—and, much more frustratingly, I couldn’t do anything about the fact that my almost immediate reaction to the protagonists of Braid and Save the Date was “Leave those poor women alone! Go do something else!” Save the Date thematizes this, kind of—it seems as if one is supposed to realizes gradually (rather than early on) that “cancel the date” is the best option, and that not playing is an option, and that expecting a screen that says “you win!” for making those choices is a mistake, but it’s still the case that the only alternative is quitting, basically, rather than doing something different. Some questions I’m left with: Is this kind of restrictedness inherent to digital media? Or all media? Can only basically unmediated play yield complete creative freedom? Or could that kind of freedom be achieved through practices like modding and otherwise treating games as collaborative and continuing, rather than finished, artworks? Also, is complete freedom necessarily better? Do richer narratives come out of games that are at least somewhat restricted? If so, what’s the ideal balance?

(Also, anyone want to play D&D?)

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Image source:

Bloodthirsty Vegetarians. Stained Glass D20. August 2, 2008. In Flickr. Accessed November 4, 2018. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bloodyveg/2730330434.

Works Cited:

Galloway, Alexander R. "The Unworkable Interface." In The Interface Effect. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2012.

Jahromi, Neima. "The Uncanny Resurrection of Dungeons & Dragons." The New Yorker. October 24, 2017. Accessed November 05, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-uncanny-resurrection-of-dungeons-and-dragons.

Jenkins, Henry. "Game Design As Narrative Architecture." In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.

Murray, Janet H. "From Additive to Expressive Form." In Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.