How long has it been, since you made up a story and told it out loud? How long since you acted in a play?
For many people, the answer is back in elementary school.
But there are millions of people who still take part in those activities every month, purely for fun. They just include 20-sided dice and call it a game.
A few months ago, an old friend recruited me into a Dungeons & Dragons game. It’s been a few years since I’ve had a chance to play, and I was happy to stretch the old mental muscles that are used in the hobby.
But it got me thinking about role-playing games (of which D&D was the first and most famous), about what they are, exactly. Because if you step back and give them a good look, they’re deeply weird.
Look at these games from one angle, and they’re an ancient tradition of folk art – storytelling and playacting. Look at them another way, and they’re an entirely new art form, born within living memory.
How do they work?
If you’ve never played one, and you skipped over the scenes in Stranger Things or E.T. where the kids play Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game is a structured group-participation adventure story. Each player creates and controls and single character.
That character is often a dwarven warrior or a elven wizard, but there are literally hundreds of games, with a vast multitude of settings. Most are adventures – science fiction, fantasy, horror, and espionage are the top genres – but there’s nothing stopping you from building a game around a bunch of accountants and managers dealing with office politics, or Regency-era gentry trying to avoid being married to troublesome suitors.
One player usually stands apart and acts as the overall narrator. They’re known as the dungeon master, game master, or storyteller, and get to play the bad guys and the bit parts, feeding the other players the details of setting and plot, and springing surprises on them.
To decide any contested situation, there are rules, usually with resolved with dice. Need to fight a monster? Pick a lock? Wheedle information from a barkeep? Check your game books and roll some polyhedral dice.
“You stand on the threshold of the goblin-infested tomb,” says the dungeon master. “An eerie mist rises from the moors. What do you do?”
That question defines any role-playing game. The players control their own actions. They can head into the tomb. Or, theoretically, they can go to the nearest town with a nice warm pub and have a drink instead of getting into a fight with goblins. Games are wide open, and, as any dungeon master will tell you, the players will always do something no one could have anticipated.
Where do they come from?
If Dungeons & Dragons had descended from improv troupes, we’d consider it a form of theatre. We call it a game because it grew out of games, specifically tabletop miniature wargames.
Back around the Napoleonic era, actual army officers started playing with models representing different kinds of troops (cavalry, infantry, artillery) to train for commanding the real thing in the field. The games were fun on their own and evolved over the years until, in the 20th century, they became a steady hobby. You could buy metal or plastic soldiers representing troops from the Civil War or the Hundred Years War, but in the early 1970s, Gary Gygax started selling a game called Chainmail that included fantasy figurines and rules to play them – dragons and wizards.
With Dave Arneson, Gygax developed a version that saw players take control of just one character, instead of whole armies. Dungeons & Dragons was published in 1974, and by the end of the decade, dozens of imitators were making new games with their own rules and settings.
What are they?
Oral storytelling. Improv theatre. Those are the end products of a role-playing game.
But are they games at all?
I’d argue that the word game is deceptive. It’s left over from RPGs origins in the wargaming hobby.
For most of history, a game was something you could win. You checkmate the king, you finish the race first, your hand of cards is better.
An RPG doesn’t work like that. You can “win” a fight against an orc, you can make your character stronger over time, you can slay dragons with +5 magic swords and some lucky rolls of your 20-sided die. But the only real victory condition is whether you enjoyed the experience.
It’s entirely possible to see your character killed and to still have a tremendous time. (Who doesn’t enjoy a death scene, tragic, heroic, or possibly comedic?)
It’s also possible to enjoy the same game in multiple different ways. Coming up with a clever strategy to defeat an opponent, acting out a character’s moral crisis, and solving a mystery concocted by the game master can all be a part of fun, with different players preferring different aspects.
Are they art?
Yes.
By the 1970s, when D&D began its march into the Mountain Dew-infused bedrooms of teenagers across the western world, we’d already gotten used to the idea that art was something separate from every day life.
Art, even popular art like pop music, was something you did for others, usually through a commercial outlet. Radio, TV, record labels, concert halls, galleries, universities. This was where art happened.
If it took place on a kitchen table, among a bunch of friends, in between everyone kicking in $10 for the pizza, it couldn’t be art, could it? It must be a game. Art is challenging. Games are safe.
And yet, if there’s creative endeavour, I’d argue games are a form of art. Folk art, at the very least, and after music, painting, and crafting, they’re most likely among the most popular art forms enjoyed around the world right now.
Where are they going?
That’s the big question. The podcaster and game reviewer Ben Riggs recently pointed out that games are currently the same age as cinema was around the time of the invention of sound films.
It’s a pretty young art form. So the answer is, I don’t know, and neither does anyone else. But if you have millions of people taking part in RPGs as a hobby, they’re definitely not going to fade away any time soon. And there’s likely a lot of territory still to explore.
What do you do?
That dungeon master’s question, by the way, comes up in every game. The answer is entirely up to the player. Fight, run, negotiate, tell a joke, moon the goblins, switch sides, beg for mercy. The players can say literally anything.
There are hundreds of possible answers, but the dungeon master’s response should always be “You can try.”
