“There is a ten-foot by ten-foot room here. There is an orc. He is guarding a chest.”

 

For better or for worse, role-playing games.

 

There are very few things (2) that a man could admit to doing that would throw more of a pall of geekishness about him. I say “a man” because the quintessential image of a role-playing gamer is male, although more usually portrayed as trapped in that awkward transition between man and boy.

 

I won’t say that there isn’t fire behind the smoke, but, your honour, I shall try and defend the institution, the old alma mater of imagination. The defence will seek to prove that the image is both inaccurate and outmoded (3).

 

Way back in the day (4) Dungeons and Dragons was dangerous. It was a stone-cold killer out to get your children. In those days, bizarre to say, D&D (and rock and roll, admittedly) filled the same panic-mongering, knee-jerking, puritanical gap that computer game and video violence fill these days (5). In fact it’s almost certainly the same people and/or institutions banging the drum. Whenever a maladjusted kid takes it into his head to bring military history to life in the classroom, the blame is ladled conveniently and safely onto some pop culture bête noir, rather than, say, wider social issues, freely available automatic weapons (6) or, heaven forbid, something to do with parenting. If someone is sufficiently unbalanced to blow away as much of his life as he can get into his sights before ending it all then one must suspect that no amount of Harry Potter, Golden Compass, Dungeons and Dragons, Iron Maiden or Grand Theft Auto (7) is honestly going to push him over the edge. That edge was crossed a while back, internally, and alone.

 

The role-playing game industry, then, has had its times of persecution. Anyone, for example, who has watched the execrable hate-film Mazes and Monsters will have felt that persecution quite keenly, if only because the portrayal of role-playing (and live action role-playing too) therein is so woefully inadequate. Man, if I was involved in that campaign I’m not sure I wouldn’t consider something drastic myself… However, whilst there are still a few extremists who no doubt believe that it’s all, basically, down to Satan, the hobby’s public perception has settled on something risible, baffling and archetypally geekish.

There is a rich history there, for those that care. Emerging from the wargaming hobby to spawn Gygax’s Dungeons and Dragons, a peculiar mixture of miniatures battles, Tolkien and Jack Vance, the hobby grew in a strangely organic, even fungal way, absorbing different genres as it found them. Amongst the earlier games, for example, was the Sci-fi Traveller, and the H.P. Lovecraft tribute game Call of Cthulhu, both still going several editions on today. From small-town labours of love the market proliferated wildly into reasonable-sized corporations, producing some wholly original games, some based on books, and a few (to my mind weak) offerings that were cash-ins on the film of the moment. Major milestones include, of course, White Wolf’s Vampire, inspiration for a million moody Goths and itself strongly influenced by the writings of Anne Rice (and the film Lost Boys), and the astonishingly detailed semi-historical game Ars Magica.

 

Of course, this is all “tabletop”, and the hobby has spread considerably since. I’ll talk about LARP (or LRP, the “action” is apparently negotiable) another time, suffice to say that the term has been legitimised in Larpers and Shroomers: The Language Report as part of the evolving English language. However there is an enormous growth industry in purported computer role-playing games, a market now worth some quite ludicrous amount of money. I have to say I’m a bit of a purist here. Single-player games to date have basically given us combat/problem solvers with RPG trappings, and that doth not a role-playing game make. Online games have more potential, if only because of the ability to interact with other human beings (8), but when I see people actually strutting around on, say, World of Warcraft speaking like Prince Valiant, if Prince Valiant hadn’t the first idea about punctuation, I always feel… well I feel, I suspect, like a non-gamer feels listening to gamers. All faintly foolish. I enjoy online games, but for the game. I’ve not yet found one condusive to actual roleplay, and it’s honestly not what I’m after when I seek out the computer.

 

The current image of role-playing games, however, is undergoing something of a metamorphosis. I won’t say they’re becoming hip. I’m not sure there’s enough pelvis in our sociocultural skeleton for it. However, the foolishness is rubbing off, revealing something almost respectable, almost intellectual, about the whole thing.

 

The foundation stone for this change is time and money. The people who were those thirteen year old boys being fighters and mighty wizards and wishing they had girlfriends are now grown men with office jobs who mostly have families, and yet those days, those dice-throwing days, were the golden days of their youth, and even if they no longer play, the hobby has a shimmer of pleasant nostalgia. Nostalgia is big business, now. The admen have turned it from a failure of the old into a mass phenomenon. I heart the 70’s! they cry, and television rehashes endless old footage in a bid to waste the cheapest hour of your life. That’s the time. The money is in the fact that an awful lot of those thirteen year olds were into computers, and computers turned out to be quite a useful thing to be into, and suddenly the awkward, derided kids with the glasses were earning enough to buy wholesale all those tough guys who were good at sports. Geek is chic, so to speak.

 

It’s worth noting that a lot of the increased cool must surely be because the hobby is nowhere near as male-dominated as it once was. This is probably because the style of play has changed from the original “kill things and be powerful” concept that allowed put-upon adolescents to escape from the inadequacies of real life, and evolved (in a very real sense of the word) into something capable of considerably more depth and meaning. At the average LARP event these days you can often find a fairly even gender split.

 

A major boost to the respectability of the hobby, however, has been the willingness, all of a sudden, of notable names to be associated with it. Such illuminati as Vin Diesel and Robin Williams, for example, are confessed gamers, and that must utterly bewilder the anti-gaming lobby in the States. Moreover, writers are beginning to come out of the games closet. Writers of fantasy fiction, it is true, stand only a step beyond the hobby as respectability goes (9), but that is a useful step. Here is someone who plays those damned games, and not only are they making a living, garnering something of celebrity, but that success must surely have been assisted by their gaming hobbies. To name but two, Stephen Erikson has stated that his epic Malazan Book of the Dead grew out of a role-playing campaign he ran with his friend Ian Esselmont (now also writing books set in their shared world), and Jim Butcher, author of the recently televised Dresden Files, is an acknowledged larper.

 

So why? What is it that all of these people have been doing all those years, if it wasn’t, after all, something to do with unholy rites? What is the appeal? Why spend seven hours straight rolling dice if there’s no money involved (10) ?

 

Later, maybe. If you need to ask the question. Later, perhaps. Maybe we’ll let you in on what you’ve been missing.

 

(1)   The title is Dianne Wynne-Jones’ term in Homeward Bounders to describe the unpleasant god-games played by the book’s nebulous villains.

(2)   Train spotting, however, is definitely one of them.

(3)   Mostly. Mostly inaccurate and outmoded. Lord knows, there are some of the old school left, but we don’t talk about them. A friend sent me a flowchart of increasing geekishness recently, much to my amusement. It can be found here: http://www.brunching.com:80/images/geekchartbig.gif . Whilst the ordering will vary depending on who you talk to, it does rather demonstrate the sheer divisive clannishness that geeks, and especially gamers, are prey to.

(4)   A marvellously indefinite expression. I probably mean the late seventies and eighties.

(5)   Hell, computer games were always violent. Everyone knows of some kid in the 70’s who, after a marathon session in the arcades, went home, dressed up like most of a wheel of cheese and went on a homincidal eating spree. Not to mention the Space Invaders murders… like the police said, “you’d think, when they saw he had a gun, they wouldn’t just keep slowly going backwards and forewards in front of him…”

(6)   It may well be that people, rather than guns, kill people, but the fact remains that people with guns kill people rather more efficiently than people without guns, or what on earth are we giving them to the army for? Similarly, I didn’t ever hear that kind of gun-pundit say, when confronted with some atrocity that was being talked up by the evangelist crowd “Satan doesn’t kill people, people kill people”, although it would, sure as hell, be very true.

(7)   Curious fact – Alan Campbell, designer and programmer on Grand Theft Auto is also a fantasy author, giving us the excellent Scar Night.

(8)   They are. The people who play online games are definitely almost mostly human.

(9)   Indeed, see the diagram at (3) above.

(10) Because rolling dice to lose little Bobby’s college fund is entirely fine and responsible social behaviour compared to having your 18th level ranger kill some frost giants.