One more thing: don’t spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy! - Gary Gygax
In another life, I took what literary theorists said seriously - seriously enough at least to disagree with many of them and consider them a blight on humanity; very well educated but fundamentally not-very-intelligent people are responsible for a lot of what's bad in the world. George Steiner in particular always struck me as a very eloquent and very widely read fool, but I reserved a special place in hell for Roland Barthes, a man I considered not far removed from Satan. I was a very angry and far-too-intellectual-for-my-own-good 20 year old. (One of my favourite quotes is by the writer Jonathan Franzen, who said that he spends around ten minutes a day fretting about the fact that, when he was in his 20s, he used to spend ten minutes a day fretting about things like the fact that Americans have substituted medical products for genuine psychological healing. I understand what he means in a very deep and meaningful sense - why was I so serious about things like that?)
Anyway, these days I'm a lot mellower and I think I can see a little bit of what Barthes was getting at, especially regarding Death of the Author. This was a famous essay by him in which he basically argued that in interpreting a text, it is the text and the reader's understanding of it alone which matters - not the author's intent. As soon as the author has produced a piece of writing he no longer owns it and no longer should be seen as having any relation to it - it is not his or her history or views which inform analysis of it, but the reader's. And each new reading by each new reader, or even each re-reading, is a new interpretation of a new text with a new meaning.
We can see this process in Dungeons & Dragons, you see. When Gygax and Arneson and their circle created the game, they had an idea of what they wanted to do, and a whole history of reading and playing and thinking behind that idea - a witch's brew of Tolkien, Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, Avalon Hill and a thousand other cultural artefacts from their own experiences. But if we interpret that in light of Barthes, where the author has 'died' the minute he has produced the text (and I should say straight away at this point that I refer to this in a purely metaphorical sense which has nothing to do with Gary Gygax's actual regrettable and very sad death), we should really throw all of that out of the window and ignore it. The text of Original D&D and 1e are for us to take meaning from for ourselves, irrespective of the intentions of the authors; if we want to use it to play games utterly different to what they envisaged, then we can do so. In fact, it could be argued that we ought to do so.
This is one of the reasons, really, why I'm not a great fan of stick-in-the-mud-ism when it comes to 'old schoolers', although I've never previously thought to articulate it in reference to Roland Barthes! The vast majority of old schoolers are, of course, creative individuals who just like to play. But there is a certain section who seem unduly wedded to what the orginators intended and to their vision of the game. Indeed I wrote a long rant about the very topic back in June, which I still mostly agree with, even if the painful stridency of the piece irks me. (I think I tend towards the painfully strident a little too much.) Gary Gygax and his generation created a great game, but it's not theirs anymore; they were the 'scriptors', to use Barthes' term, but we are the readers, the interpreters, and the ones who give the game meaning for ourselves. If we want to use the OD&D rules to play a campaign about mutant monkeys invading the star ship Enterprise at the edge of the universe, or about heroic halflings saving the world from the Dark Lord, then we should just go for it and devil take the hindmost.
You know, this is the first time I've ever seen the theories of Roland Barthes applied to something like D&D. What's even more frightening is that it makes a great deal of sense, and throws "edition wars" into a whole new light.
ReplyDeleteCongratulations on ressurecting that particular bugaboo from my college days. The last Barthes essay I read back on '03 had me up for three days pacing my dorm room pondering what I would do to the man if ever I could lay hands on him.
What a great post! Any blog that applies Barthes to D and D is a blog that I want to read. I agree with you completely. Though as a point of minor clarification, the rejection of the author as the singular basis for a untiary meaning of a text has it origins before Barthes.
ReplyDeleteIn 1946 W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published an essay entitled the "Intentional Fallacy" that argued pretty much what you are describing here. Barthes presented a more radical version of the idea, one that drew much more heavily upon structuralism and semiotics to make its point.
A minor point I know. Again, thanks for the great insights. I visit your blog almost every day.
Michael: I feel your pain, believe me. What makes it worse is that I hated Barthes so much, and acknowleding that his ideas make sense seems like a kind of betrayal of my younger self.
ReplyDeleteIronbeard: Thank you very much. I didn't know about that Wimsatt and Beardsley essay.
I'm just curious, if you don't mind me asking, why your younger self hated Barthes so much.
ReplyDeleteThe with that line of thought (and applying it to both literature and gaming) is it opens the door to pointlessness.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, I'm not a student of literary theory so I'm sure I'll make amateur complaints, but I think they're relevant to non-academic discussion of both objects.
If the author's intent has no role to play in how we read either a game book why is there to differentiate one from the other? If we can use OD&D to play a game of angsty vampires, V:tR to play a game about a semi-criminal starship crew, and Traveller to delve deep into dungeons full of trolls and gold why do we need all three?
The reason we do, especially for games (this might apply less well to literature) is the author's intent informed the tool created. I think that's the critical point where the analogy breaks down. Roleplaying games, while texts, are also systems. Systems are designed with ends in mind and straying from those ends too much tends to give poor results.
Consider the component parts of MS Office (or Open Office): a spreadsheet, a database, a presentation creation system, and a word processor.
I can perform any of the functions of one in the other. In fact, the commonality of people writing complex VBA scripts to make Excel function as a database is rather alarming. You can do it, but the effort compared to the results is is not very good.
I'll acknowledge you might want to do D&V:tM for an artistic reason but that includes acknowledgement that you are going well beyond the author's intention and might get some odd results. In fact, you're shooting for those odd results.
So, while much of the old school crowd might fetishize "these are Gary's influences so that's what play should be" to a poor end let me suggest the radical rejection of understanding what Gary's influences are and how they affect how the game is structured will also lead to a poor end.
RPGs are an artist's tools. When writing a novel in English using a Russian dictionary isn't going to help you create a good novel nearly as much as an English one would.
Ironbeard: Just sheer pretentiousness really. I hated fighting my way through those essays.
ReplyDeleteHerb: If the author's intent has no role to play in how we read either a game book why is there to differentiate one from the other? If we can use OD&D to play a game of angsty vampires, V:tR to play a game about a semi-criminal starship crew, and Traveller to delve deep into dungeons full of trolls and gold why do we need all three?
Well indeed, why do we? In fact we might not. I would actually argue that we absolutely don't. If I really wanted to I could use just one system for all my gaming. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have different games; just because we don't need something that doesn't mean it's bad or unwanted. Indeed Barthes would probably argue that the more texts we have to interpret, the merrier.
I think you're right about systems, but again, that doesn't invalidate the premise. You could argue that your preferred interpretation of Vampire: The Masquerade is to use it for playing games about vampires and ennui, because it 'does that' the best. But that doesn't make it impossible to use V:tM for playing Star Trek. It just means that you would prefer not to use it for that. Most people would probably agree with you. But that doesn't in and of itself invalidate using V:tM to play Star Trek games.
Wow, a post combining two of my favorite things: Barthes and D&D!
ReplyDeleteThis still-unreformed lit/writing major just wanted to add to the kudos.
Herb: The thing is that, while Barthes is greatly respected amongst the most pretentious and idiotic literary criticism fields, he is/was also, largely, wrong.
ReplyDeleteHis arguments about the "unimportance" of authorial intent work, but only within a narrow field. If you and I were to pick up a modern novel, it would be applicable since we and it all share a common frame of reference for the most part. However, picking up a copy of, say, Beowulf, Authorial Intent becomes a much greater concern because of the vastly disparate reference frames. What it might mean to a modern interpreter might be utterly laughable to somebody from a contemporary period who acutally understands the symbolism and stories going on.
Barthes' ideas suffer from a very similar problem when it comes to RPG's. Though we can apply them to a certain extent, authorial intent is an important consideration. We have different systems for a reason beyond nobody being able to agree on a single best. Each system is designed to accomplish something specific. I think it's better to look at RPG's less as literary works and more as tools.
KenHR: Thanks!
ReplyDeleteMichael: Regarding Beowulf, and playing devil's advocate here as a non-Barthes fan, I think it could be argued that there is no special need to understand the authorial intent behind Beowulf, because like any text any reader can interpret it as they choose. You have to consider why it is that authorial intent is important. Why is it, really?
Of course then you can bring in the New Historicist critics (who I always liked much better) who would argue that authorial intent and historical context is EVERYTHING.
Of course then you can bring in the New Historicist critics (who I always liked much better) who would argue that authorial intent and historical context is EVERYTHING.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. They were always, IMO, superior.
But that's the insidiousness that is Barthes. Even if you can't stand the guy and his books sit like a lead brick in your stomach, he's pretty hard to discount.
You have to consider why it is that authorial intent is important. Why is it, really?
ReplyDeleteBecause the complete rejection of it leads to madness, specifically the rejection of the very idea of communication, which is the purpose of writing.
Keeping it in the RPGs if swords and sorcery dungeon crawling, space criminals, angsty vampires, and cartoon rabbits are all equally valid interpretations of OD&D because I deem them to be regardless of what Gygax wrote what is the point of him writing and me reading.
That is where the little of literary theory I know fails. In this specific branch the rejection rejection of author intention leads to the very act of writing as having no purpose.
If it truly doesn't matter if you use OD&D to play in the setting of V:tM and vice versa there is no purpose in having either rule set. Hell, if author intent is irrelevant and not shared we can't even be sure when we all sit down at the table that we're playing the same game even if we use the same text (admittedly in the OD&D days that was a real problem).
I think, at it's core, that's my problem with someone like Barthes...they are denying the existence of communication itself. Yet they try to communicate that idea to me by writing.
Herb: I agree with you at root - we are communicating right now after all, and you can interpret what I'm writing in a way broadly similar to how I'm thinking - which is why the more extreme deconstructionists in particular always struck me as basically (very well educated and extremely intellectual) idiots.
ReplyDeleteBut I think you're making a big leap in saying that rejection of authorial intent leads to madness. It absolutely isn't true that "If it truly doesn't matter if you use OD&D to play in the setting of V:tM and vice versa there is no purpose in having either rule set." It just means that the purpose is different. Rather than having two games which do two different things, we have two games which can do anything we want them to. We are empowered by the fact that we don't have to think inside the box any more.
Even in the Barthesian world there would still be room for more RPGs. It would just mean more games to play around with. Today I fancy playing an OD&D Vampire: The Masquerade game. Okay! Tomorrow I fancy playing a Dogs in the Vineyard Traveller game. That's okay too! It would be possible to throw out all the games except one, and just use that for everything. But where would the fun in that be? That's still consistent with the Death of the Author.
Hmmmmm, interesting. Re Barthes and the majority of the comments... glad I was a CS major ;)
ReplyDeleteIf we want to use the OD&D rules to play a campaign about mutant monkeys invading the star ship Enterprise at the edge of the universe, or about heroic halflings saving the world from the Dark Lord, then we should just go for it and devil take the hindmost.
ReplyDeleteAnd so we have, for more than 30 years!
I must wonder (because you have not specified in what I've read) just what "new" things you think are wanting. I honestly do not think the hobby suffers a dire shortage of mutant space monkeys.
I did get a bit miffed when I saw it proposed that What The World Needs Now is yet another freaking "retro-clone" of D&D -- especially because the plan was to drain Empire of the Petal Throne of all that made it so strikingly distinctive.
However, I don't see anything in 3E or 4E (or the piles of other imitators) to warrant claims of freshness. An emphasis on not using one's imagination hardly seems to fit the bill. Turning "dungeon crawls" into linear affairs and reducing role-playing to "skill challenges" is no improvement to my eye.
Carcosa is one recently published example of something that assumes none of the usual Tolkienish trappings.
Dwayanu: It's less a case of wanting new things than it is not wanting rehashes of old things. I'm still not convinced that anything in the old school movement is anything other than the latter.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure what the 3e/4e comment refers to, as we're in complete agreement on that. I would never argue that either of those are particularly fresh or interesting, although 4e does come up with quite a few innovations (that I don't like, but that's by the by).
The problem is nothing to do with 'Tolkienish trappings', by the way. It's to do with a cretain mindset which seems to say "D&D = sandbox mega dungeon crawl with lots of nods to pulp fantasy novels."
That is certainly one thing D&D means, and a significantly neglected one. Even in the "glory days," most of TSR's modules were tournament scenarios. A proper, dynamic "mega" dungeon on the lines suggested in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures doesn't really lend itself to commercial publishing.
ReplyDeleteThus, many coming to (or back to) OD&D or AD&D find that approach a novelty, even a revelation.
The open-ended, locale-describing scenario more generally has given way to the story-scripting model. Naturally, folks seek to fill the unfilled demand.
I don't see more of a fixation there than in the plot-driven "new school."
There are some innate reasonable limits to appropriate scope, I think. D&D would be a clumsy substitute for (say) Nicotine Girls, or vice-versa. One Game To Rule Them All seems a silly goal -- not that you have suggested it.
My own rant against staleness was directed at the fetish for producing "clones," which seemed to me to have gotten out of hand. Of course, I was long ago bored even of "genre mixing" imitations of D&D (orcs in space, cyberpunk future, western frontier, Napoleonic era, etc.).
The "dungeon" concept happens to work very well, especially for a game (D&D) designed around it. I would hope not to abandon it (for what?) but to see it employed more creatively. Wilderness and city settings can use variations on the technique, and certainly we could do with more of those published as grist for the referee's personal creative mill.
What is it that you want to see from old-school designers?
Dwayanu: What is it that you want to see from old-school designers?
ReplyDeleteThe ten million dollar question. Carcosa but without the explicit child murder?
On a less facetious note, it's hard to say, because if I had the good ideas and the motivation I'd be creating them. (I suppose I sort of am from time to time, on this blog.) To use examples from the past, settings like Dark Sun, Planescape, Spellhammer or Al Qadim. ("Like", as in, similarly innovative, not similar in tone or scope.)