Food and Drink have a Special Significance

I was involved in a forum thread on Japanese RPGs recently, and this naturally lead me to look up the Japanese wikipedia page for RPGs, or "TRPGs" as they are called over there. (This, oddly, is not an abbreviation of Table Top RPG, but of Table Talk RPG. As is often the case with loan words from English to Japanese, it turns out that it's not so much a loan word as word that has been borrowed in an inappropriate or unnatural fashion, at least to native English speakers' eyes.) 

Anyway, the most interesting section on the page is "TRPG中における飲食", or "Food and drink in TRPGs". Here's a rough translation:

In TRPGs, food and drink, focusing around snacks, have a special significance. Having food and drink while playing the game with friends lets you enjoy the flavours while livening up the conversation, and is another element of the fun involved. In Mishio Fukuzawa's "New Fortune Quest Replay" [whatever that is], snacks and drinks are listed in the book as "necessary items". Other TRPG books don't go so far as to say they are necessary, but many recommend them. 

In replay books [basically a sort of novelization of a game session - yes, really] there is not usually a commentary, so there is also no commentary on snacks, but in the Sword World replay "[Title Untranslatable Because I Can't Be Arsed, it's Something Like 'Rhapsody of the Marauders']", there is some out-of-character commentary by the players regarding snacks, such as "I'm going out to get some juice", or "I want some ramen". 

TRPGs are played with a number of people, and take a few hours, so food and drink is also used to alleviate the hard work. It is desirable for all participants, including the GM, to prepare and manage the food. If this is not observed, the other participants will likely judge the offender unfavourably and be unsatisfied. It is usual for all the individual participants to to bring stuff, because expecting one person to bear the burden of providing food and drink is rather onerous. 

It is important to watch out during play that food and drink do not become a hindrance, especially when using a board or maps and so on. For instance, drink might be spilled and ruin a character sheet. It can also get on ones hands and make them smell. When the game approaches a meal time, it is usual to have a break for a while and then start again afterwards.  

During online sessions there is no chance the other players will take your snacks, so you can enjoy them in comfort. However, you also can't take other players' snacks either.

Those Japanese, eh?

Speculating Wildly about Culture

In this post at therpgsite, a lot of people are speculating about why RPGs are apparently not popular in some countries (India, China, etc.) while relatively popular in others (UK, USA, etc.). Seeing as I enjoy speculating wildly about culture, I threw my own hat into the ring, and will now elaborate on to your education and edification (or rejection and dissatisfaction, whichever you prefer).

First, I've been around the world enough to know that cultural differences are real and have an actual impact on the way people think and behave. People are the same in Japan, France, Kazakhstan, Israel and the UK in that they like good food, having fun, having sex, they care about their families, they worry about the future, and so on, as you would expect: the core is the same. But there are differences around the edges. For instance, in Japan there is no real culture of entertaining in the home. When people socialise they tend to do it outside - at bars, restaurants, clubs, whatever - and house parties are pretty rare (although they do happen).

It would be naive to assume that cultural differences like this would not have an effect on how the practice of playing RPGs translates between cultures. Certainly, in the naive sense, in societies like Japan where people tend not to socialise in the home as much as they do in the UK or North America, there is less of a culture of parlour games and hence a correspondingly smaller window for RPGs to enter.

But also, more deep-rooted cultural mores can impact on how RPGs are played and interpreted, I think. I've written quite a bit before on this blog about cultural differences between the UK and the USA, and how it seems perfectly natural when you think about it that one should produce Warhammer and the other should produce D&D. I didn't really do enough gaming in Japan, but I do have a lot of experience dealing with Japanese people in small group contexts and know that all the stereotypes about Japan being a deferential society are stereotypes for a reason: age and seniority are strongly correlated with how much people are willing to listen to you and agree with you. (This is strongly reinforced by the language.) This makes me wonder about how the role of the DM is interpreted in the Japanese context and how my own relaxed and egalitarian style would fit.

I also think it would be naive to assume that the literary and artistic traditions exhibited by certain societies would not be a factor in how readily RPGs are absorbed. For instance, it seems to me (speaking as a lay person and an outsider in a completely extemporaneous way) that there is a strong fantastical tradition in the modern (as opposed to medieval or ancient) art and literature of Spain, Portugal and Latin America, more so than in some other societies - that those countries produce cultural artefacts that seem more readily fantastical and more readily associated with fantasy than others: that, for instance, the steps from Borges to Vance to D&D are tiny, and that Borges is just one person in a heritage of fantastical weirdness that goes back to Picasso, El Greco, Cervantes... And it also seems to me at the same time that RPGs and fantasy literature are pretty popular in Portugal and Spain, at least to my limited knowledge, and that for instance I'm always stumbling across Portuguese translations of fantasy novels on author blogs, and I know George R R Martin goes on book tours in Portugal quite a lot, and I knew this Spanish girl at university who was an even bigger Tolkien geek than I was. And I also know that the plural of anecdote is not "data", but still.

Of course, you wouldn't want to play down the significance of either language, politics or economics. People in China speak Chinese, and comparatively few speak English well enough to read D&D in the original. People in North Korea don't have easy access to DriveThruRPG. Most people in Zambia don't have the disposable income to spend on frivolous RPGs.

And if living in a foreign country for a number of years taught me anything, it's that it takes a long, long time to get to know a society well enough to pontificate on its mores. I feel confident talking about Japanese culture because I lived there for a large chunk of my life, I worked in a Japanese environment, I speak the language, I dated the women, I played football with the men. The same isn't true of Brazil or India or the Philippines, so what the fuck do I know? And I also know that when I hear people who don't know Japan as well as I do talking in a general way about "Japanese culture" I always think they sound as if they're talking out of their arse, so I'm wary of doing the same thing.

And yet I just have, and will continue to do so.