More than a Private Joke: Cross-Media Parody in Roleplaying Games

In contrast to the other pieces in this In Focus feature, this essay deals with media convergence in players’ heads, and with how the cross-media cultural encyclopedia of tabletop roleplayers is put to active use in their performances.

Tabletop roleplaying games are a hybrid entertainment form, part games part storytelling, mixing popular culture interests such as fantasy literature and wargames.¹ They have therefore always been highly intertextual and convergent, at the beginning directly inspired by sword and sorcery literary worlds, and later expanding upon media universes drawn from film, television, comics, or computer games. Roleplaying means performance without a script, where players rely on basic character descriptions to behave and speak in appropriate ways as they go along in their adventures. This kind of on-the-fly collective storytelling is highly demanding and requires that players are knowledgeable of the setting, genres, and themes evoked in each particular game so that their utterances and actions will make sense and be productive in story-advancement terms. Imitation, quotation, parody, and other forms of meta-textuality are common strategies to fill the storytelling gaps. Since the narrative occurs largely in participants’ heads, any reference to an external diegetic world will help give shape to their imagination and steer it in the right direction. Many roleplayers also receive significant pleasure from recognizing fellow players’ quotes and from performing the right roles.

Roleplaying games are advocated by players, game designers, and academics as “active” entertainment, as opposed to the “passive” consumption of stories. This is often explicit in the game rulebooks themselves.² But this doesn’t mean that roleplaying as an art form is cut off from the rest of the cultural system. On the contrary, roleplaying performance is heavily influenced by other media, as all commentators who have seriously dealt with the genre have noted.³ In this essay I want to go beyond the usual assumption that other media influence manifests itself exclusively through quotations in roleplaying games. I suggest that parody can have a transformative power, both on the stories and the players themselves, as it can facilitate serious social satire.

Our Game: What a Wonderful War!

This discussion draws on the empirical material collected by myself and Anders Tychsen in a 2003 investigation, “The Production of Narratives in Role Playing Games,” where our aim was to understand how narratives are collectively produced on-the-fly in a roleplaying session in order to gain insight that could be exported to the design of multiplayer computer games. We recorded four roleplaying sessions with four different five-player teams and game masters. We transcribed the videos and conducted interviews with the players both before and after the games. One of the interesting results was that the same rather linear scenario could be played/told in surprisingly different ways, which raises questions about the steering of creativity and the stimulation of player fantasy. But another interesting (and perhaps contradictory) observation was of the similarity of the parodic activity in all sessions, even the ones with different results. Participants roleplayed in very much the same way, and I was surprised at how strong archetypes are and how they guide roleplaying performance.

The scenario we observed is called What a Wonderful War!⁴ and is based on the Traveller science fiction game system. It was written by Sven Münther (a player fan) for a roleplaying convention (con) in Copenhagen in 2003. This means that it is a self-contained scenario that has to be playable within a short time (four to five hours). In terms of structure and content, con scenarios cannot rely on the accumulated playing experience afforded by a campaign, where the same players meet regularly and get to know both the fantasy world and each others’ characters so well that the game master can use this knowledge to enrich the storytelling experience. In a con scenario, players will most likely not know each other, and might not be familiar with the setting, so that instead of building a story that requires precise knowledge of a fictional world, con scenarios rely on more...