Dungeons and Dragons is not art.

Film critic Roger Ebert has achieved a huge measure of internet notoriety for his proclamation that video games, in principle, cannot be art. His latest discussion of the topic to date has drawn more than 3,300 comments (roughly 99% of them hostile).

To illuminate the question of whether video games are art, consider the role-playing game fad that slightly predated the arrival of video games. The goal of role-playing games is profoundly simple: assembling a group of players for a session of collaborative storytelling. Collaborative storytelling has been around in one form or another since the era of the oral tradition to today's "Hardy Boys" and "Star Trek" fictional universes, so we know that this can be art. The key to the success of collaborative storytelling is that there are a set of rules for the contributors in order to enforce a coherent story, setting, and theme.

In a role-playing game, the players all adopt the roles of characters within the story, except for the "game master" player who handles all of the non-character elements of the story. The game arises from the interaction between character players and the game master. The character players are entertained by being allowed to describe their character's actions within the story as they see fit. The game master has the burden of describing the non-player story elements in entertaining ways, but he also has the benefit of being allowed an immensely greater scope of personal creativity -- control over the entire game world other than the character players themselves.

Role-playing games work well as games. As art, they are an unmitigated disaster. The artistic failure arises from the fact that character players and game masters all have independent conceptions and expectations for how the story should evolve. Coordinating these ideas into a single, coherent story with artistic merit is a challenge that proves to be immensely difficult in practice.

The major design failure of modern role-playing games turns out to be their relatively poor ability to coordinate player characters with game master. The innovation in modern role-playing games for attempting to reconcile character players with game masters was to introduce probabilistic rules to govern the results of the character actions. The merit of this should be obvious: in any situation in which character players may come into critical dispute with the game master, remove the human element from the result and replace it with a random arbiter (i.e. a die roll). Neither side can therefore accuse the other of an unfair manipulation of the luck of the dice. Suffice it to say that this made the role-playing game as entertainment possible.

Unfortunately, probabilistic rules did nothing to solve the problem of disputes. This led to two major residual problems. The first is railroading, where the game master uses his control over non-character story elements to harass, intimidate, and bully the players into abandoning control over their characters to the game master. The second is minmaxing, where the players exploit the rules of the game to maximize the ability of their characters to act successfully regardless of all other considerations that the game master may wish to preserve. The modern role-playing game is so dominated by the cold war between minmaxing players and railroading game masters as to be utterly ruined as an artistic endeavor.

Thus, we come to the hallmark of the very latest role-playing games: create balance between character players and game masters by a mutual reduction of choices to a near-nullity. Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition (D&D 4e) is a prime example of this. D&D 4e reduces player disputes by requiring the players to produce characters who are essentially equal in their ability to act within the game setting. Furthermore, the game setting is highly combat-oriented -- so much so that the ability of the characters to function as a combat team is the sin qua non of the D&D 4e gaming experience. Finally, the role of the game master is to assemble combat scenarios that exactly match the combat ability of the characters. The end result is a role-playing game that functions without crippling disputes, but that also has all of the charm, flavor, and meaning of a McDonald's Big Mac.

A sociological phase transition in the D&D genre

In the good old days, the roleplaying experience of Dungeons and Dragons was designed to be a reasonable approximation to the late Middle Ages. In particular, everyone's character had a formal class that he or she would belong to. There were fighters and clerics, paladins and rangers (presumably "special forces" rangers, but with the combat skills of park rangers), wizards and rogues. This was the medieval mindset: everyone had a pre-defined rank and role and life, and yet the adventerous player character could test his luck with the wheel of fortune.

Now the old roleplaying system of "formal" classes has broken down:

While I applaud the intent of 4E [Dungeon and Dragons Fourth Edition] to give every 1st level character a fighting chance via a ton of hit points (and healing surges) I think they just went too far with the various powers.

By giving Powers to all they've stripped away the relevance of those powers. Once every one has them, they cease to be anything special. Where's the noticable difference? Where's the defining characteristic of the character?

The answer is that it depends on the character's role. The Controller directs traffic. The Striker deals out damage. The Defender holds the line. The Leader gives out the buffs. Every class has a set of powers that support the given role. That's what defines the 4E character. The role within the party has become king.

Dungeons and Dragons now seems to be exclusively focused on performance in battle as the key determinant of the quality of the roleplaying experience (where's Dr. Freud when you need him). The pressure to fight effectively has correspondingly become so intense that the old "formal" character classes have disintegrated under the pressure of the new "empirical" character classes.

Social Class, Psychology, and Dungeons and Dragons, Part II

Is the "Monty Haul" campaign bourgeois?

The Monty Haul campaign is a notorious style of Dungeons and Dragons consisting of a fantasy world with nothing but low-hanging fruit just waiting to be plucked (author's emphasis):

The Monty "Haul" Campaign derives its name from the game show Let's Make A Deal where Monty "Hall" gave away prizes to contestants who had to do next to nothing. This campaign style is typified by the Dungeon Master awarding large amounts of experience, cash, magic, or other powers to the characters in short order. For example, a 1st-level party finds a Sword+5, Holy Avenger, a Ring of Three Wishes, hundreds of thousands of gold pieces, or some similar treasure that required little effort and far exceeds their current power or wealth. Many believe whatever equipment or magic the party finds should be earned; even then, it should just add a little to a character's ever-increasing power. Also, adventurers shouldn't be able to buy everything their hearts desire, nor should the awarded experience ever be sufficient for characters to go up several levels at once. This defeats the purpose of adventuring, and the overly generous nature of a Monty Haul Campaign belittles actual character achievement.

On the face of it, the "Monty Haul" gamer seems like a middle-class stereotype: the "capitalist" who is happily converting an unearned financial windfall into an ostentatious display of magical power and/or conspicuous consumption. The alternative ideal is the "Bobo" gamer who values wealth, magic, and power for his or her character, but only as a means for obtaining "authentic" role-playing experiences.

Of course, this only really works as an analogy since both styles of play are considered equally geeky by mainstream opinion. The "Monty Haul" gamer is probably considered somewhat more geeky in this regard since he or she stereotypically making a vulgar display of in-game status symbols:

When relatively inexperienced players (often called Munchkins) from Monty Haul Campaigns hold out their 20th-level characters as a point of pride and accomplishment, it tends to rub the experienced gamer the wrong way, especially when the youngster delights in saying things like "My character is much better than yours," as if that were somehow the point of roleplaying.

Thus for many people, the "Monty Haul" player has all of the social cache of a lower-class person hitting the $10 million lotto jockpot, then blowing the money on a 10-feet tall, gold-plated statue of Jesus placed next to the plastic flamingos in his or her front lawn. On the other hand, the Bobo gamer has a related source of geek stigma: perversion. As alluded to in part I, the roleplaying exercise has the potential of bringing subconscious motives and desires to the surface. It goes without saying that these could be highly disapproved of by mainstream society; if the stereotypical "Monty Haul" gamer is bragging about the striking power of his "Toenail clippers +10 of instant demon slaying", the stereotypical "serious" roleplayer is an otherwise normal, sexually well-adjusted young man roleplaying a red-haired, green-eyed, stunningly beautiful, female elven druid.

Yet more D&D blogging

I've been doing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons blogging lately now that the Democratic Party's presidential nominating process has declined into a stalemate. The new 4th edition rules are being released this summer, so while I decide whether or not they are worth playing I'll be posting some thoughts about it from time to time.

In particular, draft rules for handling character death for the 4th edition game are available. The resemblance to professional wrestling is uncanny. Here are the rules one by one:

1. At 0 hp or less, you fall unconscious and are dying.
   A little background is in order here. At all times, each D&D character has an integral number of hit points. Each character has some finite positive number of hit points when fully healthy and rested. Injuries and wounds make that number go down; healing and rest make that number go up.
   
   Professional wrestling works eactly the same way if you think of death as "getting pinned". Stone Cold Steve Austin is probably not going to be able to pin a competant wrestler in the first ten seconds of a match unless that wrestler is a complete wimp. He's going to have to pound on a wrestler's skull for a while to knock his hit points down before getting a pin. Once that wrestler is down to 0, he is too exhausted to fight back and get pinned to lose the match.



2. Characters die when their negative hit point total reaches -10 or one-quarter of their full normal hit points, whichever is a larger value.
   In other words, it's a lot harder to send Andre the Giant out of the ring on a stretcher than it is do to the same thing to, say, "Bob" from Scranton, Pennsylvania.
   



3. If you’re dying at the end of your turn, roll 1d20.
   Lower than 10: You get worse. If you get this result three times before you are healed or stabilized (as per the Heal skill), you die.
   10-19: No change.
   20: You get better! You wake up with hit points equal to one-quarter your full normal hit points.
   Obviously this is the rule that keeps a wrestler unconscious on the mat while his opponent is climbing up onto the top rope for a devastating finishing move. Except that sometimes a wrestler will manage to get back onto his feet before his opponent can finish him off. Back in the 80s, we used to call this kind of magical regeneration the "Hulk Hogan Effect".



4. If a character with negative hit points receives healing, he returns to 0 hp before any healing is applied.
   Here the slightest bit of healing a puts wrestler back onto his feet. This is why it's so important to wrestle with a tag team partner.

Social Class, Psychology, and Dungeons and Dragons, Part I

A couple of years ago, I drifted back into a standing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) campaign. Of course, the novelty of the game had faded away long ago, and even the mental effort required to relearn the game system hardly seemed worth it. I was so long out of practice that I almost had to pay one of my younger friends to roll up a character for me.

Approaching D&D from something of a renewed outsider perspective (also influenced by a developing geezer perspective), the actual game mechanics are not quite as interesting as the game meta-mechanics. In other words, the actual bother of deciding if any rule of the game was playable or not playable or just plain stupid is nowhere near as fascinating as the analysis of why the game makes players do the things they do or develop the social interactions that they develop. For an aging nerd, this also serves as a useful retrospective on what went wrong, but you'll see that as we go along.

Given how long my first elaboration on the theme is turing out to be, I'm going to have to make this post a part I. To begin, look at a simple question with some suggestive lines of analysis.

What is the purpose of D&D miniatures?

One interesting point that I noticed is that the Dungeons and Dragons miniature figure has dramatically grown in importance in the game system. I think I owned one or two of these little figures back in my grade school days (i.e. the early 80s), but in all of my role-playing game adventures from those days until recently, I don't think I've ever bothered with actually using one. It was something of a surprise to realize that the current verion 3.5 of D&D actually assumes that the miniature figure is an essential element of gameplay. Not surprisingly, there is a dollar figure associated with this phenomenon, but also the question of why players would want to bother with the extra time, effort, money and rules associated with these figures.

If anything, one would think that insisting that miniature figures be included in the game would make D&D even more of a social stigma for young players. Think about it: here is a game that assumes that geeky teenaged boys are going to need to buy "dolls", so to speak, in order to play it properly. Some gamers are even quite open about their disdain for miniatures:

As I'm going over the character sheets (Tira, Kathra, Corrin et al.) I keep getting this vague sense of deja vu.

Where had I seen these? Were they released in an earlier incomplete form? Did I see them in a dream?

Then it hit me. I had seen them before. In every Spotlight article about some new mini for the D&D Minis game.

Oh sure, they're a little more fleshed out now. A few more stat lines but that's about all the difference that I see. Squares. Defense scores. Features that depend on an ally (or allies) being so many squares away. Is this 4th Edition D&D or 2nd edition Minis?

Roles I can ignore. Squares I can easily translate into feet. Yes WotC [D&D is owned by the company Wizards of the Coast]. I can manage 4th grade math. The redundant explanations I can just roll my eyes and move on from ("Your powers are called spells, since they are from the arcane power source." WTF).

What I can't stand is having the Minis rulebook inflated and sold to me as the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

One obvious answer to the question of miniatures is that it happens to be an enduring legacy of D&D's roots in conventional military wargaming, but that leaves open the question of why miniatures were enduringly popular. Another possibility is that the importance of miniatures is a reaction to the D&D moral panic of the early 80s and the tragic suicides of two D&D players:

The moral panic was fed by the escapist nature of D&D. Role-playing games can provide a psychosocial moratorium, an idea suggested by psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. The moratorium is key to Erikson's theories about the development of adolescent identity, in which a "time-out" is placed on the consequences of actions. A consequential moratorium provides youth with an opportunity to expose themselves to a variety of experiences without concern for the results of those actions. Doing so allows the individual to develop a core self, or identity (Turkle 203).

The media perceived D&D as having just the opposite effect. By associating their deaths with D&D, the media portrayed Egbert and Pulling as becoming more involved in their fantasy games as their concepts of self and reality began to dissolve, being replaced by the rules and worlds offered by D&D. Instead of enjoying a consequential moratorium, Egbert and Pulling allowed events in the game to have real-world consequences, causing a fantasy curse to lead to a player's real death.

In other words, it was exactly the free-form nature of the roleplaying exercise that was suspected to have negative psychological consequences. Anything that sets a definitive form or limitation on the use of imagination could thus be seen, in this light, as a safety feature. The use of miniatures in gameplay could be a rather powerful limitation on the use of imagination. Restricting players to the use of generic, mass produced, stock miniatures types would be a concrete, visual deterrent to self-identification of a player with his or her character.

Similarly, many of the other pathologies of the D&D system can be seen as (possibly intentionally) having this function. The mass proliferation of rules to cover every possible contingency or feature of a game -- culminating in a entire library shelf of rules supplements -- is another limitation to the imagination. Other limits to the imagination are game features such as the elaboration of generic characters; encouragement of a focus on game mechanics instead of interpretations of game mechanics; and rote game scenarios or very tightly scripted game scenarios. These are all notorious D&D game features that also serve a purpose of being a continual reminder that the participants are playing a game, thus deterring a presumably unhealthy self-identification between player and character or roleplay and reality.

Fears of a hobgoblin holocaust

An article at Slate.com devoted to knocking down the reputation of the recently deceased Gary Gygax hits upon the an interesting theme: the secret core of fascism hidden deep within the geek psyche. First observe that the article's author observes the mainstream culture's shear terror of the contemporary geek:

And lo, what a fascinating and tortured bunch we are, with our tales of marathon role-playing game (RPG) sessions in windowless basements, our fingers hardened to nacho-cheese-encrusted talons, and our monklike vows of celibacy.

Like an indigenous people in some remote portion of the rain forest that the Christian mercenaries have yet to discover, the young geeks live their lives on their own terms in their own self-contained, squalid little universe. Rightfully so, it seems, for were they to make contact with the culture of the wider high-school world, they would only be ostracized and rejected by a superior culture that exalts the captains of the sports and cheerleader teams over the poor, pathetic geeks. The Good News of this wider world is that all that is good in men and women is derived from a single-minded pursuit of an ever-increasing ability to obtain the carnal affections of the opposite sex; despite the widespread belief in it's universal applicability to all mankind, there is still a lingering feeling that the geeks might be better off living in ignorance of it.

Secondly, the article also observes that geek culture has also embraced a practice that reeks of pure evil (embedded hyperlink removed):

So while it's one player's job—the so-called Dungeon Master—to come up with the plot for each gaming session and play the parts of the various enemies and supporting characters, in practice that putative storyteller merely referees one imagined slaughter after another. This is not Tolkien's Middle-Earth, with its anti-fascist political commentary and yearning for an end to glory and the triumph of peace. This is violence without pretense, an endless hobgoblin holocaust.

In other words, Hitler was a geek! The young Hitler had all of the geek warning signs. There was the passionately intense yet seemingly trivial interests (Hitler's obsession with things like architecture and Wagner's operas), the repulsively gauche lifestyle (Hitler's bohemian, painter's life in Vienna), the self-imposed, monklike vow of chastity (Hitler was notorious for this), and the lingering connections to occultism (for example, the Thule Society). Was the Third Reich nothing more than a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that, you know, got a little out of control?

The article really wants to nanny instead of sounding the moral alarm, so it finds itself forced to pull back from the brink and conceed that our modern day geeksters would never become quite so depraved as to actually embrace "the banality of evil" (embedded hyperlink removed):

For decades, gamers have argued that since D&D [Dungeons and Dragons] came first, its lame, morally repulsive experience system can be forgiven. But the damage is still being done: New generations of players are introduced to RPGs as little more than a collective fantasy of massacre and greed. If the multiplayer online game World of Warcraft is the direct descendant of D&D, then what, exactly, has Gygax bequeathed to us unwashed, nerdy masses? The notion that emotionally complex story lines are window dressing for an endless series of hack-and-slash encounters? There's a reason so many players are turned off after a brush with D&D. It promises something great—a lively (if dorky) bit of performance art—but delivers a small-minded and ignorant fantasy of rage, distilled to a bunch of arcane charts and die rolls. Dungeons & Dragons strips the "role-playing" out of RPGs; it's a videogame without the graphics, and a pretty boring one, at that.