Tabletop RPGs as Environmental Text
Tabletop RPGs as Environmental Text
Tabletop RPGs as Environmental Text
September 5, 2022
By Mehitabel Glenhaber
Summary
While scholarly analysis of TTRPGs often focuses on player's experiences of role playing as human-like agents, scholars of TTRPGs recognize that role-playing games simulate "Worlds" or "Places"7 - or, alternately, though TTRPG scholars rarely use this language, "Nature" or "Environments." Tabletop RPGs may not be "Virtual" worlds in the sense of a highly-realistic, highly visual, high-polygon representation of the natural world.
8 Nature in a tabletop RPG is not created through visual computer graphics, but through verbal descriptions of the world, and occasionally supplemented by rulebook illustrations, reference pictures, or maps.9 However, tabletop RPGs environments are "Virtual" in Janet Murray10 or Marie-Laure Ryan's11 broad use of "Narrative as virtual reality" - they create shared imagined environments which players collectively inhabit, interact with, and manipulate objects within.
While Tabletop RPGs and video games both simulate environments, a major difference, which must inform our environmental readings of TTRPGs, is that whereas a video game uses a computer to simulate the environment, TTRPGs use human players as their game engines.
Players may have different empathetic or emotional reactions to interacting with an environment simulated by other players, or interacting as a part of an environmental simulation, than they might have interacting with an environment simulated by a computer.
21 While, as previously discussed, these rulebooks do not fully dictate how players interact with the game, these texts nonetheless constitute the designer's official stances on nature, and make up an important part of how players are taught to think about the environment in their play.
While these games play an important educational role, I also ask, what other, more aesthetic environmentalist interventions could Tabletop RPGs create? How could "Green" attitudes be incorporated into more recreational gameplay?
" Without ditching the character-centered, high-action narrative structure of a classic tabletop RPG, Moran's games are narratively structured to steer players towards representing a more amiable relationship with nature in the game world - these games may not come off as "Environmentalist" to most players, but they nonetheless encode more environmental empathy into gameplay.
Reference
Glenhaber, M. (2022, September 05). Tabletop RPGs as Environmental Text. Retrieved September 9, 2022, from https://analoggamestudies.org/2022/09/tabletop-rpgs-as-environmental-texts/