Michael, I must point out that computer games have little to do with table top, or face-to-face, roleplaying games other than a surface resemblance. Too, RPG fiction as a term refers to so-called 'game write-up' style fiction, in which the author crafts a tale set in an RPG setting, or provides a 'fictionalized' version of game events.

While RPGs have elements of earlier entertainments -improvisatonal theater, story telling, fiction, they also resemble real life, in that one can not accurately predict what is going to happen, only make a half-assed guess. As the saying goes, no plotline survives contact with the players.

So the Game Master (GM) must create an evening's entertainment that is intriguing, entertaining, does not contradict what is known of the setting he is using (not without a good justification that is), and is flexible enough to survive whatever his players throw at it. And role-gamers are inventive little beasts. They will find and exploit any plot holes, even if they have to invent them.

As to game fiction. It's been around for awhile, and most of it stinks worse than a tasmanian devil after an encounter with a skunk. This largely due to the fact most game fiction writers are amateurs in the modern sense. The best is more game influenced, instead of trying to be a faithful recreation of an often badly designed game setting the author takes the time to expand that world, adding those elements that make up a fully realized sub-creation, but which players are thought to avoid. Largely because most player's experience with such was with books that weren't that well realized to begin with.

Raymond Feist's Rift War series is set on a game world, Midkemia. The world of China Mieville's Perdido Street Station began life as a game setting, to be adapted for traditional story telling later on. Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire tetralogy has the feel of a game setting fleshed out by a person who got to thinking about the impact of working magic (and other fantastical elements) on Earth's history. (For example, in the world of Oath of Empire the Western Roman Empire has actually thrived up to the early 7th century CE.) As a matter of fact, Mr. Harlan has written a series of stories set in a fantasy version of the First Crusade that has been adapted to Dungeons & Dragons.

By all in all the roleplaying game business is a young one, and largely amateur. Much as cartoons, comic books, and motion pictures were when they were first starting out. Consider the adolescent sensibility of the Leon Schliesenger/early Warner Brothers animated thorts with the adult (but still puckish) sensibility of the later Warner Brothers productions. RPGs are a young persons field, and when a grown-up, a professional, produces material it is notable.

Then too, the field has no real idea as to what it is it's doing. The inclusion of 'game' leads many to assume it must perforce follow the dictates of early forms of the subject. That it includes improvisation, fiction, and other elements seen before means many see it as nothing new, when in actuality it is a combination of old elements, all coming together to produce something new.

In short, we don't know what to call the damn thing, much less how to conceptualize it.

The literature on the subject is sparse, and lacking I'm afraid. Nothing that goes into any depth. There have been academic papers published, but largely by grad and pre-grad students, and the limitations of those should be self evident to anyone with any experience in matters academic. Those produced by more mature academics suffer from the particular author's subject myopia. As far as I know no-one has produced an academic paper on RPGs as RPGs.

In other words, it will be a few years before RPGs become a mature and professional field. But danged if I'm gonna let that stop me from talking about it.:)

Thanks for soliciting further elucidation on the subject, and for giving me an opportunity to practice composition and typing.:)

Posted by: Alan Kellogg on December 1, 2003 11:34 PM

When you guys are talking about the youth market, exactly what age are you speaking too? Grad students are very different from the Harry Potter/ Princess Diaries crowd.

And perhaps the publishing biz is feeling the effects of a larger social phenomenon that has to do with a faster paced lifestyle for families with kids. Off to day care, off to school, off to ball practice/dance lessons/music lessons. Reading takes time and money and with a younger crowd it's not the kiddos who are shelling out the bucks, it's the parents. Newer, faster, better seems to be the criteria for many purchases these days and books as an entertainment device just dont "seem" to be on the cutting edge.

Posted by: Deb on December 2, 2003 6:49 AM

Deb -- Young adults. No longer reading kiddie or juvenile fiction, off on their own for the first time -- the usual TV-ad, target-market crowd. And I think you're absolutely right about "newer, faster, better" -- very hard for books to compete on those terms, and those are terms that the young folks have gotten used to. Their loss: hard for me to imagine a life in which books didn't play a big-ish role ...

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on December 2, 2003 10:24 AM

Two more points on gaming fiction (the super-genre of RPG fiction):

1) I'd also recommend Steven Brust's "Jhereg" series (based on a long-running D&D campaign), nearly anything by Michael Stackpole (designer for Flying Buffalo and writer for FASA, among others), and the Honor Harrington series by David Weber (this doesn't seem to be based on a particular game, but the author was heavily involved in the design of "Starfire", and the experience shows in the fiction).

2) At a panel at the San Antonio World Science Fiction Convention (1997), Mike Stackpole (among others) speculated that gaming fiction might be the new SF/Fantasy midlist. His claim then (I don't know whether the current business environment would bear it out) was that the midlist was dying out, lost to blockbusters and new authors. If a new author didn't become a major force within a few books, the contracts would disappear. The only books by established authors with sales consonant with what used to be the midlist were game fiction.

Posted by: Doug Sundseth on December 2, 2003 8:07 PM

Michael,

On the "Young Adult" fiction market. It would help if publishers went looking for material that was well done, and that did not pander to the young. While the typical 20 year old may have all the good sense of a ball of clay, they aren't stupid, and can spot condescension from a mile away.

On game fiction: New to you. It's a mixed bag. Some few are good, some few are atrocious, most are ordinary. In some the game connection is so obvious you can hear the dice rattling, in others it is but a subtle influence.

Right now I'm trying to puzzle out how to simulate the magic of Thomas Harlan's "Shadows of Ararat" in both the Dangerous Journeys and d20 Systems. Not as easy at it seems.

Where RPG sourcebooks are concerned -books, that is, that add to the game written for and provide additional options for play, as I've said before, they do present all the problems of works of fiction, and works of fact with none of the advantages. Which leads to the question of sub-creation and how the author and the audience understand the world. Which understanding is all-too-often sadly lacking in people today.

Which is to say, many of those who play RPGs have no real understanding of metaphysics as it describes this reality we inhabit. But that's another essay, one I'll tell you about once it's composed and posted.

And before I do that I need to set up links to the blog appropriate forums, and before I do that I need to set up said forums.:)

(A web master's work is never done. Which for me is a good thing, otherwise I'd get bored.:D)

BTW, you have my permission to post the original comment in the blog itself.

Posted by: Alan Kellogg on December 2, 2003 11:19 PM






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