(Summary: they can’t be mechanically reproduced without catastrophic loss of fidelity.)
Economist Bryan Caplan argues that role-playing games — the “tabletop” kind played with other humans, generally on pen and paper and face-to-face — are a great art form that developed “behind their time,” i.e. long after technology should have made them possible. (Games resembling role-playing games don’t seem to have appeared until the 20th century, although cf. a case for the Bronte sisters and Branwell as the first “Dungeon Masters.”)
As a recent art-form, they are comparable to comics, and Caplan wants us to see the emergence of comics as a form appropriate to serious stories as a model for RPGs (see his manifesto on the subject).
RPGs have obviously had a ton of cultural influence — practically every video game has a few genes from the tabletop games of past decades, and mainstream writers have been making some hay out of RPG experiences. But they have a crippling limitation: they can’t be reproduced.
The core RPG experience is collaborative, improvised oral story-telling. Essentially by definition, this can’t be mechanically reproduced and disseminated widely, unlike novels, poems, drawings, paintings, music, movies, or comics. And it can’t be enjoyed simultaneously by hundreds or thousands, like theatrical plays (which can, of course, be recorded). A role-playing game is small-scale personal experience shared by a handful of people.
The obvious workarounds don’t really work. Yes, RPG rulebooks and adventure sourcebooks can be distributed widely, and there are countless thousands in circulation. But while they can be engrossing, they don’t capture what’s distinctive about the RPG. They’re like the notes to stories unwritten. By analogy to videogames, it seems plausible that the agency of the participants is key.
For the same reason, recordings of game sessions don’t do it either. The crucial element of involvement is missing. There are novels based on role-playing campaigns, but those are novels, not RPGs. Thousands downloaded the podcast recordings of the Penny Arcade guys playing D&D, but those are basically sketch comedy. Listening to Gabe and Tycho and friends ham it up is not itself role-playing.
Mechanical reproduction is an extremely important determinant of the cultural importance of an art form. Reproducibility means more people experience it, which means more social resources can be devoted to it, which means that practitioners develop more mastery. (Which is not to say the effects are necessarily all positive — historically, mechanically reproducible arts become professionalized, and we may all participate less and “consume” more.)
For this reason, RPGs seem destined to remain a marginal folk art rather than a form with the wide cultural salience of whatever it is they do on TV.
We probably understand some terms differently so I’m not sure I follow the argument beyond the (plausible) observation about reproducibility. For instance chamber music has at various times — and before the invention of recording devices — had a great deal of “cultural importance” on my interpretation of what that means. Obviously it was never a mass taste though. How different is a score from a sourcebook? Similarly it doesn’t follow that you need a large audience to have a large number of resources: even today, surely the extent of social inequality complicates that identification. (The rich are not as generous to art as once, but this could v. well be a transient phase that a new art gets around.)
But I have not read Caplan’s manifesto and perhaps these points don’t apply.
I commented on this several years ago in a post on Personal vs. Impersonal Art. In particular, I think your key part is this:
Reproducibility means more people experience it, which means more social resources can be devoted to it, which means that practitioners develop more mastery. (Which is not to say the effects are necessarily all positive — historically, mechanically reproducible arts become professionalized, and we may all participate less and “consume†more.)
I feel like the last part is vital. I don’t want to say that folk art is less valuable – because I think it is important to value personal creativity. While you might not have intended it that way, I think it’s easy to read RPGs as less valuable if they are marginal and/or have less cultural salience.
In any case, I think that non-mechanically reproduced folk art can have wide cultural salience. Heck, by your definition, the vast majority of the history of art is “folk art” – including all music or performance prior to 1880. You’re right that an individual D&D session can’t be reproduced. However, you can have a whole group of people all playing D&D. Their experience of it is personalized – which means that their game has more relevance to them. Being participatory makes the experience more salient to the individual. As you note, D&D has had significant impact – moreso than most television shows. I might draw a parallel to the traditions of theater games and gospel music – also participatory genres that have had significant impact.
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Thanks for commenting, John. Your treatment goes much deeper than mine, and I also enjoyed your “Excerpt from an upcoming essay” from around the same time. Is the longer essay available anywhere?
The conclusion of my post is vague because I’m not really sure how the fact that RPGs can never be impersonally reproduced cashes out. We can never find the greatest sessions and hang them in a museum, both because they are rarely recorded and because they lack meaning outside of the personal context of their players’ lives. There can be no anthologies, no canon. The greater community of players cannot share the “completed” product to learn from it; the thing itself, any particular session experience, can only be shared among a small circle. Two players in different cities will not be able to examine each other’s work and learn from it, even if they are both very fine and their approaches might be compatible. Two groups could buy the same box set but wind up playing games so different as to be mutually unrecognizable. The adaptive effects that drive the reproducible arts to higher heights may not be as present. You are hardly going to get up after the end of an okay session and say, well that sucked and was completely uninspiring. You will be more inclined to satisfice and less to perfect, because you will not be competing in a tournament that rewards perfection. Apologies if I repeat myself. It seems there must be many effects like this, controlling the way the game is created and develops as a form.
None of this is to say that role-playing games are a lower art or the value they bring a lower pleasure. They deliver experiences that only they can deliver.