The Weight of Smoke: Defining RPGs

Tabletop role-playing games are a complex endeavor. This has nothing to do with the complexity of the rules but is a result of how they work and how we can study that working. The first difficulty is even identifying what a role-playing game is.

A good place to start is Routledge's Role-playing Game Studies (I'll talk about this book in more detail in a later post). The editors, Jose Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, discuss how the definition of a game is elusive, role-playing games even more so. Part of this is because role-playing games exist across a wide array of forms--tabletop, computer games, MMOs, live-action, and so on. In the "What is a role-playing game?" section of many games, you'll see everything from Mike Pondsmith's definition from Teenagers from Outer Space (1987): "Role-playing is 'Let's pretend," with rules," to Hitchens and Drachen's (2009) definition that is six paragraphs each defining a different aspect of what role-playing games are. Distilling role-playing games to a concise definition is as hard as weighing smoke.

Why are they so hard to define? The nature of role-playing games is as ephemeral as the weight of smoke. The rules are not the game. Rules may influence the game but two groups of players playing the same game can have completely different experiences. The adventure isn't the game, it is simply the backdrop upon which the game unfolds. The game exists as the shared experience of the people at the table. It is a nebulous mix of narrative and social factors. That shared experience manifests in an almost infinite amount of permutations, based on factors of players, the rules, immersion, and even the random dice rolls that drive the action--and some games don't use dice, are those still role-playing games? It's difficult.

Role-playing games are complex and elusive concepts that are difficult to study and theorize about. This means that the harder we try to empirically categorize or box in games, the more cases we need to make or our theory starts to fall apart. Rene Reinhold Schallegger believes role-playing games may be one of the first truly post-modern forms of entertainment (2018). Their communal, subjective, and ever-changing nature makes them impossible to fully map.

The impossibility of absolute knowledge of role-playing games does not preclude us from studying them. It just sets the parameters of that study. Any 'comprehensive' theory of role-playing games needs to be as flexible as the games themselves. You'll note that I don't define role-playing games here. This is why. What went on in Gary Gygax's basement in 1974 bears little resemblance to the Mage: The Ascension game I am playing fifty years later. They're both 'let's pretend,' with rules. Such a vague definition simultaneously tells us nothing and captures the form perfectly.