The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games by Jennifer Grouling Cover

Author:Jennifer Grouling Cover
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: McFarland & Co.

In her article “Gendered Contexts,” Jenny Cook-Gumperz (1992) studies discourse samples from the make-believe games of two three-yearold girls. Although her main goal is to observe the formation of gender identities rather than the structure of narratives, Cook-Gumperz gives an in-depth model for this format of storytelling and the frames that it involves. She explains that because the children work together to develop a plot, make-believe sessions may be understood as narrative games (CookGumperz, 1992, p. 182); a term that corresponds directly with the way Rilstone (1994) referred to TRPGs as producing narratives and Mackay (2001) defined the RPG as a story-creation system (p. 4). Although adult TRPGs operate on a much more sophisticated level, they do have many similarities with childhood fantasy. The ability to shift frames is one of these similarities. Like D&D, children’s make-believe games rarely involve one act of re-centering to the storyworld but, instead, continually shift between the AW and the APW. Another useful way to look at TRPGs, then, is to compare the frames used in them to those used in make-believe games.

In these make-believe games, Cook-Gumperz (1992) recognizes three distinct voices used by the children: narrative speech, in-character speech, and off-record speech. Narrative speech is used to describe objects and events in the storyworld. In-character speech involves speaking as a character in the make-believe game. Off-record speech is grounded in the actual world and involves organizational planning of the narrative game as well as statements not directly related to the story being told through the game (Cook-Gumperz, 1992, p. 184). Off-record speech includes narrative planning speech, which is used to counter what someone has done or alter the course of events in the story that the children are developing (Cook-Gumperz, 1992, p. 188). These types of speech possess different levels of narrativity, from direct narration in narrative speech to little or no narrativity in off-record speech. I now turn to a linguistic analysis that shows how these forms of talk are nearly analogous to those found in the D&D game.

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