Second Interview With David

We are sitting in David's apartment. The room is sunny, filled with the aromatic scent of the green plants that are scattered about the room in well-tended pots. Bach is playing in the background-- a little Gothic mood music that is at odds with the sun ny day and cheerful room. David fills my mug with freshly brewed coffee. I glance at my notes. Going through the Ravenloft books produced a constellation of fresh questions. How do the narrative and game aspects of role-playing interact? What effect does genre (i.e. gothic/horror rather than epic/fantasy) have on the game? What significant features mark this kind of play?

"So, how would you define role-playing for someone who knows nothing about it?" I ask. "What is its essence? Does it have an essence?"

"Hmm." David thinks for a moment. "Well, it's a game where the principle is entering a character's skin and living that character for a while instead of being yourself. And it's a game, so you can do anything that is fun with that character. You are in an imaginary world and what happens happens. You try to stick to that character, keepi ng your own ideas out. You try to live as that character would."

"How does Ravenloft differ from D and D [Dungeons and Dragons]?" I ask.

"Well, there is a notion of lurking evil in Ravenloft, of imminent doom at every second of the game. You can't sleep quietly because your bed might eat you." He smiles as I laugh. "Or it might turn into blood and you sink in it, or anything like that. It's horror. Nothing you see is what it seems. Or it can be, but you never know. That's the point. You walk into a place that you've been before and see a pillar that you know. But now it's just a few inches off. It's not where it should be. There's this creepy feeling. Things seem animated with a life of their own. But you're never sure. Fear comes from the unknown. That's important. Ravenloft is based on a distorted world. You are always afraid. You never know. The gamemast er keeps you on your toes, keeps the players guessing."

"People always ask me 'Why do you like that stuff? Its horror. Why do you want to be scared?' I don't really have an answer for them, why I like it. You tell me," I laugh and shake my head, aware that I am putting a question to him that I usua lly hate, "why do you like it?"

"I think one of the most powerful things we experience in life are emotions. And one of the most powerful emotions is being scared. Fear. Playing the game, you get a mixture of fears-- if you really get into it-- and the chance to lose yourself because it's role-playing. You are not being yourself, you are being someone else, so you can let go, and you have fun because you are with good friends. So you have many, many different emotions that come into play."

"It's cathartic?"

"It can be, if everyone gets into it," he says.

The phone rings. He answers it and breaks into French, sounding delighted. It is his mother from Quebec. He excuses himself and talks for a while in French while I sit back drinking coffee and listen to the music. I don't recognize this piece now playi ng. Is it still Bach? I know it is baroque. It seems to be dominated by two strands: a light, almost playful set of notes played quickly, and a slower, more resonant set of tones beneath. Both strands run parallel to each other for a while, then break apart, intertwine, and break apart again.

After about ten minutes, David hangs up the phone and smiles at me. "Sorry," he says.

"No problem," I answer. "So, how would you define a gamemaster, someone who runs the game? What is their role? What are they supposed to do?"

"Well, they need to create-- well, the players come up with the characters, and then they throw themselves at the mercy of the gamemaster. As a player, you let down all your defenses and say 'Scare me.' It's great. You can be scared, yet nothing will r eally happen to you. How many times in life can you say 'I'm going to let myself be scared?' The gamemaster has to provide a setting, and details and details, and of course monsters. He provides incentive for the characters to go there and there. Make them think certain things which may or may not be true. And find a way to scare them. To make them live something. To make them have fun also. As a player, you don't have the responsibility of preparation that a gamemaster has.

"You have to make the players want to come into a certain adventure or quest, " he continues. You have to hook them. Then once they're hooked, you have to somehow make it personal for the characters. For example, if I say this guy comes and offe rs you money to go here, who cares? But if I say your daughter has been taken away by this ancient fiend, someone whose description seems to fit the identity of someone you know from the past, an archrival; then you make it personal, then they feel invol ved in what they are doing. The more they are involved, the stronger will be their emotions.

"You can't do this in one night," he goes on, "It takes time. The story has to evolve over time for the players to care about their characters. For example, if two months ago in the game you saw someone touch some beautiful flowers that caused his skin to melt to the bone, his bones nearly disintegrated, and the guy bled to his death in front of you, well then, every time you see flowers, if you care about your character, you're going to freak out a bit. And if you see your friend, a character who wasn 't there and doesn't know about your experience, going towards some flowers, well... you are going to react."

"How does the role of gamemaster differ from that of a player?" I ask.

"Basically, as a gamemaster, you've created the setting, you know where everything is, you know where you want to take the characters. You also have to play the characters that the players meet, such as an old woman they meet on the road who steers them in the proper direction and has information that they need. You have to play that non-player character personality convincingly. The player has to act one character; the gamemaster dozens.

"You try to create this setting," he continues, "Of course there's a plan, you want to take them from here to there and meet this person or that, but you have to remember that players have a will of their own; they do what they want in the end. So you tr y to make everything you want interesting to them. They need to feel that they want to go there. You have to manipulate all the time. You have to make them feel involved and then cope with whatever they do. You need to have loose plans. You have idea s, but have to know how to react to what the characters choose to do. You constantly have to readjust. If you want them to go through a door and they blow up a wall instead and go through on the other side, you have to improvise."

"What would you do in that situation?" I ask.

"Well, it depends. If I see you're about to blow up the wall, I might tell you that you can hear a noise coming from down the hall. You, of course, stop and listen. You hear a STOMP THUD STOMP THUD coming at you very fast. The only place for you is to go through that door; you don't have time to blow it up. You are going to open that door."

"So... what was behind me?" I ask.

David grins. "You never know. It could have been a hoard of pink elephants. Or an army of demonic minions. Or it could have been an illusion. Maybe something in the room behind the door saw what you were going to do and made you think somethin g was coming after you."

"Ohhh... so you can never trust your own senses."

David grins wider. "You just never know."

"Hmmm. Ok. So, how much do dice and character statistics figure into what you do as a gamemaster?"

"Well... you try to keep dice rolling to a minimum."

"Really?" I respond, surprised. I think of the time I spent tallying up dice rolls when I played Dungeons and Dragons, adding here, subtracting there, figuring in character strength points, percentile statistics, situational, and so forth.

"Yes," he says, "when you are dice rolling, you are in the present, you are not being in the character. But every time the character fights, you need to roll dice. It's not like when you were a kid and you say 'Bang! Bang! I got you,' 'No you missed me.' Here you have dice to tell you 'This is what happened.'"

"How does it work?"

"Well, for example, if you have an intelligence of 11 points [1 point = imbecile: 8 points = average: 18 points = supergenius] and you have to decipher a message, you need to roll a twenty-sided dice and come up with a number below your intelligence; if t he roll results in a number higher than your intelligence points, you won't be able to decipher the message. Or let's say you are a fighter, very strong. You have a strength of 13 points. You're attacked by a giant spider who injects you with its venom . The spider is powerful and has inflicted 5 points of damage with its venom, which you subtract from your strength. You roll the dice; any number under your current strength means you will live; any number higher and you won't survive."

"How do people decide what their character's powers will be?"

"You have different attributes: strength, intelligence, wisdom, endurance, dexterity, and charisma. 18 points is the maximum you can have in any given attribute. You are given a set number of points, say 50, to divide between these attributes. How you divide them is your choice. If you are a fighter, you want to be strong. If you are a musician, you want to be intelligent. If you are a priest, you want to be wise. If you are a thief, you want to have a lot of dexterity. If you are a bard, you want to have a lot of charisma. This is actually more fun than being superhuman. You really have to cope with situations. You have to think about them and be smart about them. p> "But this is Ravenloft," David continues," not D and D. It's based on horror, so nothing is clear cut. No matter how intelligent you are, you don't know if that puzzle, once solved, may release an evil spell-- things might end up not as yo u intended. The players have to live something; they are part of a story. You, the gamemaster, create the story, and the players influence it as they go. They are the heroes of the story."

"What things are used to create a mood?"

"Well, the strongest emotions are created by contrast, in music or in anything. Let's say you are in a garden. Birds are singing. There is a gentle breeze. It's quiet, except for the birds' singing. It smells beautiful. Then you hear this scream out of nowhere. Suddenly the dark cloud that you saw on the far horizon is directly over your head, but it couldn't have gotten here so soon. The breeze becomes a cold, forceful wind. A tree behind you grabs one of your legs with its claw-like branch. Th e earth breaks apart and rotting corpses struggle out of the dirt. So, you just went, in a short period of time, from total comfort to total discomfort. This is where you live the intensity of the story.

"Different kinds of music, from festive to creepy, can be used to create a mood," he continues, "Dim lights and candles. Some players dress up to strengthen the mood." He gets up and changes the music. It is now slow and very ominous, very dark. The strings seem to tremble and the bass lowers threateningly. "Picture yourself at the entrance to a cave," he says. "You enter and are slowly going downhill. Drops of putrid water fall from the ceiling. The smell is horrible, a rotting smell. The floor is slimy. It is dark. Do you light a torch?" he asks me suddenly.

I'm surprised for a second. Then I think. If I light a torch, I become visible to whatever might be in the cave. But then again, I have to see where I am going. I say "Yes, I light a torch."

"You notice drawings on the wall, horrible drawings of people being dismembered. And in every drawing, you see the same thing; a monster with dark wings and big claws. It has a humanoid shape, with two arms and two legs. But its face is dark in every p icture; its features cannot be seen. You also see blood on the walls."

"Real blood?" I ask.

"Do you want to go check?" he asks.

"Yes," I say.

"So you go there and look at it. It looks like blood. In fact, now that you are close, you see all the paintings have been done in blood."

I can feel myself being mesmerized by the story, drawn into the gruesome mystery.

"A character doesn't know what is going to happen from moment to moment," David says, switching me back to the present. "You discovered it was blood. I tell you just enough so that your imagination creates the worst thing possible."

"I construct the world along with you," I say.

"Of course. But then I have to bring reality to you and make it more horrible than what you could have thought. Who did those paintings? I have to deliver them to you in all their frightfulness. But my tone of voice, the music I choose-- all of that b ecomes a part of the story. You live the story."

"It was effective," I say. "It especially came alive when you asked me if I wanted to light a torch. I had to decide at that moment 'Do I?' And then when I asked if it was real blood, and you said 'Do you want to go over and check?' I could fee l myself walking over there and I became very aware of the darkness outside the torch light."

"That is the point. You are in there. You are doing stuff. You are living it."

Ritual and Carnivalesque Dimensions in Gothic Role-Playing: Games, Liminality, and Masquerade

While transcribing my notes from my interviews with David, I was struck by how important the concept of actually experiencing yourself as another character is, as well as the ephemeral "nowness" that is a part of role-playing games. Again and again signi ficant phrases came up, such as "entering a character's skin," the "chance to lose yourself" or "let go," and the importance of "living" a story. The play-form David laid out in the interviews takes place in a conceptual space where improvised performanc e and theatrical fantasy fuse with narrative frames and game structure, creating a world within a world-- a fantastic world related to, yet apart from, this "real" one, governed by its own laws and logic. This description aligns itself not only with narrative, but extends itself into the domain of ritual and festival: games (role-playing) and masquerades (role-playing).

In his book, Man, Play, and Games, Roger Caillois notes that there are four basic categories that games fall into: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo) (Caillois vii). While alea and mimicry are the most obvious categories in role-playing, agon too exists, though in a modified form: the players struggle against the dark situations and dangerous characters that the gamemaster creates rather than directly competing against the gamemaster. But most significant in regards to role-playing's "world within a world" status is Caillois's assertion that the activity of play itself constitutes an "enclosed" world, related to but separate from the real world (Caillois 6), following a structure very much like that of ritual.

Like ritual, games are usually marked by an underlying code: artificial order within a chaotic world. Spatially, rituals and games are set apart from the "real" world. Like the space for hopscotch, the board for chess, the table top for cards, the aren a, the stadium, or the ring, role-playing exists beyond the boundaries of real space, governed by interior, fixed laws that do not apply beyond its borders. In addition, games, like rituals, are temporally segregated, delimited by a frame which defines a specific beginning and ending for its interior context. But perhaps most significant is play's "meaninglessness"; its only value, like ritual, is intrinsic, the value participants give to it (Caillois 6-7). Whether spontaneous and freedom-oriented ( paidia) or calculated and rule-oriented (ludic), Caillois asserts that play and reality "take place in different domains" (Caillois 64).

This notion of a world separated from the governing structural codes of the real world is echoed in Victor Turner's book, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Turner sees a dialectical interplay between society's structural codes and its "liminal" or an ti-structural points, where potential, alternative models of reality may be generated and the tacit codes of society highlighted, inverted, or even destroyed (Turner 14). Such a liminal point Bakhtin would term "carnivalesque," for Bakhtin saw carnival as a highly provocative festival presenting an alternative view of "reality" and thus embodying a means of liberating escape from the status quo (Cas tle 103).

Castle notes that the eighteenth century's practice of the masquerade grew out of carnival, which in turn was based upon popular religious rituals and seasonal folk festivals in the medieval and Renaissance periods, and often involved the donning of costu mes (Castle 84). The archaic carnival celebrated the fluidity of metaphysics, the atavistic belief in

the underlying unity of opposites and the "organic" wholeness of experience. Folk spectacle emphasized union over separation, changing over "finished"< forms...With the development of modern notions of the subject, however--what Bakhtin calls the "completed atomized being" of rationalism--this popular metaphysics was superseded.
(Castle 116-117)

Samuel Johnson asserted that the rich and powerful "live in a perpetual masquerade, in which all about them wear borrowed characters" (Castle 82). Yet the world of artifice, self-alienation, and fantasy was not regulated to the rich of the eighteenth cen tury. The "Midnight Masquerade," originating in England in the second decade of the eighteenth century and lasting into its eighth decade, modeled on carnivals and fetes of the Continent, was a large-scale urban commercial venture that cut across histori c lines of rank and privilege (Castle 84). Castle notes its paradoxical place in society:

[I]t was an emblem of luxury and excess...[yet] it promoted a potentially inflammatory sense of social equality by allowing the "lower orders" to consort with their betters. (Castle 104)

The masked assembly...[a] nocturnal affair, held in brilliantly illuminated rooms...was open to anyone who could afford the price of ticket and costume.... Thanks to the general anonymity of the scene, collective behavior was unrestrained: eating, drinki ng, dancing, and gaming were enjoyed to excess. Costumes were often spectacular and phantasmagoric ....The fantastic multiplicity and incongruity of the visual spectacle were to a large degree replicated in the disparate composition of the masquerade crowd it self, which drew on both sexes and on all ranks... (Castle 103)

The being in disguise takes away the usual checks and restraints of modesty; and consequently the beaux do not blush to talk wantonly, nor the belles to listen. (Castle 87)

Besides the classic black mask and domino, popular masquerade disguises included foreign or exotic "fancy dress," transvestite costumes, ecclesiastical parodies (of nuns and priests), picturesque occupational costumes (of shepherds, milkmaids, and the l ike), as well as costumes representing animals, supernatural beings, and literary, historical, and allegorical personages. (Castle 103)

In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray observes that the fear of a narrative's power to create a world that is "more real than reality" is an old one indeed. Cervantes illustrated the potential danger that lay in "immersive" mediums such as b ooks on high romance and fantasy in his 1605 novel Don Quixote (Murray 97-98). The "siren power of the narrative," Murray writes, "is what made Plato distrust the poets as a threat to the Republic" (98).

Perhaps Plato, with his vision of single-tracked totalitarian control, had good reason to worry about poets and spinners of fables. One gaming player refers to role-playing games as "an exercise in looking at different realities--not being stuck in a si ngle reality" (Rushkoff 195).

Another role-player states that "[t]he whole idea of gaming is to play different patterns....I like playing the game where I live in a benevolent universe, where everything that happens to me is a lesson to help enlighten me further. I find that a prod uctive game. But there are other games....[O]ne can play predator; I live in a benevolent universe and I'm the other team" (Rushkoff 198). Fine describes these different realities as "frames of experience" (Fine 181-183). When role-playing, a player is able to experiment with multiple frames of experience that are not normally available, realities that are not confined to status quo categorizations or prefabricated boxes of perceptual interpretations. Is this dangerous?

Role-playing games appear to be no more dangerous than any other kind of narrative or game. Traditional myths and epics such as the Iliad, the Song of Roland, the Nibelungenlied seem to extol the virtues of bravery, wisdom, and kindne ss, yet they can be (and have been) used to support the glamorization of warfare, elitist notions of "naturally" pre-ordained heroes, and dictatorships that rule "for the good of the people". Competitive games such as chess and go pit players again st other players and re-enact the principles of war in a deceptively elegant manner, while games like Monopoly seem to actively encourage values such as ruthless greed and an eat-or-be-eaten ethic However, unlike traditional narratives and traditional games, the role-playing game is a communal activity that is nonlinear and structurally o pen; there is no set path to follow and everyone must work together to successfully construct a satisfying experience. The role-playing game world is an infinitely complex system to explore, to experience, to create. Like carnival, role-playing games offer the chance to escape from mundane, commonly accepted reality--the chance to play with reality.

This notion of exploring different--and potentially disturbing--realities lays also at the heart of the Gothic genre. In Exhibited by Candlelight, editors Davidson, Stevenson, and Tinkler-Villani refer to the Gothic genre as "a form of literar y outlawry" which depicts "alienation from a male, middle-class, urban literary elite." In place of the mathematical regularity and rational balance favored by the neoclassicists, Gothic authors drew on "the alternative creative tradition of ballads, oral culture, fairy-stories, [and] primitive peasant superstition" (4).

Another often noted hallmark of the Gothic genre is its focus on death and decay. Yet beneath this surface exists a subtler undercurrent: the importance of life and vitality. Rather than live a life of detached abstraction and mechanical experience, the G othic genre is filled with the terrors and joys of sensation, of intense feeling, of the experience of living. As David states, "one of the most powerful things we experience in life are emotions. And one of the most powerful emotions is being scared.... As a player, you let down all your defenses and say 'Scare me.' It's great. You can be scared, yet nothing will really happen to you. How many times in life can you say 'I'm going to let myself be scared?'" Fear is a powerful emotion; powerful emotions remind people that they are alive. Gothic role-playing games allow players to experience this aliveness in a safe environment.

Such a safe environment also allows people the luxury of exploring unconventional perspectives and the chance to examine one's own internal gears. What archetypal conventions dominate the culture in which we dwell? What would you do if....? In an interview with a reporter from National Public Radio, modern horror writer Clive Barker ob served:

I get a lot of people who say, "You're obviously an intelligent guy. Why do you write horror fiction?" And I say..."I write horror fiction because I think horror fiction can do a lot of intelligent things and important things....Whatever happens, their lives [the lives of horror fiction characters] are fundamentally changed. They can never be the same again. And in a world in which we are sold a kind of blissful banality...finding out the devils and angels that haunt it is actually far more important (Jones 41).

Bibliography

Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Trans. Meyer Barash. Glencoe: The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc., 1961.

Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Jones, Stephen, ed. Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden. Lancaster: Underwood-Miller, 1991.

Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: the Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: The Free Press, 1997.

Nesmith, Bruce and Andria Hayday. Realm of Terror. Lake Geneva: TSR Ltd., 1994.

---------- Domains and Denizens. Lake Geneva: TSR Ltd., 1994.

Rushkoff, Douglas. Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace. San Francisco: Harper, 1994.

Schick, Lawrence. Heroic Worlds: A History and Guide to Role-Playing Games. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1991.

Tinkler-Villani, Valeria, and Peter Davidson (with Jane Stevenson), eds. Exhibited by Candlelight. Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995.

Turner, Victor. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.

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