Myths of Play

roleplaying games as a factory of new myths

This is not a peer-reviewed academic article.

This is the end-term essay for the Philosophy of Mythology seminar, a module within the broader Bachelor in Digital Media Studies.

Written by Alessandro Piroddi.

Submitted on the 15th of March 2022.

Re-edited and published on Patreon on the ?st of April 2022.

Enjoy...

Intro

In this paper I intend to explore the question of “what is a myth?” from the perspective of its practical production: which elements are needed to invest a “narrative object” with the power of mythology? To pursue this end I will analyse a current and practical example of myth production and usage: tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs or rpgs for brevity). In these games the participants to the play activity engage in the shared creation of stories through the medium of game rules and source materials. Although many possible in-between solutions have been implemented by specific products, within the realm of this kind of game one can easily identify two main design approaches to the “mythology” of the stories to be played, namely Full-Myth and No-Myth, expressing different ways to produce and handle imaginary worlds. These two positions seem to reflect and put into practice the different ideas and theories expressed by philosophers such as Karl Kerenyi and Joseph Campbell in their respective works: the former understanding myth as an origin of, and a strong influence on, the present, intended more as a background bestowing depth and scope rather than as an etiological explanation; the latter focusing on the underlying structure and universal meanings that most myths seem to share regardless of their historical, geographical or cultural collocation.

What is a Roleplaying Game?

For the uninitiated reader, a tabletop roleplaying game is a subgenre of boardgame that focuses its main activity on the shared telling of a story. This happens as a conversation amongst participants in the play activity, and is mediated by a set of rules meant to structure, gamify and facilitate the overall experience.  As an object, an RPG is (usually) a book, the manual containing the rules for play, alongside other source texts and illustrations. Play aids such as dice, tokens, cards, writing implements and other paraphernalia can be part of the play experience too, depending on the needs of each specific RPG rules-set.

A minimalist example of RPG activity could look like this:

Player_A fills the role of game facilitator, describing a situation and the secondary characters within it. Player_B acts in the role of Cindy, a high-schooler.

Player_A - “Imagine you are in school during a morning like so many others. Cindy is walking down a corridor to get to the next class when Marta, a bully that often harasses her, appears a few doors down. What do you do?”

Player_B - “Damn! Cindy freezes in place and looks around to assess the situation. Has Marta seen me already? Who else is in the corridor?”

Player_A - “Well...”

Depending on the rules of the game, this exchange might be free flowing or mediated by the use of specific mechanics. The situation will evolve, one description at a time, to form an organic narrative that is both improvisational and informed by everything established by previous descriptions. Maybe dice will be rolled, maybe points will be spent, maybe the narrative authority of a certain player will be used to arbitrarily make an important decision, or maybe the general consensus of everyone present at the game table – be it physical or virtual – will determine what happens next.  The tension between player choices, narrated content and the influence exerted by the rules and mechanics of the game is what constitutes the bulk of the roleplaying game activity. A lot of this will also be influenced by para-game elements such as the individual hopes, ideas and expectations of each participant, the shared social dynamics, the shared culture and know-how about this kind of game, and many other factors. Playing the same situation within a “horror” game rather than an “adventure” or “romance” or “drama” game will result in extremely different play experiences. Partly, because the game rules are different, structured to incite different player behaviours. Partly, because the participants’ genre expectations are different, and this influences their creative contributions and goals. Within the structure of tabletop roleplaying games the concept of “myth” is thus very important, so much that it appears in three distinct meanings:

• Myth as a falsehood that players, within the confines of the game,  choose to believe.
• Myth as the foundational principle of current practice.
• Myth as symbolic signifier of deeper meaning.

The Myth of Reality

At the end of 2002, through various posts and discussion on the The Forge forum, Allan Langford expressed a concept he named The Myth of Reality (Langford, 2002). RPG play activity consists in the mediated description of fictional characters immersed in some fictional situation where they perform fictional actions which produce fictional consequences, which in turn alter the fictional situation, prompting a new cycle of actions and consequences. This is, on a very abstract level, the core loop of this kind of game. It works on the assumption that the fictional reality would work according to the same rules of causation that bind the real world we live in. When I describe a character picking up a stone and throwing it upward, I expect the stone to fall back down to earth. If not, there has to be a reason why this is not happening, something to justify such aberrant behaviour. This is, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, a “myth”: a commonly believed but false idea. The fictional game world is, indeed, fictional. It does not exist. It behaves purely according to the whims and expectations of the people describing it. The fact that people find it more satisfying to play-describe something that (to them subjectively) makes logical sense and that presents a veneer of verisimilitude is purely arbitrary. The stone doesn’t have to fall back down. There is, in fact, no stone at all. There is not even a “down”. Within the play-space of an RPG, reality is a myth in which the participants believe. This was a non-trivial realisation at the time, as blind belief in this myth was at the root of many play-related problematic behaviours.

One example is the occasional conflict about “how reality works” that, if not handled properly, can lead to the disruption of the play flow and to arguments among players. In the physical world we live in, the answer to the question “Can this person jump from one roof to the next?” is rooted in an impossibly complex network of details; modern science can create a simplistic model based on forces and distances, but this is also an approximation that can’t possibly take into account all the physical, psychological and circumstantial factors involved. The simple rules of an analogic game can’t even come close to such an already abstract approximation. And in many cases the rules just can’t cover all possible actions and situations the imagined character could face. Blind belief in the Myth of Reality can then easily bring to two outcomes:

• The game-model of reality is dissonant with (one of) the players’ mind-models, causing ludonarrative dissonance – conflict between the expectations set by a game’s narrative elements and those set by its mechanical ones (Hocking, 2007).
• The game does not model the situation, leading to a direct confrontation between the mind-models of the players involved.
• The game-model and the players’ mind-models are in accordance.

Only the third occurrence results in a smooth flow of play, while the others end up shifting the conflict to a social level, where players have to decide amongst themselves how to answer the original question. Most RPGs offer at least a cop out based on the authority of a single player, but this solution, while functional, presents problems of its own. Langford’s Myth of Reality helped RPG design to become aware of this and to develop rules that directly address the game’s narrative rather than trying to simulate a reality that doesn’t actually exist.

The same principle also affects more insubstantial elements such as the behaviour of fictional characters within the game, another area where blind belief in the Myth of Reality caused problems. In this case a player behaving in a disruptive way would be able to find justification for their real actions and choices behind the idea that “the character I am playing would do it”, leaving the other players unable to articulate a game-supported reprimand, forcing the victims of the undesired behaviour to engage in a real-life social conflict. Again, such a problematic pattern, present in the hobby since its inception in the late 1970s, had no simple solution until Langford’s formalisation of the Myth in 2002. And while the “indie” games stemming from the niche subculture of The Forge incorporated the idea immediately, it took almost two more decades for the broader RPG culture (and the games designed by and for it) to catch up, making the “my character would do it” argument not only invalid, but a well known red flag for problematic player behaviour.

Foundational Mythology

All of this leads to the second way in which RPGs embrace and leverage the concept of myth, this time from a more structural and philosophical standpoint. Player engagement in the game comes, abundantly but not exclusively, from the fictional reality making sense in an internally logical and self-consistent way. The game is an articulated form of “make believe”, so anything that reinforces belief will also make the myth of reality more solid. At this point, I personally find it useful to distinguish the narrative elements that make up the fictional reality of play between active and background ones. Active elements include descriptions of what is happening at the moment, what the characters are doing, and what immediate consequences such actions yield; they come into existence as the product of play activity, both informed by previously existing elements and shaped by relevant game mechanics. Background elements represent the aggregated “history of reality”: all the information about all the fictional elements within the game. The history of a location. The history of an object. The history of a character the protagonists meet. The history of the very protagonists before active play began: if the game starts with a character defined as a 30-something knight, then how did they become this person? Where do they come from? What led them to the point of being here, now, at the start of the game?

Keeping this in mind, in 2003 Langford explored the qualities and possibilities of game structure that handled background and active elements in different ways, eventually formulating a concept he named “No Myth of Reality” – which by contrast spawned the “Full Myth” complimentary term – which would then enter the common parlance of “indie” RPG design (Kim, 2008). What he observed was that background information could either exist prior to the beginning of the play activity or be generated during play, and that game structure could toy around with this through rules and mechanics.

Pre-existing information could come from various sources: 

• the texts and images of the game’s rulebook
• the texts and images of some game’s expansion supplement
• the texts and images of other mediums the participants agree (implicitly or explicitly) to use as a source for their game (novels, movies, comics, etc)
• the written notes and drawings and overall prep-work some of the participants might have generated prior to the beginning of the current game instance.

A game designed to rely on these pre-existing source materials would be said to have a “Full Myth” structure. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a game designed to not rely on pre-existing source materials, usually substituting them with procedures and mechanics meant to foster, support and regulate the impromptu creation of background information through play activity, would be said to have a “No Myth” structure. It is important to mention that FullMyth and NoMyth are not a dichotomy, nor are monolithic entities. Instead, they are granular structures that can mix and interact with one another, shaping how different elements of a specific game are handled. Labelling a whole set of rules as a “Full Myth Game” rather than a “No Myth Game” can only make sense with the understanding that we are describing a tendency within a spectrum based on how many game elements are structured in one way rather than the other, and also how central such elements are within the overall design of the game.

The aforementioned background material becomes, thus, the mythology of a game’s shared imaginary reality. In the words of Kerényi, it establishes a foundation, an origin (Verardi, 2012, section 3). This fits with Malinowski’s view of myths as a cultural force:

“Myth, as a statement of primaeval reality which still lives in present-day life and as a justification by precedent, supplies a retrospective pattern of moral values, sociological order, and magical belief.

[...]

The function of myth, briefly, is to strengthen tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracking it back to a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events.”

(Malinowski, 1926, p.51)

RPGs are not “just” an exercise in cooperative storytelling, but rather a way to experience a story through ritualised narration. Background information lays the foundation upon which active play can happen. What we do now makes sense, or not, depending on what our game’s mythology establishes. For this reason, the creation of background information can’t be just “us describing whatever”, as it wouldn’t feel like a myth. It’s an origin that is too new and too mundane to easily exert influence over the present, it requires legitimation. One way to invest something with a special “aura” is to distance the final users from the background material they use to fund the imagined reality, be it a distance measured in time (it exists before play), social capital (it comes from an official source), technical divide (it’s made by experts), or some other measure of separation (Benjamin, 2020, p.255).

This is where the FullMyth approach has its roots. As the game design of RPGs was still in its infancy, the first manifestations of game mythology were simple and straightforward: published background information, a mythology that existed before and independently from any specific group of players. In a way it mirrors the psychological principles underlying the famous Milgram Experiment, where the test subjects invested contingent elements (the lab coats, the formal venue, etc) with the value of authority (McLeod, 2017). While RPG play inherently produces fiction, using pre-existing “authoritative” material as the base for it greatly heightened the sense of being part of something grander, something with a past and a tradition, where the current play instance was just the latest incarnation. But this form of mythology presented a few structural limitations. First and foremost, this kind of background information is quite dry and impersonal, filling books with minutiae and details about all sorts of things: descriptions of geographic areas, names of cities, info on regional economy, bits of local culture; but also more or less detailed chronicles of “past” historical events, names of heroes and villains, whole pantheons of gods; but also shopping lists of adventuring equipments, with weights and prices and availability indexes and encumbrance rates. All of this can inspire the reader, and it also does produce the funding effect of a rich and detailed mythology, but in a quite inefficient way, as it is often the case that very little portions of a 300+ pages book will actually be memorable and contribute to the myth of reality. Myth is more than the mere recounting of past facts; it is a narrative, and as such it has to properly address human emotions and beliefs (Malinowski, 1926, p.49). In RPG design terms, we could say that a myth is more effective in its cultural purpose the more the emotions it evokes, the more it “bleeds” from the page/tale onto the present audience (Vi åker jeep!, 2009). Another problem with this kind of background information is that almost invariably the text would only be read, due to the game design of early and mainstream RPGs focusing on the polarising role of “Game Master”, by a single person within a group of 3 to 6 players. While this invests the reader with the aura of a “keeper of the myth” it also means that the mythology only ever trickles down to its audience in very small and very inconsistent bits: knowing that there exist three hundred pages of mythology has its own value, it contributes to the aura, but if the players are only ever exposed to one page out of it – because the play activity so far only needed to reference the content of that one page – then the myth is untold, not relieved, not experienced.

While this approach has always been the most common one, dating back to the late 1970s and growing to become the mainstream option even today, the “indie” experimentation, begun around the early 2000s, led to the formalisation of the NoMyth alternative. Here the dynamics are completely inverted. First of all, the “authority” shifts from the mythological text presenting pre-existing background information, to the mundane procedures that will lead to the in-real-time creation of new background info. This completely strips away the aura, but at the same time produces results that are highly emotional and personal, being created by the players, for the players, often while being “manipulated” by the game mechanics into expressing unconscious feelings and ideas, which are then baked into the background information produced. The result is a mythology made strong by deep personal investment, rather than the allure of a distant and extrinsic authority. Being tailor made for an audience of one (as each player affects and is affected individually by a shared fantasy) this kind of mythology is, simply put, a better narrative. Moreover, it is a more efficient one, as the only background information that exists is the one the audience actually experiences.

Myth Making

So far we have discussed how roleplaying games are an activity that relies on a myth (the Myth of Reality) to engage its participants. We have then discussed how RPGs incorporate and leverage the funding function of mythology to justify current activity, and how this can be achieved both through the authority and aura bestowed upon literary artefacts and through emergent narratives tailored to spark emotional impact. But there is yet another way in which RPGs apply the power of myth to their ends.

In his analysis of primitive myths, Malinowski excludes the possibility that myths had anything to do with “the usual paraphernalia and symbols of psychoanalytic exegesis” (Malinowski, 1926, p.12). In his opinion, a myth is a direct expression of its subject matter, made alive through its codification into the rites and traditions that affect contemporary life. The emotional impact and meaning it might have on its audience can surely affect the diffusion of the myth, but it in itself was not created as a symbol of anything other than itself. This might be accurate when considering the prime elements that spawned a mythological narrative: the facts, the people, the events. Whatever happened, it happened because of intrinsic reasons, only meaning what it meant at face value, when it took place, within the socio-cultural context of the time.

This is where Kerenyi disagrees, presenting his idea of the “mitologema”. While it might be true that whatever originating incident was not, in itself, meant to have any special meaning, the moment it becomes a narrative it also becomes the object of human interpretation. The brain doing what the brain does – seeking patterns and making connections –, these narratives will eventually end up into some kind of “shape” that people, across time and culture and through the re-telling of old stories, will recognise as fundamental archetypes, which is what he defines as “mitologemi”. So while the incident at the origin of a myth might have no symbolic intent and value, the act of describing it, of reporting and communicating it, turns it into a narrative which, as all narratives do, in its most abstract and fundamental elements can coalesce into a shape, an archetype, with the potential to be found again and again in other narratives. This connects it to the realm of human thought, and the whole “paraphernalia and symbols of psychoanalytic exegesis”, in which Kerenyi and Jung base their analysis of mythological stories (Verardi, 2012, section 3).

This can be read as meaning that, while an ancient myth might not have been conceived with a symbolic value, in order to craft a new narrative that looks and feels like a myth we can indeed use the language of archetypes and symbols to achieve a mythic-like result. A demonstration of this, of the possibility to reverse engineer mythology, comes from the work of Joseph Campbell. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces we find an analytical deconstruction of mythological narratives that coalesces their common structures and elements into a singular monolithic abstraction that Campbell calls “monomyth”: a myth outlining the journey of a heroic figure. In such a journey each moment of external strife and adventure is truly a symbol of inner turmoil and exploration, leading the “hero” through a series of events and places that will culminate with some sort of external resolution and internal growth (Campbell, 2004, p.227). This is by no means intended as a strict structure or a rigid template, but rather as a coherent collection of symbols, a framework of archetypes; still it has become a very practical tool in the modern storytelling industry, influencing the way in which we make movies, novels and narrative products in general, especially in its simplified and more widely known realaboration by Christopher Vogler, called “the hero’s journey” (Wit and Folly, 2020).

In RPGs the ability to evoke a mythical feeling is an important mark of quality that greatly enhances gameplay. In practical terms, this feeling enhances the Myth of Reality with the illusion of depth, on many levels:

• Fictional elements can feel more realistic and plausible, as if the narrative actually worked on real-world principles.
• Fictional elements can feel as if they had a past behind them, as if they came from somewhere, the result of an organic evolution.
• Fictional elements can feel as if they were part of a grander world, hinting at other places, things, people, cultures.
• Fictional elements can feel as if they had diegetic meaning and purpose, being part of a rich and vibrant world that, while imaginary, doesn’t feel like the arbitrary artefact of random play activity.

The effective use of symbols and archetypes can suggest these qualities without the players actually experiencing them, generating engagement in the form of personal investment into something considered meaningful and by driving curiosity for the discovery of all that was hinted at but not yet exposed.This is achieved in many different ways, unique to each game.

More traditional games, such as the famous Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), simply offer a great amount of background information, filling books and books with fantastical content quite clearly, and sometimes blatantly, inspired by real world cultures and mythologies.

Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy at Utmost North (Lehman, 2005) uses ritual phrases to handle the flow of play and to resolve in-game conflicts:

• The game starts with all players saying “Long ago, the people were dying at the end of the world” while lighting a candle.
• When one of the protagonists is first introduced into play, their player says “But hope was not yet lost, for [name] still heard the song of the stars”.
• Then, at the beginning of each scene “And so it was...”
• And at the end of the game session, while extinguishing the candle, everyone recites “But that all happened long ago, and now there are none who remember it”.

The protagonists are all named after a real star in the sky. The game mechanics, a system of narrative costs and bargains conducted through ritual sentences, ensure that character will have alternating fortunes in their endeavours, and that in the long run – which for this game means just a few sessions – they will either heroically perish for the cause they believe in, or tragically grew callous and disenchanted, turning into the very enemy they were fighting against.

Trophy (Ross, 2021) uses the “forest” as a symbolic locus of inherent danger and mystery. It presents minimalist illustrations reminiscent of what could be carved in wood, or of primitive art. It structures adventures as “incursions” within the woods, setting them as a temporary foray into a primaeval place that can’t just be conquered and civilised. While animals and people can represent defeatable adversity, “monsters” are made mythological through various techniques: they have no common/official name and are only presented through physical descriptions, during early stages of an incursion their presence can only be hinted at, they are mechanically impossible to defeat through direct confrontation, which would invariably result in the death of the offending character  – something that breaks one of the most common and fundamental conventions of adventure games, where characters always have a chance to succeed, even if extremely unlikely – forcing players to either find creative solutions around the problem, or indirect and unorthodox ways to face it.

Another way in which some RPGs, or their supplements, try to evoke a mythical feeling in the players is through the narrative structure of the events happening within the game. Most commonly this is done with the intent of emulating a target kind of narrative. The difference with previous methods is easy to spot when comparing games such as The Call of Cthulhu (1986) and Lovecraftesque (2016). The former, like D&D, presents background information inspired by the horror novels of H.P. Lovecraft: characters, locations, creatures. But without structural mechanics, the resulting play doesn’t resemble in any way the events in any of the writer's original works, creating instead a kind of story that is distinctive of CoC adventures. The latter conversely presents little or no material lifted from the novels of H.P. and, instead, implements a deconstruction of their narrative structure through its game mechanics. Lovecraftesque players might know nothing about Lovecraft, but they will always end up experiencing a recognizably lovecraftian story.

Finally, some games even try to follow the example set by the schema of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey, or try to loosely model their play experience on at least some of the elements from the Campbellian monomyth. This is seldomly a genuine intention. More often than not, this is the result of an RPG author trying to celebrate or emulate the narrative structure of some other “heroic” media (movie, novel, videogame, tv-show) and, through this, picking up on its mythological elements. That said, as RPG design discourse matures, a more self-aware and intentional use of myths will surely become more common.

A final note on this topic needs to address the fact that myths are first and foremost cultural entities. So while a “genuine” myth, such as the primitive ones Malinowski studied, exists independently from the symbols and meanings people might ascribe to it, the “counterfeit” myths conjured by RPGs rely on the player’s cultural backdrop to know and understand the symbols and archetypes used. Lacking that, the spell fizzles as the audience fails to notice and react to the symbols, and no mythological feeling is inspired.

One famous example comes from Campbel and Vogel themselves. The schema found on page 227 of The Hero with a Thousand Faces has a counter-clockwise directionality, moving from a top-central starting point towards the left. This means something specific, as “the left hand path” is traditionally a metaphor for a course of action different than that of the status quo and, as such, signifies the unknown and possibly peril. It’s the incarnation of the beginning of the hero’s adventure, leaving behind what is familiar and acceptable. Alas, this detail is not expressed plainly in the text and was only made clear orally, in seminars and lessons, and in later works. As a result, some part of the book’s audience failed to catch the meaning hidden in the symbol, only experiencing it as an arrow that could go in either direction, and that for some reason was going left rather than right. Not only the meaning was lost in translation, but this loss ended up spawning and spreading an inadvertently antithetic version of it. As right-flowing text and diagrams are easier to read for a western audience, Vogel’s reinterpretation had clockwise directionality, moving from top-centre towards the right (Wit and Folly, 2020).

Conclusions

This paper has shown how mythology constitutes the living tissue of which RPGs are made of. How these games, both as an artefact and an activity, require belief in a myth to function, and in turn produce new mythology to support and expand the initial myth itself. It has established how awareness of this fundamental function can deeply influence the way in which RPGs are structured, as well as the kind of experiences they can deliver. It has exposed how current games craft their mythologies through different means and approaches, achieving both the foundational function of living traditions and rituals, and the emulation of those qualities, such as depth and meaningfulness, that a genuine myth can elicit in its audience.

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