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“Kill her, kill her! Oh God, I’m sorry!”: Spectating Dungeons & Dragons

Esther MacCallum-Stewart

Ten minutes into the YoGPoD episode 31 “Dungeons & Dragons Part 2,” the player Chris Lovasz, or Sips, decides he is going to passive-aggressively grief the rest of his party. “I’m just gonna make a camp, guys,” he drawls, as the rest of the players interrogate the first quest-giver. As the game proceeds, Sips’ camp-building deadlocks the adventure, as the players can’t progress without him. In frustration, they methodically kill, threaten, and chase away any quest-givers that approach them. “Fuck me!” shouts the DM, as the party turn on the third consecutive NPC. “Do you guys not want to take any quests; ever?!” “Well, maybe if we kill him and loot his body, he’ll have a piece of paper, or something,” another player replies smugly. For the players, preventing the game from running and irritating the DM by thwarting his plans has become just as amusing as playing his dungeon, all of which is done with a longstanding, tongue-in-cheek understanding of how D&D ought to be played.

The YoGPoD podcast series was the forerunner for the highly successful Yogscast YouTube channel, which produces videogame walkthroughs, first looks, and reviews.¹ At its heart is the machinima adventure series Shadow of Israphel, recorded within the sandbox indie game Minecraft and charting the exploits of heroes and main hosts Xephos (Lewis Brindley) and Honeydew (Simon Lane). Like the podcasts, the series is light-hearted and highly intertextual, punctuated by fourth wall-breaking interjections about everything from soya milk to comments on the activity in the streets outside each player’s window. The adventures of the duo are so popular that over 2 million people watch each episode, and their YouTube channel has over 1000 Minecraft-related videos, many of them played on customized adventure story maps made for them by fans. As Lewis Brindley explains, the adventure maps are a substitute for their D&D podcast episodes, adding visual context and enabling the acting out of more dramatic or spectacular events.

In 2011 Google financed 100 new YouTube channels in order to promote its subscription channels and encourage professional development within the platform. One of these, a channel named Geek and Sundry, was awarded to internet star and writer Felicia Day, well known for her webisode series The Guild, which charts the successes and failures of a fictitious MMO guild.² One of the most popular series on Geek and Sundry is called Tabletop, and shows geek celebrities and their friends playing board and tabletop role-playing games. Like the Shadow of Israphel series, each episode is watched by up to a million people.

Every year at PAX Prime (the Penny Arcade Exposition) in Seattle, a group of gamers assembles onstage to play Dungeons & Dragons. The group of nerd celebrities consists of Wil Wheaton, Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik, Scott Kurtz, and Chris Perkins. The session lasts about two hours. The 5000-seat venue is consistently filled to capacity, and queues to attend begin nearly two hours beforehand. In 2012 the session was used to showcase a beta version of the fifth edition D&D rules, testimony to both its popularity and its influence with other gamers.

The rise of these shows is at the center of geek chic, a growing subculture encompassing minority leisure activities such as comic book reading, gaming, role-playing, and science fiction/fantasy literature. However, this is somewhat disingenuous. Though long-term gaming fans might be comforted to think that discussions about board-gaming, t-shirts with unicorns, or Half-Life mods are the next big thing, it is more likely that the transmedial nature of gaming fans and the texts that they consume allows them to communicate with each other more readily, thus creating a more widespread sense of shared identity. In addition, the interest for such activities has expanded, given that most 20–30-year-olds in the western world have grown up in environments where computer gaming is part of their childhood. Whether geek chic is cool is therefore debatable; more likely it is simply more accepted in mainstream culture. What is true, however, is that watching other people play D&D or games clearly derived from it seems to be becoming as interesting to people as actually playing for themselves.

This chapter examines this behavior. We will look at early adventure games based on D&D, asking why they avoid many aspects of the game, especially those that involve role-playing and moral decisions by players. We will then discuss how gamers now discover D&D, and why this is important in changing their understanding of the game. Finally this brings us to the philosophical implication behind this discussion: why Pierre Levy’s ideas about the digital age, virtual communities, and collective intelligence are so important for understanding how, and why this has happened.³ To conclude we’ll discuss the effects that this has on D&D players.

“Sixteen Diamonds’ Worth of Dirt”: Television and Dungeons & Dragons

The desire to re-create Dungeons & Dragons as visual entertainment is not new – D&D directly influenced a number of derivative television programs broadcast during the 1980s and 1990s – including The Adventure Game (1980–86), Knightmare (1987–94) and The Crystal Maze (1990–95). These programs allowed the game to be viewed by an audience as well as played. In these games, the dungeon format is taken literally, with players locked into each scenario, and forced to solve various physical, logistical, and verbal puzzles.

Although popular, and clearly derivative from Dungeons & Dragons, the programs were not intended to showcase the game but rather to provide versions which relied on a more familiar game/challenge show format for television audiences. This meant that players were contestants rather than characters, who took part in each game once and disappeared after their turn ended. They were either young professionals (The Crystal Maze), children (Knightmare), or children’s celebrities (The Adventure Game). The Crystal Maze was clearly advertised as a management training exercise, with ties to its role-playing roots largely avoided. Knightmare and The Adventure Game were specifically made for children’s television.

The programs demonstrate anxiety with adopting characters or specific roles. Players are adventurers or captives, but are not expected to adopt personae. The host of each show plays a typecast Dungeon Master role, guiding each group around the maze or overseeing each quest, but their attitude is more game show host than NPC. In The Crystal Maze, the camp behavior of Richard O’Brien clearly embarrasses some contestants as he performs distracting capers or plays loudly on a harmonica during moments of tension. In Knightmare, the Dungeon Master Treguard often emphasizes his neutrality to players, preventing them from interacting with him or asking for clues. NPCs were, however, a feature. The Adventure Game is remembered for an array of eccentric characters including Uncle, an angry aspidistra plant, and various characters named after anagrams of the word Argond (the planet that all of the NPCs, whose natural form was a dragon, originated from). The Adventure Game has a science fiction theme and contestants are often shown playing early computer games or solving futuristic puzzles such as directing the remote-controlled Dogran through the computer game Labyrinth. Overall, these games contained characteristics such as quests and puzzles to solve, but role-play was solely to entertain, inform, or otherwise distract the contestant/viewer.

These games demonstrate the popularity of puzzle-solving and adventure games, but they point to issues with representing D&D to a mainstream audience. Each is extensively repurposed for television, with most aspects of tabletop play removed. Rolling dice, deliberation, role-play, map-making, moral choices, and combat are all gone. Jennifer Grouling Cover argues that this alteration is important because “While the new genre will have some commonalities with its antecedent, it will serve a different purpose for the audience.”⁴ In this case, necessary changes make the game more television-friendly, and they chime with established adventure game tropes already present in television programs.

It is not just the association with D&D and childishness that prevented television producers from replicating the game too closely. The “Satanic Panic” that surrounded role-playing games in the 1980s and 1990s had an obvious influence. Moral decisions and combat, the most problematized aspects of play, are not present. Players moderate their behavior – there is no swearing, frustration with puzzles is mild (of the “awww shucks!” variety), and players absolutely do not resort to violence or the arcane to solve issues. When Chris Searle makes the lightest of sexual innuendos in episode 3 of season 3 of The Adventure Game to Sandra Dickinson, “Could you pull my wire?”, he immediately apologizes with a very English retraction “if you’ll forgive my expression,” and though contestants are allowed to vaporize their companions during the end puzzle, The Vortex, this is couched as “getting their own back” and done at the encouragement of a cheekily smiling Argond.

Overall, these games remake D&D as a puzzle-solving adventure to be watched rather than played. Fears that fantasy might corrupt children into deviant behavior mean that the imaginative nature of the game is removed in favor of a more practical approach. The viewer remains a spectator only. The early nature of these games also means that fan responses are absent. Although The Adventure Show sometimes contains a pre-recorded phone-in where children speculate on how to solve puzzles, these shows largely avoid such input. Overall, then, the sometimes complex moral decisions that have to be made in D&D games are avoided.

Legacies

T.L. Taylor and Emma Witkowski argue that when playing videogames the relationship between spectatorship and gameplay needs to re-evaluated, because watching or otherwise commenting on games is a fundamental part of how we play and understand them. ⁵ Along with several other scholars, they argue that games are also consumed and enjoyed by spectators and non-participants, as well as those actively taking part. Supporting these arguments are the growing number of conventions hosting e-sport tournaments, online television channels showing gaming matches or first plays of recently released titles, e-sports channels on YouTube and TwitchTV, and the high levels of viewing for shows which present full walkthroughs or debriefs of games. If, as Taylor argues, e-sport events are increasingly regarded as a high-profile spectator activity in their own right,⁶ it is also true that gaming – including role-playing games such as the first examples mentioned – is frequently watched as well as played. Amongst these spectated games are play-throughs of tabletop campaigns, stories using D&D precepts, and examples of role-play in games that lack their own narrative. It seems that there has been some sort of weather change over the last ten years. Making up stories and playing roles is not only fun, but it is fun to watch. It is therefore important to examine how players now approach the game, in order to understand why this might be the case.

Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974, forty years ago and more than enough time for a generation of players to grow up and introduce their own children to the game. The game is still thriving, new supplements and editions are regularly released, and many online communities are dedicated to playing, sharing, and reimagining the game. But when I first encountered D&D I only played it once, with my mother and younger brother. As DM, my mother gamely struggled through the solo adventure in the Red Box (1977), but had neither the time, nor the understanding to write more campaigns. The imaginative component of the game was just too alien. I clearly remember her inability to role-play the healing cleric NPC and her confusion at allocating treasure via a dice roll. My younger brother was more interested in removing the wax used on the dice, and redoing it with his crayons. These quickly became lost as a result, and despite my interest, the box was relegated to the back of the cupboard. Like Simon Lane of the Yogscast, it was not until I was well into my teenage years that I finally found a group of friends with whom to play the game properly.

These experiences are not uncommon. D&D is actually rather socially difficult to play – it requires a group of people (ideally about five or six) who can meet regularly, and who have similar understandings of what the game is about. As games scholars have pointed out, players do not play, or comprehend play, in the same way, and D&D games can vary wildly from purely spoken role-play to meticulously detailed movement on maps and charts.⁷ Yet now, the influence of D&D has been so wide-reaching that it permeates gaming culture on every level,⁸ making us aware of its core tropes without our having played it. As a child, I loved the television programs described above, and even applied to take part in Knightmare, but was unable to play D&D locally. For me, despite becoming an active larper, and taking part in many tabletop games over the years, it was MMOs that finally gave me the opportunity to take part in D&D-like games on a regular basis. I still love playing D&D and its tabletop derivatives, but I have also spent many memorable hours (days!) in Azeroth, Innistrad, Middle Earth, and Baldur’s Gate. My experiences with D&D therefore have mixed influences; some of my knowledge comes from the vanilla text, but more comes from playing derivatives that remake elements of the game elsewhere.

Given these criteria, the age of the game, and the vast array of texts that emulate D&D, it is unsurprising that players are more likely to experience D&D-type play through other games and genres such as MMORPGs, card games like Magic the Gathering, and LARP events, videogames, or fiction. These media ape D&D’s structures, conventions, and tropes, yet it is very possible that their players are largely unaware of these origins. For them, D&D is simply another way to experience the rich diversity of geek culture, not the core text from which everything else derives. Crucially, although they may have a comprehensive understanding of how D&D is expected to work, and may find it easy to understand if they do eventually start playing it, the game is not their primary frame of reference.

This feedback loop is one that is rarely considered, and it also has important philosophical ramifications, since it directly affects how players understand and interpret the game, what Pierre Levy calls their “collective intelligence.” For example, the player may understand D&D’s archetypes through other modes of play such as the class system in World of Warcraft. When I introduce friends to role-playing games, they often use comparisons to understand the game on their own terms, for example by describing an NPC as a “quest-giver” or comparing statistical aspects with those within MMORPGs: “So, my magic points are like mana?” Usually, their interpretations are a simplified version of the more nuanced play available in a tabletop game (magic points have multiple uses, NPCs and their requests have more depth than simply asking players to kill twenty bears), and a direct result of experiencing more simplified D&D mechanics exhibited in derivative games.

As a result, publicly broadcast games often spend time explaining the game to the viewer, and providing them with intertextual references to aid their understanding. D&D is seen as existing amongst a corpus of games which all contain similar elements and can build creatively upon each other. The positive effect of this is that these players are not confined by the predetermined understandings or conventions that might exist within D&D.

For example, at the beginning of the PAX 2011 D&D session, “Acquisitions Incorporated: the Last Will and Testament of Jim Darkblade I,”⁹ the players introduce themselves by recalling the previous game. Bards Paul and Strom provide additional sung commentary, warning the audience to “hold ye shit together,” and expect an evening of “merriment and smack talk.” Wil Wheaton (as Aoefel “Al” Elhromane) reminds everyone that in 2009, the group “split the party,” causing his fae character to drown in a pool of acid. Scott Kurtz cautions the audience not to heckle because “being funny is for us,” and as stage hands bring on a large table and the group take large folders from its drawers, Jerry Krahulik jokes with them, “Is this not how it happens at your house?” This introduction serves several purposes. It introduces the temperament of the players and their characters. It lays out social rules for the game (namely, that the audience should remain passive spectators during the session but also expect excitement, unusual situations, and humor), and it establishes the players as familiar with the gaming discourses and behavior required. The introduction also places the players in the position of experts, representative of both gamer and gameplay.

The players also take care to provide explanations that might not otherwise be present. Collectively their characters represent the most familiar classes and races of D&D, and both the DM and the players talk through their actions, and what meaning these have in terms of gameplay, as they take each step in the game. Thus, Acquisitions Incorporated is as much about teaching players to play – probably why the game is sponsored by Wizards of the Coast – as it is about the entertainment occurring on the stage. The participants carefully regulate their behavior to make this possible, so that as a spectated event, the game requires some familiarity with geek culture and gaming, but not an in-depth knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons. Intertextual references bolster this – at one point during the combat encounter, Kurtz comments “I’ve done this encounter before in Utgarde Keep. I’m going to do this one just the same – with half my attention on Netflix!” Utgarde Keep is a well-known instance (dungeon) in World of Warcraft, with a similar encounter to the one being experienced in the game (various stone animals come to life and attack the players), and is also known for being rather easy. Netflix is a television service which can be watched online. These two references – both from geek culture rather than D&D itself – instantly give the audience a comparative framework with which to appreciate the action and to revel in their own intertextual sharing, reinforcing the sense of belonging (or “communitas”) between stage and audience.

These spectated games allow events which may seem relatively mundane to experienced players to be discovered as original content by others. This also encourages both reimagination and subversion, with players approaching the text from new directions and without preconceptions, and trying to surprise each other with new modes of play taken from more current, related texts. It also demonstrates a type of sharing typical of virtual spaces.

“Don’t blow the Daily” Learning 2 Play

Pierre Levy understands the cybertext era as one in which collective endeavor will lead to new, self-regulated virtual spaces. Although his work is philosophical, it also has sociological and anthropological implications, which means that it can be applied in very practical terms to popular culture. Levy argues that post-2000, we have entered an age in which knowledge is shared differently, leading in turn to new ways of understanding how we form communities. His writing is commonly used in studies of new media and popular culture as a way of understanding the changes that have come about as a result of the virtual revolution. Within cyberspaces, Levy sees knowledge as the sum of many different voices, what he calls “collective intelligence.” These voices are often spontaneously formed around need or shared interest rather than duty, and although collective intelligence, and more recent agile thinking can be applied in managerial ways, these groups are rarely seen as working within the confines of official bodies. Instead, they are more like the communities who create adventure maps in Minecraft for the Yogscast to play, or the people who send interesting links to Felicia Day’s weekly Flog: experts contributing their knowledge to a collective whole. Most of these people have one very specific area of expertise, but they share it openly to create a larger pool of composite ideas. Thus, virtual spaces and communities vary according to who is using them, and when and why they are being used. They can also change very rapidly as interest shifts to new areas or expertise is needed elsewhere, and are seen as egalitarian, since they follow the principles that information wants to be (and is) free.

Levy is cited extensively by researchers of online communities.¹⁰ Henry Jenkins sees the textual poaching and transmedial behavior of fans who appropriate what they need online and change it for their own ends as an increasingly commonplace activity. James Newman uses the idea to discuss how online groups form a sense of “communitas” which helps them create a sense of belonging.¹¹ Both of these activities can be seen in the examples I have given, as fans become more visible, share their experience with others, and help to pass this information on via virtual and subcultural means such as geek chic products. Collective intelligence also allows the sharing of prior ideas in new contexts – in this case, the use of D&D tropes employed in current media to explain how traditional D&D can be played.

The Yogscast, PAX games, and Tabletop all present to the audience an idealized session of D&D or other role-playing/geek prowess. Because the session is played by people known for their affection for, and ability to satirize, geek culture, it is expected to be humorous and intelligent. There is an element of envy, “What if I could play games as epic as this?” but also identification, largely created by the dice rolls or unexpected events: “That has totally happened to me!” The games also showcase positive relationships – affectionate but teasing, occasionally crude, but never personal or mean. The games educate the observer socially as well as ludically. So for example it’s okay to make jokes about the other player characters, or mistakes made in the past, but overly sexualizing the “busty” (previously misread as “bushy”) female NPC in the PAX game is specifically avoided, and the Yogscast caution each other when their NPCs’ stereotypes go too far, or swearing becomes excessive. Overall, the games are entertaining to watch, but are also instructional.

When Brindley and Lane started the Shadow of Israphel series, they had similar objectives in mind but also wanted to spice up the more mundane “how to” explanation of the games. Their attempts to enliven a relatively straightforward walkthrough of Minecraft resulted in a creative exploration of the text that allowed them to dip in and out of a role-played narrative. Sometimes, Xephos and Honeydew are brave adventurers exploring strange realms and interacting with a series of eccentric characters. Other times, they are simply two players chatting about their everyday lives while they build a base. They are, however, players whom the audience wish to emulate. Their obvious friendship is coupled with a dry sense of humor, and their surprised responses to each challenge, which can involve screaming with terror, crying out in anger, or generally yelling in frustration at the chaotic goings on around them, endorse a type of buddylect¹² that not only endears them to an audience, but also provides an idealized model of gameplay. The videos appear spontaneous, although in reality they are meticulously crafted and the maps take weeks to build. The conversations between the two are uncontrived, but nevertheless have taken years of cementing, and sometimes careful editing (especially to avoid mundane aspects like talking over each other, too loudly or out of synch with video footage) in order to perfect.

Levy’s argument is that online communities learn and share from each other according to need, not official constraints. For Dungeons & Dragons, this means teaching players acceptable ways to play a game they might understand in theory, but not in practice, by showing them what to do rather than trolling through the rulebooks. It also means appropriating the parts of D&D that have become more commonly known in gaming culture, and showing audiences how, and why these apply to the game. All three groups moderate their performances accordingly – they avoid pejorative comments and they make deliberate attempts to be witty, as well as spending time on explanation or visualization. As a result, all three groups are elevated within the community to celebrity status because they are seen as representative of the community’s best aspects. They also epitomize Levy’s argument that the understanding of a single text must and will shift in accordance with the needs of a group who wish to understand it under new terms.

Notes

1. Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane, The YoGPoD (2009– ), available on iTunes; Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane, The Yogscast (2009– ), available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/Blue Xephos; accessed March 24, 2014.

2. Felicia Day, Geek and Sundry (2012– ), available on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/geekandsundry; accessed March 24, 2014.

3. See Pierre Levy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999).

4. Jennifer Grouling Cover, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), p. 50.

5. T.L. Taylor and Emma Witkowski, “This Is How We Play It: What a Mega-LAN Can Teach about Games,” paper given at the Foundations of Digital Games Conference, Monterey, CA, 2010, available at http://tltaylor.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/TaylorWitkowski-ThisIsHowWePlayIt.pdf; accessed March 24, 2014.

6. T.L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: E-Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

7. See for example James Newman, Playing with Videogames (London: Routledge, 2008); Garry Crawford, Video Gamers (London: Routledge, 2011); and Helen Thornham, Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis (London: Routledge, 2011).

8. Mark Barrowcliff, The Elfish Gene (London: Pan Macmillan, 2008); Ethan Gilsdorf, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality among Role Players, Online Gamers and other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms (New York: Globe Pequot Press, 2009); and Grouling Cover, The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games.

9. Wizards of the Coast and Penny Arcade, “The Last Will and Testament of Jim Darkmagic I,” Live Dungeons & Dragons game played at PAX 2011, available at http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd/4news/paxgame; accessed March 24, 2014.

10. Matt Barton, Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games (Massachusetts: A.K. Peters, 2008).

11. Most specifically Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992) and Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), and James Newman, Playing with Videogames (London: Routledge, 2008).

12. Astrid Ensslin, The Language of Gaming (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).