Groups are made, agencies are explored, and objects play a role. Such are the […] sources of uncertainty we rely on if we want to follow the social fluid through its ever-changing and provisional shapes. (Latour 2005, 87)
This book is divided into several chapters, each of which is designed to explore and explain a specific area of the game. Remember, though, that in a storytelling game, the most important ‘chapter’ is your imagination. Never let anything in this book be a substitute for your own creativity. (Rein·Hagen et al. 1998, 24)
1.1 Prelude
This book engages non-digital role-playing games (usually abbreviated as RPGs) in and from Japan. In doing so, it attempts an experiment with concepts and controversies, an experiment in “Japanese Studies.” For these first lines, let us go no further than describing RPGs as games in which players take on roles and as a practice entangled with many other media. To say that RPGs are like The Lord of the Rings combined with chess and improv-theatre would be amiss but might conjure some interesting images.
This study deals with role-playing games but does not seek to define them. General explanations meet the fluidity of contents, play-styles, and creative agendas, which put any certainty into doubt. Thus, Role-Playing Games of Japan maps a network of actors and their world-building around RPGs to allow readers to encounter them with all their uncertainties.
This study focuses on Japan but does not want to emphasise unique “Japanese” characteristics because what it means to take on a character in a role-playing game always amounts to a particular, contingent realisation of this practice. A game troupe in Tokyo may play a US American game in much the same drama-focused way as does a counterpart group in Munich, while players down the street of the same city favour games by local designers and a competitive play-style. Still, the Japanese RPG industry extended the practice in particular ways not explored elsewhere. Thus, the purpose of this book is to trace the transcultural entanglements of RPG practices with a focus on Japan but in a global context. It seeks to elaborate on what kind of agents, human and non-human alike, function as mediators between groups of role-players, bridging or strengthening national borders and other boundaries.
Games like Dungeons & Dragons (Gygax and Arneson 1978), Call of Cthulhu (Petersen 1981), Vampire: The Masquerade (Rein·Hagen et al. 1998), or Sword World RPG (Mizuno and GroupSNE 1989) form a crucial node in a nexus of various media types and genres. They have inspired media-mixes, such as The Record of Lodoss War novels, manga and animations (Yasuda and GroupSNE 1986), and are part of franchises like Lucas’ Star Wars or Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (“Game of Thrones”). Currently, non-digital RPGs experience a second boom worldwide, in Japan particularly driven by the horror game Call of Cthulhu. They increasingly gain scholarly attention as an inspiring source for other media and concerning dynamics of group formations. Since the late 2000s, role-playing games are thus also coming of age in academic terms: A first peer-reviewed journal was established in 2009, the International Journal of Role-Playing, followed by the Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies in 2019. Meanwhile, the number of related monographs and edited volumes increases constantly. Zagal and Deterding’s seminal Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations (2018) brings together various strands of current research and covers much ground but like many others focuses almost exclusively on the Euro-American environment. Studies about Japanese media and games on the other hand concentrate on anime, manga, and digital gaming (cf. Steinberg 2012; Picard and Pelletier-Gagnon 2015). Furthermore, previous research often relied on established concepts, such as “community,” for summing-up group formations of practitioners.
This was one incentive for this study: Born out of curiosity for non-digital gaming in Japan, I sought to amend this deficit in knowledge because respective research would open a field of dramatic stories bridging fiction and reality, open a field for questions of entanglement and multiplicity. However, at the same time I did not want to fall into the trap of feeding into nihonjin-ron, that is, stories about how the Japanese are special and unique, in this case, about the “Japaneseness” of role-playing. Thus, right from the start, this study was less about positive knowledge of a stable and certain object of analysis (“the game,” “the role-player,” “the Japanese”) but concerned with the production of such knowledge, about the inherent tension of terms and collectives, of continuities and discontinuities. It questions the appropriateness of traditional knowledge containers for new phenomena of trans-local connectedness, such as the heterogeneous networks that make-up role-playing games. “Be surprised!” became the methodological core of my research. The people and things I encountered during my study showed me how everything was even more complex, more uncertain than I had envisioned: How uncertain the dynamics of concepts and identities were, how non-human mediators such as the Internet connect as well as disconnect, and foremost, how difficult it is to ask questions about “a practice,” which is done slightly differently by each actor entangled in its assemblage.
This book is an intervention in discourses on Japan and its cultural practices that tend to essentialise difference instead of exploring its making (cf. Galbraith and Lamarre 2010, 362). The emphasis on “Japaneseness” of products and practices often does not result from the object of inquiry itself but rather from the limited focus on Japan alone without regarding global entanglements or uses elsewhere. Through tracing complexity instead, the project informing this book became a study about the way in which the assemblage of practices named role-playing games circulates across borders and simultaneously becomes the locus of boundary negotiations in a highly digitised and interconnected world. These partially connected practices have a history that crosses many nationally or culturally imagined borders, beginning in nineteenth century Prussia with antecedents in ancient India, gaining a specific form in the US in the 1970s and being nowadays most popular in a digitised variant of multiplayer online games relying on mechanics refined by Japanese programmers, and as live-action enactments promoted in various forms and in various parts of Europe.
This history features two major instances of circular movements, one of which is this repeated crossing of national borders and a supposed formation of collectives beyond the nation-state. Such formations are contrasted by statements of established difference, such as the impression that Japanese role-players only engage in computer-mediated games, dominant on respective Internet forums until recently. The other movement zigzags across boundaries of a different kind, namely education and training for a supposedly real world. Training—first for the military and later for businesses and youth—clashes with escapism, reclusiveness and deviance, but also with the intrinsic value of entertainment. This study explores how role-playing games and their players interact with controversies revolving around these boundary-makings, but also investigates the role of those who bridge such boundaries. This study maps global and local entanglements of a practice that has inspired and was informed by many other cultural forms (be it film or literature). It sheds light on some of the traces left by mediators in our globalised-but-bounded world, none the least of which may be referred to as Internet technologies.
Because role-playing games are entangled with popular media, such as fantasy and science-fiction, animation and comics, their study might fit the label of “Cool Japanology” if their forms in Japan are to be considered. Taken from the title of a book and symposium (Azuma 2010), the label borrows its “cool” from the country-marketing campaign “Cool Japan,” which utilises anime, manga and related fan practices to promote Japan to foreign tourists (Abel 2011; McLelland 2017). Consequently, the label denotes the study of these products and practices in their Japanese specificity, usually referred to as “Japanese popular culture.” The search for their “Japaneseness” often relies on creating boundaries between Japan and “the West.” For example, narrative text-image-hybrids are supposedly known as manga and not called comics like in the US or Europe. Such simple contrasts, however, disregard connections, continuities, and discontinuities alike (see Berndt 2008; or venture into a bookstore in Japan, where manga are called komikku, comics). Thus, the methodological nationalism or parochialism inherent to “Cool Japanology” has been critiqued for its reproduction of essentialist images (Ōtsuka 2015). In this study, I want to question such approaches, including the role of knowledge producers and their modes of studying such practices.
Especially when a new research field in this area emerges, scholars tend to celebrate what others had ridiculed as childish or problematised as escapism. Such scholarly glorifications include definitions that read “fans” as pop-culture academics (Jenkins 1992; Okada 1996, 2015) or middle-class resistance (Eng 2012), laud “gamers” as a postmodern identity (Azuma 2007; McGonigal 2011) or—in direct relation to this study—claim that role-playing games are actually art (Mackay 2001) or actually folklore (Underwood 2009). However, defining fans as scholars, for example, says more about the audience of the writer, that is, other academics, than about those defined (Hills 2002, xxiv–xxv). Regardless of how insightful and ground-breaking we can consider many of these studies (Bennett 2014), the scholarly tendency to challenge generalisations about a given object with their own, similarly stands in opposition to the actors in their multitude and the complexity of practices.
In lieu of judging in the actors’ stead, I want to explore their ways of defining. Thus, two major tropes or principles guide my study, uncertainty and multiplicity. Both refer to the fluidity, complexity and dynamics of identifications, boundaries, and interactions. The role-players I encountered, who are “actors” in many different ways, themselves debate what characterises a good role-player and what practices should be called role-playing. Thus, this study follows a practice-oriented approach and proposes the concept of assemblage of practices to refer to the sum of humans, materials and ideas entangled in the various arrangements of RPGs. This perspective helps navigating the fluidity of practices and overcomes the a priori assumptions inherent to the common, meaning-laden terms culture or community. The latter, for example, carries the baggage of referring to a supposedly lost, organic, harmonious village collective, so that applying it to “online communities” will automatically find them lacking in commitment or durability (cf. Deterding 2009). This underscores that new formations might be better described by using other terms to catch the meanings they hold for their members. Instead of applying a theory that explains, this study follows “theories” that urge to describe: “At some point one has to pass from explanation to mere description” (Wittgenstein 1979, 26e, §189).
The two historical movements of border-crossing sketched above have recently come together when markers for deviant media use and practice, such as the conceptions otaku in Japanese or nerd in English, conflate wi...