Planer symposium - a report

Dirk the Dice reports on Areas of Effect: Planar Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries, a symposium on role-playing games held at @arebyte gallery, London

"Tabletop role-playing games are resistant to theory," according to Stuart Hovarth, author of "Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground" and co-host of the Vintage RPG podcast.

He was beamed into London’s @AREBYTE gallery, live from the swamps of New Jersey, to an audience made up of students, academics, artists, and role-players who had spent the day listening to theories about RPGs.

Of course, he’s right. Whatever best practice, advice, guidance, and postulations that may be expressed, it all comes down to how you interact with your friends at the table and what you all bring to the experience. There’s no ‘one true way’ of engaging with RPGs, and that’s what makes them fascinating and locked into an endless dialogue with itself about best practices, identities, world-building, and degrees of emotional immersion.

He was speaking at Areas of Effect: Planetary Systems, Critical Roles, and Gaming Imaginaries, a one-day symposium being held at the gallery as part of its The Body, The Mind, The Soul program. Speakers were invited to speculate on the nature of playing RPGs and how they may create space for contemplating a changing world. As an expressive art form, is it possible to create new spaces for activism and generate new communities?

In his keynote, Simon O’Sullivan used the expression ‘anamorphic’ from the world of art, which describes how optical illusions can reveal hidden depths to paintings through a mirror or a different perspective. Each of the contributors to the symposium was providing different optics to see the world through the imaginary space created by RPGs.

WORLD BUILDING

Artist David Blandy, who along with writer Jamie Sutcliffe, had organized the event, led a panel about world-building as a response to the natural environment. His work includes The World After, a film installation accompanied by a role-playing game inspired by Canvey Wick at Canvey Island, an abandoned oil rig reclaimed by nature. The rig was only partially built as the 1973 oil crisis rendered it useless; his film takes the camera into flora and fauna to show new worlds created by a biodiverse landscape. The RPG supports this by imagining a future place after a climate crisis has caused an inflection point where humanity needs to find new ways to survive and form relationships.

Holly White and Zedeck Siew (speaking from his home in Malaysia) also discussed their projects at the intersection between nature, the urban landscape, and imaginative world-building.

It was followed by a more pragmatic discussion about how game design tackles ‘lore’ in RPG worlds. Led by Chris McDowell, the panel discussed the significance of lore. What’s better? A lore that reveals itself through play, character generation, and artifacts within the world, or lore that requires investment in encyclopedias? It’s a question that answers itself.

Kayla Dice suggested that a rudimentary awareness of genre conventions was sufficient knowledge to play her game Terminal Digital Pirate Action. Timothy Linward observed that the esoteric details of the various factions within Warhammer 40k were an essential element of fan identity and made the game ‘clubbable’ thanks to shared collective knowledge but ultimately was at the mercy of the market forces of selling miniatures. Our investment in lore is limited by our personal time capacity.

Chris observed that it was only at the points of conflict where lore became interesting, using Traveller planet descriptions as an example. In game terms, who cares if 200 years ago the planet was at war and is now at peace?

VINTAGE HORRORS

Stu Horvath has written a beautifully illustrated book, Monsters, Aliens and Holes in the Ground, which describes itself as a guide, but it’s more like an archive of vintage material. It is a rigorously written but approachable chronology of role-playing games. His story will be familiar to listeners of the GROGNARD files. He played in the 80s and stopped for a while, when he resumed, he wanted to restore his collection and hunted copies of game and supplements from the internet.

The resulting book is a real treasure. I couldn’t resist buying a copy from the small stall in the gallery, which also included Antipode Zines, Iglootree, Laurie O'Connell, and Loot the Room.

The final panel hosted by Mark Pilkington included Mike Mason, Call of Cthulhu’s Creative Director, talking about horror role-playing and its unique capacity to create experiences of fear and dread. For the panel, there’s something particularly transgressive about horror role-playing. Participating in a game is an act of the uncanny where reality is out of joint. A member of the audience provided an example of a blood ritual conducted by her Haitian heritage as a form of role-playing; a collective fear creating redemption during a carnival.

AREBYTE to Eat

The rarified space of the gallery gave an opportunity to think about RPGs differently. It was worth making the trip to the Ballardian London docklands to spend time listening and reflecting upon the contributor’s discussions.

It was great to catch up with people too. It was thanks to ABS that I found out about the event and it was good to see AFM’s Jem and Keir there. A number of people said, “I was listening to you on the way here,” which was good to hear. SF and weird fiction author China Miéville said he was a fan of the podcast too (I know!) and suggested a theme for a future episode. At lunch, Mike Mason told me that he was working on new stories for Mason and Fricker’s Eldritch Stories season 2, over a sausage butty, with avocado on a brioche bun, we were in London after all.

The symposium not only shed light on the diverse lenses through which RPGs can be viewed but also served as a reminder of the creativity and community that games inspire. It was interesting explore the intersections of art, activism, and immersive storytelling, the potential for RPGs to forge new pathways in our understanding of the world … just don’t come up with a theory for it.