Tag: gaming

General Writing

Why I’m a Writer, Not a Gamer

Bruce Byfield

Towards the end of his life, Fritz Leiber, the writer of the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series, was a guest at GenCon IX. Before he attended, he made clear to the organizers that, although he wrote fantasy, he did not play D&D or any other games – not even the newly released Game of Lankhmar, which was based on his stories. He would rather use his imagination for writing, he explained.

As a young man and enthusiastic gamer, I was taken aback by this comment from one of my heroes. How could anyone dismiss gaming in that way?

Many years latter – yesterday, to be precise – I found myself echoing his sentiments. Practicing social distancing in the middle of this pandemic, I wondered if buying a few games would help me endure until happier times. Going to the Humble Bundle site, I scanned various offerings, watching the videos for a dozen or so of them – and quickly found myself bored. The back story for the fantasy games I investigated all seem unmaginative. Even before the 60-90 seconds of a trailer was over, I found myself clicking impatiently, hoping for something different. I never found it. Nor did flipping to other game sites give me a different experience. Having weaned myself on games some years ago, I had no desire to return to them. Like Leiber, I would rather focus on my own stories.

This reaction puts me at odds with many younger writers I encounter online. Many of them live and breathe games, and often refer to them, leaving me to do a furtive search to learn what they are talking about. So what has happened to me?

Partly, I’m no longer the audience for games. The last time I read only fantasy, I was in my middle teens. I still have a serious fiction addiction, but, unlike the average gamer’s, it is fed not only by fantasy, but by mysteries, hnistoricals, and mainstream offerings as well. All these genres add up to more than I could read in one lifetime. Consequently, I no longer have to rely on the mediocre to service my addiction – and modern games do not appear to value originality to any extent. If anything, the demands of the marketplace mean that the opposite is true. Unless I am mistaken, gamers want more of the same.

Just as importantly, to me, games seem to be all about vicariously living. At the end of a dreary day at work, many of the gamers I know snatch a brief nap, then spend as much of the evening as possible immersed in their game of the moment. Often dinner is a snack while still at the keyboard.

By contrast, as a freelance writer, my work day is as close as I can expect to life of leisure. Writing about open source software, my work is often meaningful. When I’m finished for the day, I’m satisfied, not drained. Usually, I’m not looking for escape, but something as meaningful as my paying work. I find that in writing, and my dreams of finishing my work in progress. Gaming seems – how shall I put it delicately? – frankly shallow in comparison. I no longer have to rely on someone else to feel like I’m living.

However, the real reason I’m not a gamer is simple. Even if a game does engage my mind (and I still have fond memories of several versions of Civ and various simulations), the kick from a game feels feeble these days to putting my own imagination on file. I’m engaged with my characters, and with fleshing out their world, and adding a few hundred words or inventing a telling detail is simply more satisfying than winning through to the end of a game. If I manage to publish, I imagine that will be even more satisfying, but even finishing a draft chapter is more fulfilling than the meaningless pleasure of a game.

I don’t regret the hours I squandered on games. Nor am I suggesting that every game should change their mind as much as I have. After all, who am I to dictate what someone else should do. All I am doing is describing my changing reactions. Still, if I had to summarize my feelings, games were the warm-up. Trying to write fiction is the main event. It took awhile, but I now thoroughly appreciate Leiber’s reaction at GenCon.

General Writing

What Writers Can’t Learn from Dungeons and Dragons

Bruce Byfield

“If you’ve played a character, you are ten steps further towards being a writer than anyone else. You’ve made a character, you have a backstory, and you’ve engaged in narrative, just playing a character in a game. If you’ve DMed, you’re like thirty steps farther towards being a writer of a novel or a story; you’re an active storyteller.”
-Patrick Rothfuss

Like many writers, I went through a period of Dungeon Mastering. For almost two years, I spent every Friday evening masterminding a story for half a dozen friends, setting up a backdrop against which they could play out their fantasies and work through their real-life relationships with each other. Not surprisingly, when I started to write, I began with some of the characters and maps I produced for gaming. Some of that material survives to this day, mutated out of recognition from its origins.

But did Dungeons and Dragons and its ilk make me a better writer? Or give me transferable practice? Unlike countless of writers like Patrick Rothfuss, I would have to say it didn’t. The differences between gaming and writing are simply too great for one to influence the other.

Yeah, both games and fiction involve storytelling. However, like movies or graphic novels, they are different media for storytelling. Each media has its own advantages and restrictions, and moving from one to the other is a form of translation, in which some things are lost and some things are gained. Writing and gaming are no different.

To start with, D&D is an oral form of storytelling. As you might expect, oral stories are geared to the speed at which human ears can comprehend. This speed is much slower than when reading. To remain comprehensible, oral stories develop more slowly than written ones. Typically, too, they involve a lot of repetition. In Homer, that repetition consists largely of metrical phrases like “rosy-fingered dawn” or “Achilles, fleet of foot,” and patterns of action, while in D&D, it takes the form of meta-actions like rolling for initiative and damage done. In fact, being free-form, D&D has a lot of repetition that has no place on the page. Unlike in writing, there is no room for pacing, or a departure from chronological order.

Moreover, D&D is group storytelling, whereas a writer is generally on their own. A gaming session has more in common with improv theater than writing. DMs are closer to a writer than the other players, yet even they provide no more than a framework for the others to develop. That framework must provide space for the other players to improvise, and for the effect of chance. A skilled DM may try to take alternative storylines into account, but more than one has had to cancel the rest of the session or work on the fly when characters do something unforeseen. Writing, in comparison, has so little room for randomness or alternative storylines that examples are hard to find. I have heard that Phillip K. Dick used the I Ching to develop the story of The Man in the High Castle, but, if he did, no sign is visible on the page.

Still another important difference is that gaming requires much more material than the average piece of fiction. For a once a week session, DMs generally have to spend several hours a week in preparation — and I know more than one student whose DMing placed them on academic probation. To lighten the burden, DMs have endless sources of reference material, but often the result is a lack of originality. What matters is an entertaining session, not originality. By contrast, while clichés abound in fiction, too, to many readers’ apparent satisfaction, originality is prized, no matter how small.

However, the main difference is that D&D tends more to story, and writing to plot. Except with the most thoughtful DMs, D&D tends to be episodic. A main quest may exist, but the point is to stage an engaging session. Only rarely is a session complete in itself, with self-contained goals that advance the main quest while being complete in itself, like the best of TV series. More often, a session consists of events that are linked only by chronological order and that contain a large amount of randomness.

By contrast, with rare exceptions like Jack Kerourac’s On the Road, fiction is plotted. The first event causes the second, beginning a chain of cause and effect that only ends in the climax and resolution. This structure is extremely artificial, and less true to life than a gaming session, but is too well-established to be often challenged.

Really, I can barely begin to list all the writing skills you won’t learn by gaming: flashbacks, internal monologues, elegant prose, and much more besides. About all that gaming and fiction have in common is a love of the fantastic. Other elements of their storytelling do not translate. In fact, to assume any closer connection is an easy way to get lost when writing. I sometimes wonder how many of the beginning writers on Internet forums who are always asking for help with plotting are gamers who feel lost developing stories on their own, who feel lost telling stories by themselves. In the end, no matter how much they squirm, writers must rely on themselves. If they want inspiration to learn from, they are far more likely to learn from other books than from games — or from other forms of storytelling.