Is Fantasy killing the RPG?

I know I said I wouldn't talk about fantasy anymore but I can justify it to myself in terms of this post really being about RPGs.  Yeah... that'll work... that's what I 'm doing.

 

Mark Chadbourn (author of Jack of Ravens, which I haven't read) has made an excellent post  (via Ariel) about the relationship between the RPG hobby and the fantasy genre and how he thinks that the fantasy genre should be making a concerted effort to approach fantasy in a completely different manner to the way that the RPG hobby does (whether electronic or not).

As a reader I think he's hopelessly optimistic and, as a gamer, I think that he has the problem backwards, I think that the values and tropes of fantasy have come to infect the RPG so thoroughly that it is robbing it of its ability to innovate and progress as a medium.

Chadbourn argues that the RPG industries have effectively swamped the market.  They have taken the staples that once made up the fantasy genre and mass produced them for a much wider audience.  So now, instead of having to gain access to a fantasy book, a potential fantasy fan need only log into an MMORPG and live out the kind of adventures covered in fantasy stories but in an interactive manner, which is obviously far preferable.  Chadbourn goes on to complain that because the market is so utterly swamped, any new fantasy writer has to battle the idea that he's a hack producing more of the same.

I agree.  I think that now it is possible to experience epic fantasy in so many ways that just churning out a story with some elves and goblins really isn't enough any more.  However, I think this raises two rather uncomfortable questions. 

Firstly, are Chadbourn's economics sound?  I would argue that if Chadbourn means that, artistically speaking, fantasy authors have to try harder then I agree.  However, if he means that the market for epic fantasy has been saturated, I would argue that the opposite is true and that the market is actively hostile to innovation.  World of Warcraft is as traditional a form of epic fantasy as you could possibly hope to find.  With the exception of its non-Tolkienian races it is epic fantasy by the numbers.  However, if you look around the fantasy MMORPG world you'll find a D&D game and a number of other games that all follow WoW in producing epic fantasy by the numbers without a gramme of originality or innovation.  What is even more depressing is the amount of time spent in these games.  I personally know two people who spent months of their lives playing WoW for 40 hours a week.  One player even went so far as to take time off work in order to organise his guild and plan raids.  In short, for many people, WoW is less a hobby and more a second unpaid job.

The MMORPG market, much like the world of fantasy literature, is one that operates on the basis of narrowed horizons.  In the world of console gaming, the lack of innovation has reached such a point that any change is treated as earth-shattering.  The best example of this was a gun in Half-Life 2 that allowed you to lift things up at a distance.  To my eyes this was a new swirl of icing on a cake largely unchanged since the days of doom, but to gamers everywhere it was an innovation.  The same lowered bar holds sway over innovation in the mainstream fantasy and RPG markets with any fresh deviation from Tolkienian roots seen as an innovation and sufficient grounds for fans of the new work to sneer at the fans of other works (this was something I learned from my run in with George R. R. Martin's fans... to me the books appear to be yet more tales of battle, magic and great men but to the devoted fantasy fan these are worlds away from other works featuring battle, magic and great men).  In fact, the fantasy genre rewards lack of originality by guaranteeing that the likes of Karen Miller massively outsell genuine innovators (such as China Mieville) and people turning out equally vapid rubbish that is actually significantly different to the kind of vapid nonsense most people read (as is the case with Scott Lynch's works).

 

Secondly, is this influence all one way?  one of the most notable facts about tabletop gaming is the extent to which fantasy completely dominates the agenda.  In many ways, the gaming hobby is playing Dungeons and Dragons with a few footnotes added to represent the other massively less popular games that are played, but what is more interesting is the way that the fantasy genre has effectively colonised all the other genres when it comes to roleplaying.

For example, if you want to play an RPG set in a historical setting, you have to look long and hard for a game that does not include magic rules.  Games set in Roman Britain have rules for druids, games set during the French Revolution have sorcerers and games set during the Victorian period frequently come with wizards, goblins and elves.  But this colonialism does not stop with historical settings, it also applies to other genres such as SF.  For example, one of the most successful cyberpunk games of all times is a game called Shadowrun featuring, you guessed it, elves, dwarves, dragons and wizards.  Even more traditional forms of space opera routinely have psyonics and other magic-surrogates.  In fact, if you want to play a game that does not have any supernatural in it, you are a vanishingly small minority.

 

The problem here is that the vast majority of fantasy fans simply have no interest in innovation.  If fantasy authors were to hear Chadbourn's rallying cry I suspect that the result would be a decrease in sales across the genre.  The problem is not with the world of RPGs or lazy authors, it is the audience and until someone finds a way of evolving the tastes of that audience, the market will reward the writers who are able to pleasingly re-arrange old ideas and not those who present us with new ones.