A Thesis Proposal
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Enjoy:
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A Descriptive Study of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society
“The Time Portal, through which the Investigators jumped numerous times, was an extremely simple prop that gave spectacular results. Its first appearance was the most dramatic. It opened up in thin air about twelve feet above the ground: the night was dark, and fog and lightning boiled up from inside… The whole thing was operated by about ten kokens dressed entirely in black, and the players reported later that in their excitement they really didn’t see any of them. As far as they were concerned, it really was just a big hole in space with lightning and fog. They couldn’t see the bottom, and all of them jumped through without hesitation, never stopping to wonder what, if anything, they would be landing on. That’s a level of role-playing, commitment, and excitement that can only happen in a live-action game.”
--from Cthulhu Lives, game #55: “The Epic”
Much of my life has been experienced through hobbies. One might even say that I take a professional approach to my amateur and leisure activities. High school homework, for example, was pushed back because I needed to tighten up the script for the Friday night radio show that my best friend and I hosted. Another friend’s Eagle Scout Project took extra time because we had to shoot the opening to Pennsylvania Jones and the Secret Cookie Recipe at the same time. My National Merit scholarship application was almost late because I was working on another revision to the Marx Brothers revue I scripted for the high school arts expo. The Geology class lecture shared my attention with a game that I was running two weeks later; the timing needed to be fixed. Even today, when stress piles up, there is always a pewter miniature that is ready to be painted.
Ten years later, hundreds of pewter miniatures stand on the shelf next to my computer. I still have the first squad of miniatures I ever painted. Not surprisingly, there is a marked improvement from those miniatures to the most recent. More surprisingly, the closest thing to an art class I have had during that same decade is a scene design class taken as a graduate student. If my ability to paint had improved over those years, in what context had this ability developed?
According to Steven Gelber’s Hobbies: Leisure and the Culture of Work in America, I could never have learned this skill through mere play. Hobbies, Gelber posits, could be a means of practicing already acquired skills in a more creative, rewarding way; they do not result in acquired skills. Though he toys with the idea of hobbies developing job skills, Gelber eventually dismisses it: “relatively few people were in a position to turn their hobbies into jobs, but many more could turn their job skills into hobbies” (48). What is missing this assertion is the possibility that even if hobbies do not often turn into jobs, skills acquired by a hobbyist could be applied to his or her professional life. As an example, would the skills and techniques developed from the hobby of painting miniatures be of assistance in painting a prop head? When the severed head of Macbeth needed color, where did I learn the abilities of applying a basecoat, building up layers, adding a wash, using drybrushing techniques? Is it possible that leisure activities might inform and influence our non-leisure activities?
These questions bring me to Cthulhu Lives and the organization that created it, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. The group’s unique brand of live-action role-playing provides a perfect leisure activity to answer my questions. Before I can get too far into the event that is Cthulhu Lives, I need to first lay out the world of role-playing games (RPGs).
The Subculture: RPGs & LARPs
Though few people would recognize the term “RPG,” most would be familiar the archetypical RPG, Dungeons & Dragons. While the idea of role-playing is well-known to educators as an instructive tool, it can also be a means of interactive entertainment (as evidenced by the existence an RPG industry). Perhaps the best performance comparison would be something along the lines of Augusto Boal’s Living Theatre. A role-playing game rests somewhere between traditional theatre and improvisation, a performance type that contains a script of plot events, actors with developed characters but no scripted dialogue, a director who guides the plot as it happens, and an audience that functions as performers. The primary difference is that though there are structural similarities, RPGs track closer to the realms of entertainment and popular culture.
But that is only a comparison to keep in mind throughout an attempt at a definition. An actual session of an RPG is a social event that, according to the introduction to the Call of Cthulhu RPG, “brings together a number of people in order to form a communal fantasy often more verdant and imaginative than one person could ever create” (Petersen/Willis 10). Though there are hundreds of RPGs I could use to define the whole, I have specifically chosen to draw definitions and terminology from Call of Cthulhu for two reasons. The first is my familiarity with the system and its fictive background; the second is its influence on the activities and goals of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society. Before getting to the latter, we will need to be familiar with what constitutes a role-playing game that one might purchase on the shelves of a local bookstore.
In its most basic form, an RPG is a game system with set rules and structure, wherein players create characters, and these characters shape a narrative directed by a non-player (known in Cthulhu as the “Keeper”). This shaping happens through the cooperation of player characters (PCs), who interact with each other and with non-player characters (NPCs), usually portrayed by the Keeper. The role of this person is to moderate and mediate the narrative-in-progress, much like a director. But such a story cannot take place in a vacuum. As a necessity, most RPGs also develop a setting wherein to set the narrative-building sessions. One of the few performance studies scholars to study RPGs, Daniel Mackay, has termed these backdrops “imaginary-entertainment environments: fictional settings that change over time as if they were real places and that are published in a variety of mediums… each of them in communication with the others as they contribute to the toward the growth, history, and status of the setting” (29). In the case of Cthulhu, the environment is one that mixes the real world with the fiction and philosophy found in the works of H.P. Lovecraft and his circle of writers. Mackay’s study is especially important because it focuses on the process of playing an RPG, rather than the attempt to define them with goals and measurable outcomes In the Call of Cthulhu RPG, the players engaged in this process take the roles of investigators of the weird, and the “goal” of the PCs is to resolve an unnatural happenstance. “Goal” is a problematic word to use here. For the fictive characters, they are competing against the malignant forces of an uncaring universe to achieve the goal of saving humanity. The players, however, are not competing against each other; it is imperative that they work together. In this sense, the “goal” of everyone involved is to enjoy a social and aesthetic event.
While most RPGs take the form of people sitting around a table with pencil, paper, and dice, there is a type of RPG that involves far more interaction and performance. This style is known as live-action role-playing games, or LARPs. The major difference comes in the way characters are portrayed. In an RPG, a player simply states what he or she does. In a LARP, players actively do it. The rules for a LARP are more fluid and reactive, and characters are based more closely on the abilities of the players portraying them. This is a matter of practicality, since players interact with flesh-and-blood people and their environment (as opposed to making die rolls while sitting around a table). Despite the differences, they are still making choices that can change the direction of the narrative. Running one of these games takes more than one non-player, and these non-players take a form similar to a production team found at a traditionally staged theatrical production. While there is still one person working in the same function as a Keeper (now more of a director), people are to design and create props and costumes, performers to portray NPCs, and stage managers to communicate with the director and players if the game has more than one location.
Though I use theatrical terms to describe participants’ roles in an RPG, I do not posit a one-to-one correlation between theatre and role-playing games. But I submit that there is enough of a connection to theatrical styles such as Boal’s Living Theatre that a comparison is not unwarranted. Later, I found that I was not the only one to make such a connection. In “’Operation Mallfinger’: Invisible Theatre in Popular Context,” speech and performance scholar Jonathan Gray describes an experiment he and ten other performers executed in a Baton Rouge mall. They attempted to create a unique type of performance using Boal’s tenets, only in a popular culture setting. Under observation (but not investigation) were some of the reactions during the post-show discussion. Gray writes that “the overall response of the actors was one of satisfaction and unexpected pleasure. Several suggested that we should ‘package’ the idea and sell it as a role playing game or other similar commodity” (133). In this accidental observation we can see a prejudice that is inherent in many studies of leisure or amateur activity; the focus is on the cultural implications, the capitalist possibilities, or the use-value of said activity. As sociologist Gary Alan Fine described it in the justification of Shared Fantasy, his groundbreaking study of RPGs, “To avoid being labeled frivolous, some retreat to ponderous prose which does not allow the inherently interesting phenomena to emerge” (xii). Following the examples of Fine and Mackay, these “paraperformances of American folklore” (Mackay 2) need to be studied with this understanding: in these amateur hobbies, a sense of play is tantamount. Instead of focusing on didactic, educational, or end-result studies of RPGs, we need to study them with the assumption that the end result is fun. Players enter into this hobby willingly, and stay in only so long as they derive pleasure from it. With that lodged firmly in our brain can we then begin to discuss what results from years of dedicated amateur hobbying, such as the ability to provide flesh tones to a usurper’s cursed head.
In order to study the seriousness of play, I intend to look at the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society (HPLHS). Since its inception in the ‘80s, this group has intentionally blurred the distinctions between game, entertainment, and performance with their LARP, Cthulhu Lives. Using the works of Lovecraft and the Call of Cthulhu RPG, the HPLHS crafted a style of live-action role-playing that was “the embodiment of the word play in all its senses” (Branney/Leman). Though it rarely has time to put on many LARP performances currently, the group uses that same spirit and experience of producing to create props and performance models for other LARP players, mainstream artistic artifacts such as films and plays, and (most interestingly) important abilities and knowledge to that aid them in the artistic and professional realms. Through a descriptive study of the history, goals, and methodology of this organization, this project will allow us to begin the conversation on how this performative, leisurely hobby produces skills, abilities, and contacts that can be important in non-leisure settings.
Methodology
The purpose of this study, then, is to describe the history, goals and methodology of the HPLHS. After that, looking at the events and items they have created, we can ask some important questions, like the one put forth by the Horror Channel: “[How did you go] from Cthulhu Lives to the live musical Shoggoth On The Roof, and now to the movie version of Call of Cthulhu” (Horror). Taking this further, how did this leisure-time hobby enhance or influence their activities outside the realm of leisure? There is still a common through-line of being producers, even if the group and its members no longer work only to create LARP sessions, but also short films, theatre, props and prop contests, and game aids and advice via their website. In what way did the Cthulhu Lives game provide cultural capital to its participants?
The first chapter will be dedicated to expounding upon exactly what an RPG is. The very basic description in this prospectus, like the brief introduction found in each RPG book, is not enough for the purposes of this study. “Such explanations of what constitutes a role-playing game… often describe a complex process in very compressed terms” (Mackay 4). I also plan to define RPGs in terms of performance studies, drawing heavily on the work of such scholars as Daniel Mackay. How do RPGs (and LARPs) compare to similar performance styles (such as Invisible Theatre)? Within these areas, what is the role of “playing”? What do we, as performers and interactive audience, learn or experience by making choices and crafting the narrative? Once this broad context is set up, I will then narrow the definitions and examples to RPGs. When that broad umbrella of is set up, I will look at Call of Cthulhu’s place within the RPG industry, since it is the RPG that inspired the creation of the HPLHS. Game structure and Lovecraftian influence will be the main foci. Differences between the game and the form of a LARP will be discussed as well, leading into what needed to be done to come up with Cthulhu Lives.
The second chapter will endeavor to take this performance-based definition of live-action role-playing and fit it into the realms of hobby and leisure studies. Much of the groundwork will be laid from the studies of scholars in sociology or folklore, such as Gary Alan Fine. From that standpoint of subculture and sociological structure, the chapter will incorporate theories of everyday life from such scholars as Wacquant (and other successors to Bourdieu), Robert Stebbins, and Erving Goffman. What possibilities do our leisure activities offer to our non-leisure ones? Of primary importance here will be Bourdieu’s idea of cultural capital, the processes by which individuals achieve knowledge, skill, or education.
The third chapter will be the actual description of the HPLHS. Its founding was based around the desire to create an organization to support Cthulhu Lives (in more ways than one; the name originated as an answer to a police officer who wondered what was going on with all the people running around in funny clothing). Starting with the origins, I will look at the evolution of the goals and motivations of the organization. How did the games evolve in structure and depth? How and why did things change, what particular obstacles presented themselves, and how and why did the organization branch out in its creative efforts to encompass things outside (if influenced by) Cthulhu Lives? What skills were required to put on these fames? What has become of the items created for them? To answer these questions, I will draw from interviews with the organization’s founders, Andrew Leman, Sean Branney, and Darrell Tutchton. Another data set I will draw upon will be artifacts created by the HPLHS, including (but not limited to) their Cthulhu Lives sessions (as archived by Leman on their website) and the physical objects left behind from such games, to the musical A Shoggoth on the Roof and the fictive background and material surrounding it, to the short films produced by the group.
Finally, the last chapter will be an attempt at synthesizing all the previous chapters. How do the goals, motivations, actions, and artifacts of the organization mirror those of more “serious” theatre or educational practitioners? How do they differ? Looking at the projects and events created by the HPLHS, what conclusions can other “producers” draw from them? Where can future research in performance or role-playing go from the ideas brought up in this thesis? How generalizable is this study to other gaming-related hobbies?
Sources and Obstacles
As I have already mentioned, the scholarship on RPGs, live-action or otherwise, is limited. I posit a number of possibilities for this. The first is that scholars “who study leisure typically find themselves… accused of not being sufficiently serious about their scholarly pursuits” (Fine ix). With the advance of popular culture, this is becoming less and less of a phenomenon. However, now that it is somewhat more accepted to study leisure artifacts (i.e., games), such studies are looking to the burgeoning world of computer and video games. Another element working against easy study into RPGs is that they don’t easily fit into the traditional view of what constitutes a hobby. The creators of Cthulhu Lives admit such a thing when they describe their LARP as something that is “not easily categorized as a hobby, or as entertainment, or as a form of art” (Branney/Leman). This overlapping and difficulty of classification is noted by others, as well. Philosophy professor David Novitz inadvertently made this point when he used an RPG (entitled Shadowrun) as a device to examine the difficulty in defining just what constitutes “art.” When we try to define it along the lines of a traditional American hobby, the difficulty remains. For this, let us return to Gelber’s Hobbies. Since he defines hobbies under the umbrella of leisure, hobbies must “take place in time that is free from work… are voluntarily undertaken… [and] are pleasurable” (7). At the very least, then, RPGs seem to fit into the definition of leisure. Furthermore, “hobbies generate a product and therefore hobbyists have something to show for their time” (Gelber 295). Though performance is a fleeting thing, it still generates tangible artifacts, whether they are the archived stories found on the HPLHS website, or the props, costumes, scripts, and puppets crafted for each game. So Cthulhu Lives can fit into at least one basic definition of “hobby,” even if the fit seems a bit awkward.
On the other side of the coin, much of the scholarship on role-playing that does exist falls outside the definition of leisure. Here, the discussion focuses on the educational prospects for game-style role-playing, such as Marc Carnes’s Reacting to the Past series of game modules. Carnes states that “role-playing games have long been a staple of higher education” (B7), but he is referring to classroom activities with a specific purpose to teach the application of the skills learned in textbooks. Cthulhu Lives and other RPGs are not measured by their instructional abilities, but their ability to entertain and create lasting stories. Carnes entitled his article “The Liminal Classroom,” drawing from the ideas of Victor Turner. If we refer back to Turner’s “Liminal to Liminoid,” he reminds us that liminality can be playful, and that leisure includes the “freedom to play… with ideas, with fantasies, with words… and with social relationships” (37). All these echo the sentiments of the HPLHS, who view Cthulhu Lives as “structured, complex, layered, mind-bending, and fun,” and “an extremely potent medium for intellectual and psychological exploration” (Branney/Leman). Its blend of narrative storytelling, theatrical conventions, and pop culture settings may not have the overt social and political aspirations of more scholarly theatre, but its focus on interaction and community is a powerful and enjoyable means of involving people in a story.
But that blend does have an important result. At the most obvious level, scripting over 60 games should help develop basic competencies in such things as plotting, dialogue, and character creation. It also lead to (or was an excuse for) historical and creative research, language proficiencies, and visual artistry. The creators are emphatic that all those games provided the ability to produce their later endeavors. In interviews, they stress that aspect of Cthulhu Lives: production. A game of Cthulhu Lives not only requires copious amount of preparation, but also the abilities to negotiate, administrate, and develop solutions on the fly. While this thesis will focus on such cultural capital generated by HPLHS activities, there will be no attempt to overlook the importance of the enjoyment itself. As important as I think Cthulhu Lives is, I would be remiss to forget that people do this as leisure. In that light, it would be filling a gap to study the HPLHS, an organization that blends performance and ritual, theatre and film, role-playing and gaming, but never forgets the word “play.”
Limitations
The primary limitation will be to keep the study focused on the ideas of hobby, leisure, and cultural capital. Rather than make the attempt to dwell upon LARPs’ place in the realm of paraperformances, I will be using existing RPG scholarship as a means of defining Cthulhu Lives from a performance standpoint. Obviously, other limitations will present themselves in the course of gathering and digesting the various sources of information for this study. A likely limitation will likely be the lack of scholarship concerning the RPG medium as it is. Though there is an academic anthology on RPGs currently in the early stages of production, I am not sure of its availability in time to inform this study. In addition, some of the available literature is in German, meaning I will need to polish my rusting German language skills. Finally, I will be excising RPG studies that rely primarily on psychological and educational methodologies. Though I want to know how Cthulhu Lives builds capital, it has to be from a leisurely standpoint.
Of course, this is all a hypothetical plan of action, based around the reviewed literature and the experiences of this author. Since much of the study is based around interviews and artifacts that cannot be found at this time, it is very hypothetical. Though I am not reinventing the wheel, I believe that such a group presents a good chance to make a valuable contribution to both performance scholarship and scholarship of everyday life. That said, it is just as important to remember what Fine warned about in his study: “In describing these… role-play[ing] games, it may appear to the reader that they reveal things of sociological note, but not that they are fun” (xii).
Thankfully, the group I plan to study will be a constant reminder. Their seemingly-erudite Latin motto is: “ludo fore putavimus.” In other words, “we thought it would be fun.”
Works Cited
Branney, Sean, and Leman, Andrew. “Who Are We and What is Cthulhu Lives?” Originally published as “Cthulhu Lives” in The Unspeakable Oath 13 (1995), 18-27. Accessed online at http://www.cthulhulives.org/whatisit2.html. Last accessed 10/13/05.
Carnes, Marc C. “The Liminal Classroom.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 51:7. Washington, DC: Chronicle of Higher Education, 2004.
Fine, Gary Alan. Shared Fantasy: Role-playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1983.
Gray, Jonathan M. “‘Operation Mallfinger’: Invisible Theatre in a Popular Context.” TDR 37:4. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993.
Leman, Andrew, and Anderson, Jamie. “Game 55: The Epic.” Accessed online at http://www.cthulhulives.org/Game55/frame55.html. Last accessed 10/14/05.
Mackay, Daniel. The Fantasy Role-playing Game: A New Performing Art. Jefferson, NC: Macfarland & Co., 2001.
Novitz, David. “Disputes About Art.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 54:2. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996.
Petersen, Sandy, and Willis, Lynn, et al. Call of Cthulhu, fifth edition. Oakland: Chaosium, 1995.
Turner, Victor. “Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual.” From Ritual to Theatre. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.