Thinking About Things

I’ve recently been thinking about things. I don’t mean thinking about general concepts of life, I mean things. Stuff. The objects and things that we surround ourselves with. Part of this started, admittedly, with playing the game Unpacking. I did a video essay where I explored the real characters of Unpacking, the things we are unpacking. It had made me continue to think about the ways that things impact our lives, and have lives of their own.

When it comes to the research project on TTRPGs, there’s a lot of stuff to be thinking about. While playing a role playing game doesn’t necessitate small figurines and maps, many people do utilise these things in order to play. People like to even make their own figurines which look similar to their character, self-painted to look even more like what they imagine. These figurines can be sat on maps to help to illustrate distances between players, and how a dungeon is set up.

But there are some items that are more functionally needed. Dice, for example, are a requirement for role playing games. They decide what happens in the game. Anything that could possible result in a different answer, players roll a dice. Trying to see if you spot a trap? Roll. Swinging a sword to see if you hit an enemy? Roll.

For me, as someone who studies mythology and storytelling, what makes table top role playing games so interesting is the way stories are told. I’m used to very traditional structures, where there is a storyteller who is communicating their story to an audience. This can look like old school myths or folklore tellings, with someone speaking around a fire or in front of their community. But it can also look like a movie, where the creators of the movie are the storytellers, and the audience sit in cinemas. Or it can look like a video game, with the developers being the storytellers and the audience playing out the narrative.

But for table top role playing games, who fits what role? We have the Dungeon Master or Game Master (DM or GM) that has organised the game. The GM has all the information regarding enemies, has planned out who the players will run into and in what order. In some respects, we can think of the GM as being the storyteller. But that discounts the role of the players

The players also fit into the storytelling structure. The players can sometimes make decisions that the GM didn’t plan for. They can even choose a path that goes in the opposite direction of the plan, and the GM has to suddenly shift everything they’ve planned in order accommodate this new change of plans. The actions taken by the characters are in the hands of the players, which is a huge part of the story itself. Despite this, the players are also, in some respect, the audience who is also receiving the narrative. They consume the narrative and create the narrative simultaneously.

But there’s a third dynamic that creates narratives, and this is where our things start coming into play. The dice. Often, the course the narrative takes is in the hands of the dice, not in the GM or the players. The dice are what determines what happens and how things happen. The dice are a form of storyteller, one that has an equal hand in the way things unfold.

So let’s think about the things we engage with, the items that make up an important part of our lives. Mary Douglas and Isherwood, in the book the World of Goods: Toward an Anthropology of Consumption, encourage anthropologists to think about items in a different way. Typically, anthropologists and others think about objects from the perspective of more capitilistic endeavours: about their use or their value. How expensive is it? What other types of values do we ascribe to it? How do we use it? But Douglas and Isherwood encourage us to think about objects different. We should, instead, think about how objects fit into life. For example, we can think about a book as something that is read, or that has information within it we want to glean. Or, we can think about a book as a book. One that we connect to, or enjoy touching.

I have a copy of The Fade by Chris Wooding. Chris Wooding was one of my favourite authors when I was younger, and despite having to give up many of my books when I moved countries, I still clung to that book. I haven’t read it since my first read through of the book, which wasn’t even that copy, but I have such a love and connection to that story, to that author, that I couldn't let go of my copy.

That’s because there’s something greater in that book than just the book. It’s not about the information, but the emotions and connections and memories forged with it that it comes to hold.

We can think about dice as functioning similarly. Dice are more than just their economic value, or their functional role in storytelling. We also connect to these various things in table top role playing. The little figurines that are hand-painted to connected to our character is more than its functional role on the map. It’s a representation of us, an emotional element that we connect to and think about as more than the figurine itself.

In many ways, we should do what Douglas and Isherwood encourage us to do: to study objects like people. We should think about them in relation to hierarchies, social connections, and relationships. We should think about things a lot.