Role-Playing, Reader Response, and Play-Therapy in Fantasy Fiction: “You could hear the dice rolling” in Novels About Abuse and Recovery

Abstract

Role-Playing, Reader Response, and Play-Therapy in Fantasy Fiction: “You could hear the dice rolling” in Novels About Abuse and Recovery James Gifford (bio) Role-playing games (rpgs) have an established use in play-therapy, particularly psychotherapy with children and teens as well as in social work with these groups. Likewise, reader response studies have long established the self-reflective and transformative nature of literary reading, as well as the therapeutic uses of writing. While these four areas are typically approached as distinct from each other—rpgs, therapy, reading, and writing—they find common ground in responses to and concerns with trauma and abuse. We know that rpg players may use their persona in gaming sessions as an avatar to work through issues of concern in their real lives. Similarly, readers consuming fiction may process and reflect on their own real-life experiences through the imaginary worlds inside. Authors, as a third group, also may use their writing as a way of processing their experiences in a sense akin to how a patient works with a therapist through dialogue, play-therapy, and journaling. There is, however, an overlapping point not yet recognized among these quasi-therapeutic possibilities. The crux of this article is a niche literary genre in which all four of these distinct areas coincide: fantasy fiction, and in particular popular fantasy of 1977 to 1990, in which “you could hear the dice rolling” (Lindskold, n.p.). This article considers where these topics overlap in the therapeutic components [End Page 103] of such novels for both readers and authors based on critical attention to affect and literary reading combined with the person-player-persona distinctions in sociological studies of rpgs. By doing so I argue for the value of an affect-based approach to genre fiction parallel with the ubiquity of critical cultural studies, taxonomies, and identity politics as approaches to popular media.1 The phrase “you could hear the dice rolling” typifies a well-recognized sub-genre of “franchise fiction” (Robertson 130) as well as other general fantasy fiction for which some conventions of role-playing infiltrate the organization of the narrative, tropes, or action. While this is typically a pejorative description, its use here signals affinities rather than a value judgment. My interest is in the affective role-playing rather than the contingency-focused possibilities of this sub-genre and the notional “dice.” The broader sense of “dice rolling” novels began in earnest with Andre Norton’s 1978 novel Quag Keep, which is directly based on her gaming sessions with the founder of the rpg Dungeons & Dragons (d&d), Gary Gygax. Her novel’s characters move from real life into the Greyhawk gaming world and back again, with their adventure along the way following the conventions of the rpg’s set of rules.2 In other words, Quag Keep is essentially a novelization of an rpg session with role-playing shaping many parts of the narrative and even the traits of characters.3 An excerpt [End Page 104] from the novel was published as a preview in the rpg gaming magazine The Dragon in February 1978 prior to its full publication as a novel the next year for the purpose of enabling useful cross-promotion between the novel and the game module.4 But it also served another purpose related to affect: to model or even mentor new rpg players on how to self-narrate the experiences, decisions, and feelings of their persona-character in a gaming session. This element of affect and self-modifying reading is the issue at stake, as well as how the conventions of such novels shaped the genre more generally. This innovation subsequently led to extensive use of fantasy novels in which “you could hear the dice rolling” to create novel-form narratives set in various rpg worlds for cross-promotion among experienced players, as well as to exemplify the narrative and self-narrating paradigms of rpgs for new players unfamiliar with these conventions. Such novels were more than entertainment: in a commercial frame they were cross-marketing for a franchise (Robertson 130), and for the concerns of this article they are also pedagogical tools for...