About
a couple weeks ago at Dragon Con, I took part in a slew of various games
ranging from various RPGs to Magic: The Gathering to Munchkin. I
also got a chance to play a one-shot of MAID RPG, a rules-light comedy
RPG game from Japan that I’ve previously played and enjoyed. Through the
example of MAID, I want to use this blog post to discuss how MAID
and in fact RPGs in general relate to Roger Caillois’s essay “The Definition of
Play”, and how a table-top roleplaying game are not just simply exercises in Mimicry
where a player acts out a fantasy as a separate character, but rather a
roleplaying game incorporates elements of Alea and Agon to not
just identify with a character but also be a spectator that watches that
character.
MAID is a tabletop role playing system driven mostly by
randomness, humor, and a general lack of rules interference. The game is
imported from Japan and is themed as anime slapstick comedy; the premise is
that every player plays a Maid character that must curry favor from a master of
the household (usually a young teenage boy) through exceptional servitude,
doing their domestic maid duties, seduction, and competing with their fellow
maids for attention. Through favor, maids may raise their stats, lower “stress
points” (harmful points that build up and can cause play penalties in the form
of “stress explosion”), and generally become more powerful in classic role
playing form. At Dragon Con I randomly rolled up a character that happened to
be especially cunning and delinquent (character traits, abilities, history, and
even appearance are randomly generated). Playing my cunning and delinquency to
the hilt, I spent most of my session sabotaging others attempts to please their
master, stealing credit for tasks I didn’t do, seducing my master, and
literally tripping up my fellow maids. Whenever action waned, the game master
rolled dice and used the result to determine random story events, that could
range from ninjas suddenly appearing to rain suddenly making all the maids wet
(and therefore sexier). As a result, the game relies heavily on slapstick and
absurd situations cropping up, and also encouraging players to create bizarre
webs of seduction (with the master and each other), competition (in trying to
gain the master’s favor), and teamwork (in the form of shared obstacles).
In MAID the favor mechanic serves as the
primary driving force; yet while it may first encourage competition (or as
Roger Caillois may call Agon) or perhaps games of chance (Alea),
both aspects of the game in fact encouraged the greater act of roleplaying or Mimicery
among the group. Certainly the many acts of seduction, counter-seduction,
sabotage, and competition that occurred when fighting over the master’s favor
made it seem that favor was the end-all goal and indicator of winning; in this
case the winner would clearly be to have the most favor points, and the game be
an Agon-istic game where “the point of the game is for each player to
have his superiority in a given area recognized” (Caillois132). Of course, all
the conflicts and actions in the game are determined through dice rolls, and
while true Alea has a player that “is entirely passive; he does not
deploy his resources, skill, muscles, or intelligence” (Caillois 133), there is
an element of both the skill of Agon and randomness of Alea.
Players have certain skills they excel at and others they are poor, they have
to set up situations that let them exploit their skills, and ultimately taking
initiative, using opportunities provided by the GM, and ultimately being a good
roleplayer translates to favor points.
Another way to look at this however, is to see that
favor points are merely one (of in fact many) systems used to reward good
roleplaying. In MAID (and arguably any table-top roleplaying game) the
players are ultimately imitating a narrative, whether it be fantasy, sci-fi,
horror, or in the case of MAID, slapstick anime. If Mimicry’s
pleasure “lies in the being or passing for another” (Caillios 136), then role
playing is quite literally a game of playing the role of another. The elements
of Agon and Alea then act in a subtle way of being a type of
spectacle that the player both shapes and witnesses. Caillios discusses the act
of witnessing Agon or conflict is a form of Mimicry:
Every agon is a spectacle. Only it is a
spectacle which, to be valid, excludes simulation. Great sports events are
nevertheless special occasions for mimicry, but it must be recalled that
the simulation is now transferred from the participants to the audience. It is
not the athletes who mimic, but the spectators. Identification with the
champion in itself constitutes mimicry related to that of the reader
with the hero of the novel and that of the moviegoer with the film star”
(Caillios 137)
In
this case, there are several levels of mimicry and spectacle involved. For one,
the Agon or competition of each character in game against each other or
their obstacles is a spectacle where the experience of actually being a Japanese
subservient female is the identification and simulation that occurs. To
separate the Agon being witnessed from a real test of skill, Alea
is used to determine the outcome of the various conflicts through dice rolling,
where the skill or intellect of an actual task is reduced to passivity and a
form of fairness. Finally, the “identification with the champion in itself” is
paralleled by Caillios to the relationship of “the reader with the hero” or
“the moviegoer with the film star,” an interesting observation in relation to
RPGs considering the form imitates (or perhaps mimics) novels and movies in
their narrative, although perhaps not their narrative form so much*. In this
case, the player controls their role played character, and the distance
afforded by spectacle allows the player to allow the character to do things
they would perhaps not do in real life (or allow bad things to happen to the
character they would not want to happen on themselves), yet there is enough
identification with the character for the player to have them act in
interesting and fleshed out ways, to mimic and act out the play universe
created on the tabletop.
To illustrate the relationship between Alea, Agon,
and Mimicry I will use a couple experiences from playing MAID.
My first example comes from the Dragon Con MAID session; it was early in
the game and each maid was trying to decide which of three masters to follow
after a particularly nasty train wreck. One maid, a meek lolita with a past
history of being whipped, decided to serve a young aspiring magician master who
decided to put on an impromptu magic show and use the maid as an assistant for
his throwing knives trick. A different maid decided to step in and try and stop
the magician with a magical ice spell. I however, being the cunning tricky evil
delinquent that I was, caught the scroll the spell was written on in midair
then decided to throw it at the meek lolita maid who was desperately trying to
dodge the coming onslaught of magician knives. The character I played did this as
an attempt to gain favor points and get in the way of the other Maid’s goals (Agon),
and the results were determined by dice rolls (Alea), but the reason I
chose to act the way I did in the narrative was to create a spectacle and
encourage the other players to do more than simply run away from an interesting
situation; in order for the game to mimic a ridiculous anime, I went at lengths
to create a ridiculous anime situation, and I was also interested not only
identifying with my character and her wily machinations, but also that of the
hapless lolita, and deriving pleasure from seeing how both the player and
character took hold of the situation. There is also pleasure from witnessing
failure: a different game of MAID I played about two years ago involved
my pure innocent maid being repeatedly seduced and manipulated by other
players, grabbed a hold of by icky (but innocent) tentacle monsters, and
generally having bad things happen to her. Instead of being angry or upset over
“losing” and basically never getting any favor points, I began actively seeking
out situation where my character would end up in bad situations for not just my
own amusement, but also for the other players and the game master who used my
plights to create more interesting and dynamic conflicts.
MAID serves as a good example for illustrating the relationship of Agon and Alea to Mimicry for not just itself but all typical tabletop RPGs. Certainly, other more rule intensive games and min-max oriented players would be more focused on the Agon-istic elements of carefully building their character with proper gear and stats, but even in the most trite monster hacking experience an Agon between character and game master’s contraptions are witnessed and fulfill the requirements of Mimicry. In the end, role-playing is unlike other kinds of play in that it combines and shifts between classifications outlined by Caillios and both creates spectators and play-actors in the same person through these shifts.
-Jason “Olivia” Lee
Works Cited
Caillois, Roger. “The Definition of Play and The Classification of Games”. The Game Design Reader. Ed. Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. 122-155. Print.
*Will Hindmarch wrote a great essay about this in relation to Vampire: The Masquerade
Jason this is a fantastic essay, and I like the way you articulate the way individual players can lean towards certain aspects of games and play within their individual play styles. The only problem is that you didn't include Huizinga and Suits in this, but I think you did one of the most thoughtful analyses of this assignment esp. vis a vis describing specific game elements and how they map to the theoretical ideas discussed.
Posted by: gamegrrrl | 10/18/2009 at 09:30 PM