What's being cultivated at your RPG table? (Not just a question for Druids.)

 Let’s hope that your D&D world is more violent than your real world. Let’s hope that you have many more opportunities to hack, slash, burn, bash, banish, crush, chill, dismember, electrocute, and eviscerate the baddies in your roleplay game than you ever have in your day-to-day real life. The modern world around you at school, work and at home hopefully bears only a passing resemblance to the fantasy realm of mythic monsters, wilderness exploration, and medieval intrigue that your dungeonmaster has dreamed up for you. But, is it possible that, if you were to spend hour after hour, day after day immersed in roleplay fantasy realms that you would begin to think the real world is slightly more like that D&D world than would someone who spent their free time watching, say, baseball and sports news? Could heavy roleplay gaming cultivate in you a perception of a world more akin to Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter, and the Tribor Trail?

To my chagrin, D&D has not become the primary storytelling device of the modern world...yet. For this installment of Dungeon Theory, we are looking at what George Gerbner thought was the primary storyteller of his research career: the television. For Gerbner and his fellow researchers, it was clear that television had surpassed religion as the main weaver of cultural tales. As such, TV had the capacity to shape and cultivate in its viewers a particular vision of the world. Distressingly, that vision, Gerber believed, was primarily a message of violence. Thankfully, cultivation theory is not merely limited to hypothesizing about TV, but about how media consumption impacts our understanding of social reality.

The first prong of cultivation research begins with the examination of institutional practices which in-part determine why media corporations produce the kinds of messages they do. If we think about this in D&D terms, the question looks more like why does WOTC produce a game that is so violent? What are the policies and practices which underlie the production of a game so heavily invested in weapons, offensive spells, damage, and death? It seems to me that when for-profit companies are involved in the production of mediated messages, it’s likely we’re going to find financial gain as a motive for at least some of the organization’s behavior. There are non-violent roleplaying games (e.g., Til Dawn, Romance in the Air, Primetime Adventures), so it’s not as if violence is necessary for good story-telling, but its staple presence (and prevalence) is what would alert a cultivation theorist. 

The second prong of a cultivation analysis is typically a kind of content analysis aimed at categorizing and studying specific mediated messages, a message system analysis. While Gerbner and colleagues focused his message system analyses on violence (as we could with messages of violence in D&D), any media content could be similarly explored using this technique. The potential for violence present in current D&D rules and sourcebooks cannot be denied, but does that mean that there must (or should) be a high level of violence in your campaign? Not necessarily.  In fact, I think that this is one of the many topics up for discussion between player and DM during a traditional Session Zero.  

Session Zero is a game session held before the first session of actual play. It’s a chance for players to talk about their characters, nail down backstory connections, and discuss goals for their character. It’s an opportunity for dungeonmasters to set the scene of their campaign, establish the tone, identify potentially triggering elements (i.e, suicide, sexual assault, torture), and consult with everyone who’s going to be sitting around the table as to their level of comfort with these (and other) hot-button topics. Session Zero seems to me an excellent time to discuss the amount of violence, the degree of violence description, and the level of gore players are comfortable having as part of their game.  

The third prong of cultivation theory is analysis. Cultivation theory claims that consuming media (television specifically) grows in viewers a particular vision of the world based on the ideologies, images, portrayals, and values shown. Could the same be happening for heavy players of D&D and other violent tabletop roleplay games? Potentially, and it’s for that reason that I believe that DMs should be extremely mindful of the kinds of portrayals their game includes. I am aligned with those who believe that games have the potential to teach and reinforce prosocial behavior, even when those games use violence as a mechanic. Dungeonmansters, your game world, while violent, can still be a venue where diversity, inclusion, communication and equity are salient. 

What cultural elements or themes are most central to your current campaign?  If your players were to be surveyed, what would they identify most quickly as the images, values, and portrayals that are typical of your campaign?  For players, what elements in your DM’s game seem to show up time and again? Beyond a single gaming table, cultivation research would ask us to consider what mainstream D&D modules and supplements cultivate in their players. If one were to look at the sourcebooks produced by WOTC over the past decade, what elements would percolate to the surface as salient, repeated, and central? Mainstreaming is a central tenet of cultivation research, wherein heavy media consumers theoretically tend to develop a commonly-held perception of the world due to seeing and hearing the same labels and images repetitively.

Cultivation analysis is not an intervention. It’s not research which is typically conducted experimentally. Instead, it relies heavily on survey methodology. In his research on television violence, Gerbner found that heavy television viewers cultivate an image of a meaner, harsher, and more violent world than do light television viewers.  So problematic were his findings, that they were termed the mean world syndrome. Could something similar be happening at your D&D table? Could you, as the DM, be cultivating a vision of a particular kind of world for your players?  I think so. The question that follows is what type of world are you presenting?

If the game is an immersive and imaginative environment where players can vicariously experience the emotional highs and lows of their characters (and I know that I have), then certainly, I think that there is at least the potential for D&D games to instill and reinforce some vision of the world that players could carry with them after the game has ended. The question I would lay at the feet of all DMs (and WOTC) is what do you want the mainstream of roleplay gaming to look like for your players? What kinds of themes, quests, characters, plots, and locations can you develop and integrate into your game to cultivate a more just, diverse, equal, and inclusive world?