Since last week was a bit of a bust for gaming for me, I was glad to be back at the table yesterday, working after two weeks with the kids at the library to delve further into the dungeon that has been the focus of this narrative arc. Out of deference to the need for overtly educational content, I spoke briefly to the players of the narrative concepts of protagonists, deuteragonists, and antagonists, as well as how the ensemble narrative of which such tabletop roleplaying games as Dungeons and Dragons are examples functions.

I noted to the players, too, that only six sessions remain allocated to the program by the library. It’s not the first time a game in which I’ve participated has had a definite end-date in view; most of the gaming I’ve done in recent (and less recent!) years has been done in time-limited play-by-post forum games, so I’m accustomed to having something of a ticking clock counting down. My players, for most of whom this is only the first campaign they’ve participated in, have not, although I know they have experience with deadlines. (My daughter is among the players. She has homework with due dates. She is not always fond of this.) The sense of a looming end to something they (seem to) enjoy has something of a focusing effect, at least in the moment (preteens aren’t noted for their permanence of thought, and they really should not be so), and I had the impression that things moved along at a better clip than in most previous play-sessions.

The imminent end brings to mind, at least for me, the concept of memento mori (“remember that you will die”) as well as the related carpe diem (“seize the day”) and YOLO (do I need to explain this one?)–overall the notion that time is limited and enjoyment must be wrung from each available moment. Within a game, the concepts resonate oddly; in Dungeons and Dragons, and in many other tabletop roleplaying games, death is an inconvenience more than anything else. Characters die, yes, but there are several means of resuscitation and resurrection in many games, and even in games that do not admit quite so easily of returning from the dead, it is not so difficult to produce another character and introduce that figure into an ongoing game. I have the nagging thought that consideration of such in a more formal philosophical sense would be an interesting exercise, and I wonder if someone has or several someones have written such exercises; present circumstances prevent my immediate detailed exploration of such things. (My day job is as it is, and it is getting to be busy.)

No world presented by a tabletop roleplaying game, even one that purports to exist more or less in the “real” world (the scare quotes are necessary; philosophy and the word “real” have an uneasy relationship), is the “real” world inhabited by the players. (Layers of simulacra may be in place, but the principle still holds, I think.) The assumptions that inhere in dealing with the “real” world do not apply to the world presented by the game; even when the rule is that “it works like the real world until it doesn’t,” as is often the case, the “it doesn’t” emerges remarkably quickly into gaming. The first magic missile thrown, the first undead rebuked, the first goblin guarding a chest, and–poof! The gaming world is other than the gamers’ world, and what is true in the latter is not necessarily true in the former. How thought and logic and all the other constructions thousands of years and hundreds of schools of philosophy have developed would apply in such circumstances…I am not trained well enough to venture to say, except to note that they would have to change to apply at all, were philosophers interested in treating such things.

I do not speak for them; I cannot affirm or deny that they are or are not. But it might be interesting to see what has been done or what could be done, and in another life, I might have been such a person as would do it.

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