roleplaying and its forms of knowledge: the Penanggalan
In the ever-growing list of projects I'm unlikely to get to anytime soon: a study of roleplaying as a genre of knowledge.
Alas, I don't think this could be called in any way scientific. It would produce the sort of paper that frustrates me as a reader. But. I have a sense that roleplaying, like lego, has fundamentally shaped my categories and habits of thought in ways I can only glimpse sidelong. There are obvious components to both - an idea that things ought to fit together just so, that the bits of the world should have a jigsaw-like ecology to them and yet be recombinable, that there should exist, somewhere, an adequate description of each thing that predicts the ways in which it can be (or prefers to be) employed. That objects in the world should bulge with incipient stories.
That tale about Michelangelo seeing a statue lurking in an uncarved block of marble and trying to release it? Mies' quote about how architecture begins with the careful putting together of two bricks? That's obvious to the legoiste. As is the corollary, that only certain forms lurk in the lego block. That a whole world of impossible forms haunts the legoverse. On the roleplaying side there's the obvious urge to number, to find hierarchy, to level, to reduce to mechanics and also to subvert the resulting mechanical nature. To surprise within the limits of the rules. Both suggest worlds of standardized, mathematical, prosaic forms, which can be captured perfectly as they are but which also refer to some other more actual, maybe Platonic forms, one that can only be suggested with voids, or metaphors or metonyms.
My contention is that roleplaying leaves a trace on the thought of roleplayers, and that this trace can be recognised, least interestingly, but most readily, in written descriptions of monsters.
Thus the Penanggalan, which Winstedt (ultimate source for the 1910 Britannica description) calls a spirit... which sucks the blood of those in child-bed, consists of a woman's head and neck with trailing viscera, which shine at night like fire-flies. If she sucks the blood of woman or child, death follows. Winstedt's description suffices for his own agenda, a famous exploration of which supplies my title. The Britannica wants a little more detail to fit its frame of demonology, which tells you something about its own perspective. Fine. And that's translated pretty much directly, sans colonial ticks (such as Winstedt's according to The Malays...) into the Vampires on the Comparative Method page on Wikipedia. Also fine, if a bit Lamb's tales from Frazer.
And then there's Wikipedia's dedicated Penanggalan page (which for the purposes of my discussion I hope never gets "cleaned up"), where we learn that it cannot be readily classified as a classical undead being. Where we learn about its curiously modern relationship with vinegar (by which it can be recognised), its various methods of attack, and its adjacency to (evergreen staple of monster description) tentacles. About methods of protection against it and their exploitable weaknesses. And of course, methods for destroying it.
This description reeks to me of roleplaying, distinct from mere "gaming." I offer for comparison the terse entry on the Chonchon, which curiously does not cite Borges but does refer to 4 video games. The Chonchon article gives us, to swipe Heaney's evocative phrase, a dogsbreath in the night. It does not give us notes useful to anyone who might encounter or, most of all, wish to deploy it.
I can't quite decide if the note on the number of its teeth constitutes an entry on "treasure."
Alas, I don't think this could be called in any way scientific. It would produce the sort of paper that frustrates me as a reader. But. I have a sense that roleplaying, like lego, has fundamentally shaped my categories and habits of thought in ways I can only glimpse sidelong. There are obvious components to both - an idea that things ought to fit together just so, that the bits of the world should have a jigsaw-like ecology to them and yet be recombinable, that there should exist, somewhere, an adequate description of each thing that predicts the ways in which it can be (or prefers to be) employed. That objects in the world should bulge with incipient stories.
That tale about Michelangelo seeing a statue lurking in an uncarved block of marble and trying to release it? Mies' quote about how architecture begins with the careful putting together of two bricks? That's obvious to the legoiste. As is the corollary, that only certain forms lurk in the lego block. That a whole world of impossible forms haunts the legoverse. On the roleplaying side there's the obvious urge to number, to find hierarchy, to level, to reduce to mechanics and also to subvert the resulting mechanical nature. To surprise within the limits of the rules. Both suggest worlds of standardized, mathematical, prosaic forms, which can be captured perfectly as they are but which also refer to some other more actual, maybe Platonic forms, one that can only be suggested with voids, or metaphors or metonyms.
My contention is that roleplaying leaves a trace on the thought of roleplayers, and that this trace can be recognised, least interestingly, but most readily, in written descriptions of monsters.
Thus the Penanggalan, which Winstedt (ultimate source for the 1910 Britannica description) calls a spirit... which sucks the blood of those in child-bed, consists of a woman's head and neck with trailing viscera, which shine at night like fire-flies. If she sucks the blood of woman or child, death follows. Winstedt's description suffices for his own agenda, a famous exploration of which supplies my title. The Britannica wants a little more detail to fit its frame of demonology, which tells you something about its own perspective. Fine. And that's translated pretty much directly, sans colonial ticks (such as Winstedt's according to The Malays...) into the Vampires on the Comparative Method page on Wikipedia. Also fine, if a bit Lamb's tales from Frazer.
And then there's Wikipedia's dedicated Penanggalan page (which for the purposes of my discussion I hope never gets "cleaned up"), where we learn that it cannot be readily classified as a classical undead being. Where we learn about its curiously modern relationship with vinegar (by which it can be recognised), its various methods of attack, and its adjacency to (evergreen staple of monster description) tentacles. About methods of protection against it and their exploitable weaknesses. And of course, methods for destroying it.
This description reeks to me of roleplaying, distinct from mere "gaming." I offer for comparison the terse entry on the Chonchon, which curiously does not cite Borges but does refer to 4 video games. The Chonchon article gives us, to swipe Heaney's evocative phrase, a dogsbreath in the night. It does not give us notes useful to anyone who might encounter or, most of all, wish to deploy it.
I can't quite decide if the note on the number of its teeth constitutes an entry on "treasure."