Abstract
This article examines how table-top role-playing fantasy gamers engage in edgework. Edgework, as defined by Stephen Lyng, occurs when people voluntarily tread boundaries to gain emotional rewards. Based on nineteen months of participant-observation in a gaming group, twenty in-depth interviews, and archival data from e-mail lists and websites, I show how gamers gained many of the benefits that traditional edgeworkers, like extreme sports participants, obtain without the physical danger. Participants tread the boundaries of sanity/insanity and order/disorder, prepared for their edgework, and sustained an illusion of control. By playing a game, they felt alive and powerful, yet removed the edge, thus engaging in “virtual edgework.” In contrast to previous studies, I show that what makes an activity edgework is not the type of risk but how the experience is structured. I suggest that future scholars need to consider new avenues for edgework as people’s lives move online.
Stephen Lyng (1990) developed the concept of edgework to explain voluntary risk-taking. Edgework, according to Lyng, involves treading the boundaries—the edges—between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, sanity and insanity, order and chaos (1990). The challenge of edgework comes from exercising skill to ensure that one doesn’t end up dead, hurt, or crazy. The thrill comes from experiencing extraordinary powers, a distortion of time, and oneness with the world. Edgeworkers also enjoy feelings of specialness, believing that their experiences are ineffable and understandable only by others who master the same skills and activities.
Most studies of edgework focus on activities that entail physical risks, such as skydiving, BASE jumping, motorcycle racing, whitewater rafting, mountain climbing, and other extreme or adventure sports (Ferrell 2005; Holyfield, Jonas, and Zajicek 2005; Laurendeau 2006; Lyng 1990, 2005; Simon 2005). Yet when Lyng first proposed the edgework concept, he did not limit its application to physically dangerous action. What matters, rather, is that there are some kind of high stakes on the line, possibly but not necessarily one’s body or life. What also matters—what makes edgework edge work—is the acquisition and exercise of the skills necessary to get near the edge, the point beyond which the stakes at risk could be lost, without actually going over.
This broader understanding of edgework has informed studies of non–physically dangerous forms of voluntary risk-taking. Researchers have looked at petty criminal activity by adolescents who risk their prospects for mobility (Miller 2005; see also Anderson and Brown 2010); of stock traders who risk big losses in the market (Smith 2005; Wexler 2010); and of academics who take career risks (Hamm 2005; Sjoberg 2005). Some researchers have looked at the emotional risks taken in sadomasochistic sexual practices (Newmahr 2011) and at the spiritual risks involved in unconventional religious practices (Jones 2010; Bromley 2007). While some of these activities entail a physical risk (e.g., snake handling), for the most part, the risks to life and limb are small or non-existent. Yet in each case there is an edge. Participants put their emotional stability, status, career prospects, or spiritual well-being on the line, a line beyond which damage can be incurred.
But what if one desires the experiential rewards of edgework but is unable or unwilling to put any genuinely high stakes on the line? Is it possible to engage in what seems oxymoronic: safe edgework? I will argue that this is precisely what table-top role-playing gamers do. They engage in an activity that generates many of the same experiences enjoyed by other edgeworkers—freedom, mastery, control, excitement—without the dangers. By participating in fantasy games, gamers can tread boundaries between different states of being, yet because gamers do not define the game as real, there is little to lose in the event of failure. What gamers thus engage in is virtual edgework.
Waskul (2006, 20) describes a table-top role-playing game as a recreational activity that “is not competitive, has no time limits, no score-keeping, and, aside from the death of the player’s persona [character], has no infinite definitions of winning or losing. 1 ” Table-top role-playing games require at least two people, although most games have three to ten players. The Game Master (GM) organizes the game, chooses the plot and nonplayer characters, describes the setting and the actions of nonplayer characters, determines the outcome of player actions, and is the referee. Players create their own characters (referred to as player-characters), describe the actions of their characters, and roll dice to determine what their characters do. Players sit at a table and conjure an alternative world, usually with the aid of character sheets, books, and miniature figurines.
The premise of most games is that the players must cooperate to overcome the obstacles the GM puts in front of them. There are no opposing teams. Even the GM, who dictates the behavior of imaginary foes, is not seen as an adversary. He or she presents challenges to the other players, but those challenges are expected to be balanced against character abilities. Games are also open-ended; a gaming group can play the same characters regularly over the course of years.
While many people consider games trivial and mere entertainment, sociologists and other scholars have paid a good deal of attention to games. Initially, scholars examined play and games in general, pointing out that people have to draw boundaries around games to make them enjoyable. For instance, Huizinga (1949) argued games exist in a “magic circle” that separates them from everyday life. While others have argued that the separation between play and reality is not as clear as Huizinga claimed, role-playing games require players to navigate the separation between the two (Calleja 2013; Consalvo 2009).
The first sociological examination of role-playing games was Fine’s (1983) ethnography of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) players. Several scholarly studies since Fine’s have focused on how the games work internally or the relationship between real selves and fictional, game-world selves (see Grouling Cover 2010; Hendricks 2006; Mello 2006; Myers 1992; Nephew 2006; Tychsen et al. 2006; Waskul 2006; Waskul and Lust 2004). Table-top role-playing and similar activities, such as live-action role-playing (LARPs) and MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role-playing games), focus on fantasy and magic, requiring players to use their imagination (Tychsen et al. 2006). All three also provide numerous opportunities to establish social relationships through in-game activities (Brignall and Van Valey 2008; Chen 2009; Moore 2005; Tychsen et al. 2006; Williams and Kirschner 2012).
Moreover, Kociatkiewicz (2000) argues that the creation of game worlds is similar to the creation of real-life social worlds. As in reality, gamers need others to understand the elements of the social world that are important, but they do not worry if others have different images of minor details; if there is enough agreement to ensure smooth social interaction, a sense of reality is achieved. Similarly, Waskul and Lust (2004) argue that self-presentation in role-playing games parallels real life. According to Waskul and Lust, gamers attempt to maintain boundaries between themselves as individuals, themselves as players in a game, and the characters they play—the same kind of boundaries that people try to maintain in everyday life. In a later study, Waskul (2006) further argues that the main difference between the creation of characters in role-playing games and the creation of selves in everyday life is that the latter are considered serious and important, while the former are not.
All of these studies demonstrate that table-top role-playing games provide a fruitful site for examining important sociological concerns about selves and identities. In this article, I argue that an examination of table-top role-playing games can also help us clarify our understanding of edgework.
More than thirty years ago, when Gary Alan Fine published Shared Fantasy: Role Playing Games as Social Worlds (Fine 1983), fantasy gaming was widely seen as an odd hobby engaged in by a few social misfits. Since then, fantasy gaming has grown tremendously in popularity, in part due to advances in computer technology that have made high-quality video games readily affordable and drawn millions of people into online gaming communities. What this cultural development suggests is that a great deal of what is now experienced as adventure and risk-taking may be occurring in virtual realities. A further implication is that virtual edgework, as practiced by table-top role-playing fantasy gamers, may be becoming the modal form of edgework in developed societies. As such, it would seem to warrant serious analytic attention for what it can tell us about voluntary risk-taking and about cultural change.
In the immediately following section, I describe my approach to studying gamers. I then discuss how role-playing gaming, though posing few or no real-world risks, such as loss of employment, health, or social standing with those unconnected to the game, to players’ well-being, can nonetheless be considered a form of edgework. I also show how gamers collaboratively constructed characters, game worlds, and game narratives in which they could engage in virtual edgework. I argue that while this virtual edgework had a limited edge beyond which damage occurred, it still offered many of the same rewards as “real” edgework. Finally, I discuss the implications of my findings and analysis for reformulating the concept of edgework and for understanding voluntary risk-taking more generally.
Setting and Method
To find a study site, I identified a newly forming gaming group online, attended the group’s first meeting, and obtained permission to observe and record. Permission was granted, provided that I also participated fully. Having played role-playing games for twelve years, I was not new to the experience. While group members socialized me into the specifics of the games they played and their group norms, they did not attempt to teach me the basics of the game because they knew I had prior experience. In fact, group members regularly depicted the game we most frequently played as too complex for newcomers to role-playing, suggesting that my “insider” status helped me gain access.
I attended weekly game sessions from May 2009, when the initial GM organized the group, to November 2010, when the group dissolved. During this period, the group played eight different games in the fantasy, science fiction, spy, and techno-thriller genres. Game sessions ranged from five to seven-and-a-half hours. As a full participant, I was involved in organizing the group, all aspects of the game sessions, and social interactions before and after games. I created ten characters during the group’s existence and played eight of them. I tape recorded the games and surrounding activities. I also jotted notes as games unfolded. Afterward, I typed full fieldnotes, transcribed the tapes, and wrote notes-on-notes to begin developing my analysis.
The gaming group varied in size from four to eight over the course of its existence, with a total of twelve people (other than me) participating in the group at various times. Most members were experienced players. Several members played in multiple regular games during the period of the study. Only three group members had no prior role-playing experience. 2 Group members ranged in age from eighteen to late forties. Nine of the group members were male, three were female. All were white and all had some college experience. The majority were current or recent college students.
In addition to participant observation, I conducted (in 2011) intensive interviews with twenty role-playing gamers. Six of the interviewees were members of the original gaming group, fourteen were not. I recruited interviewees through personal contacts and through a local online social networking group for gamers. The interviews lasted approximately an hour-and-a-half to three hours. I asked about what makes role-playing fun, about good and bad gamers, about non-gaming interests, about conversations with others about gaming, and about gaming experiences. I transcribed each interview and coded transcripts for recurring themes.
Of the twenty interviewees, sixteen were male and four were female. All but three of the interviewees identified as white. Two males identified as Asian, while the remaining interviewee considered himself “other.” Two interviewees were high school graduates, while the rest had at least some college. Most of the interviewees had middle-class jobs, and ten of them had or aspired to jobs in the computer industry. Interviewees ranged in age from twenty-one to forty-eight. These demographics are typical of the table-top role-playing community as a whole, which is largely white, middle class, and male (Grouling Cover 2010).
Additionally, I participated in and observed GENCON, the national gaming convention, in August 2009 and 2010. I jotted notes during and after convention-related activities. Upon my return, I typed complete fieldnotes and wrote notes-on-notes. Additionally, I collected convention “swag” (the publications and free items that GENCON gives to participants). Lastly, I also collected e-mail, mailing list, and website posts from a variety of sources relevant to the gaming group.
The project began through a grounded theory approach (Glaser and Strauss 1967). Going into the project, I was interested in the signification of gender identity among role-playing fantasy gamers, though I was open to emergent themes in the data. As I coded my fieldnotes, I noticed that gamers exercised a great deal of control over the game. While I could see that they did not have complete control or freedom, gamers nonetheless constantly talked about these things, and talked about them in remarkably similar ways (cf. Irvine 2000).
In trying to make sense of what they meant and why that response was so common, I thought about other settings that give people chances for freedom and control. Through a subsequent process of focused coding (Charmaz 2006), I came to see similarities between what gamers did and what edgeworkers do. Yet there were important differences as well. This led to development of the virtual edgework concept and, through integrative memoing, to seeing how gamers negotiated risk and safety as they played role-playing games.
I begin by describing how gamers created experiences of edgework through play. I show how gamers obtained many of the same feelings as more traditional edgeworkers as they negotiated boundaries, prepared for their edgework, and attempted to control the uncontrollable. I end by considering what this analysis can tell us about the sociology of edgework more generally.
Edgework in Fantasy Gaming
In this section, I will show how role-playing gamers do edgework when they play. I will begin by discussing the boundaries that gamers create and negotiate. Next, I will describe gamers’ extensive preparation for risk-taking, before and during games. Third, I will examine how gamers cultivate a sense that they are using skill to exert control. Lastly, I will consider the sensations that gamers experience when they play. It is these actions and experiences, taken together, that make gaming an example of virtual edgework beyond which damage is incurred.
Negotiating Boundaries
There are four different boundaries edgeworkers can negotiate. Because the action of a role-playing game is almost entirely verbal, gamers do not tread the line between life and death. Nor do they negotiate the boundaries of consciousness/unconsciousness, as drugs and alcohol are not central to gaming. They do, however, try to push themselves as close as possible to the boundaries of an orderly sense of self/environment and sanity. Sometimes they court chaos.
Gamers, unlike other edgeworkers, primarily engage in virtual edgework, because players test the limits to their characters’ abilities, rather than their own. While characters can die in the game, players do not suffer physically when it happens. The idea is to engage in as much combat, do the riskiest actions, or attempt the most grandiose actions possible without exceeding the character’s ability to survive the damage. Because the character is not real, the damage taken and any resulting death does not mean the death or injury of a player. Rather, it would be the loss of self-presentation within the group and thus represent a threat to her sense of self and environment as orderly.
Players regularly attempted actions that tested their characters’ powers. Jeremy, 3 a 24-year-old white male, was known for exceeding his characters’ limits. During the course of the Harnmaster campaign, he lost three characters, more than anyone else, because of his efforts to see how much punishment his characters could take. One week, Jeremy took a series of risks with his character. First, he chose to have his character cast a spelling while fighting, which he knew was dangerous. He then proceeded to continue casting as his failure grew worse. His choices led to the death of his character and the near death of other gamers’ characters. In this case, one player’s failed edgework put the entire group of characters at risk.
Jeremy’s propensity to lose characters, and thus to endanger others, was so unusual that other gamers often remarked on it. During the episode described above, players told Jeremy that his character would not behave so recklessly. Matt and I urged Jeremy to wield his character differently by noting that our characters had taken less risky action in a similar situation. In the end, only Jeremy’s character died. Yet, when the game ended that evening, everyone (including Jeremy) left immediately instead of hanging around to chat. For me, that game session was one of the most nerve-wracking I had ever experienced. I was quite attached to my long-lived character, Chloe, and was greatly annoyed at Jeremy’s excessive risk-taking. Jeremy could have lost status within the group because of his risk-taking, but his popularity among the group outside of the game protected him.
Gamers sometimes struggle to find a satisfying balance between fantasy and reality. Gamers say “it’s just a game,” much like soap opera fans say “it’s only a soap” to minimize negative emotions from story developments they do not like (Baym 1998, 126). Baym (1998) found that despite their clear recognition that soap operas were not real, fans frequently felt distress when their favorite characters experienced negative events. Similarly, parents frequently remind their children that the video games they play or the TV shows they watch are not real to calm them down when they get upset (Jones 2002). Adult gamers are not immune from experiencing negative emotions based on fantasy. As my own and other gamers’ experiences demonstrated, gamers did not need to think the character was “real” to be bothered by game events. W.I. Thomas (1928) argued that anything people define as real is real in its consequences. In this case, gamers did not define the game as real and felt that doing so would be going over the edge. Nonetheless, they often experienced negative emotional consequences when their characters were threatened. This contradiction gets to the heart of the paradox of gamers’ edgework. They suffered emotional consequences from fantasy gaming that they themselves did not want to define as real.
Trevor told me about someone else who took character death in stride, again highlighting how unusual such an experience was: That particular player kind of—he had a round robin of characters in that particular game. He would play one for three or four sessions and then some decision he made would either remove him from the game or get him killed, and then it was a new character … So, the joke kind of became, okay [name of player], okay, player, what, which character are you playing this game? [Interview]
As in the group I observed, others joked about the player’s repeated character changes. No other interviewees mentioned such players and no one else in the group made new characters so often. After Jeremy quit the group, others tried to explain his behavior. Those who knew Jeremy best talked about how he enjoyed making characters as much as playing. They implied that Jeremy took more risks because he was less invested in any one character than other players were, and so character death was not a big deal for him.
Although gamers never put their lives on the line, there was one way in which they could test themselves physically. Like workaholics who work as long as they can without collapsing from sleep deprivation, gamers put long hours into their activity (Cooper 2000; Lyng 1990). Most gamers presented themselves as able to negotiate the boundary between mental alertness and mental breakdown. They generally acted as if it was not a problem to play until after 1:00 We played for 24 hours. Around hour 22, I began or around hour 18, I actually began to go insane from lack of sleep. At the end, I was almost physically ill and then nearly got in a fist fight with one of my friends because I had abandoned all social niceties and I was this screaming little ball of rage. [Interview]
In both cases, Malcolm suggested he had gone over the edge into insanity from lack of sleep. Playing games late into the night when the gamers have already expended mental energy earlier in the day at school or work, or playing marathon sessions, can also be seen as a way to tread the edge between order and disorder. In these cases, they are testing their ability to exert as much mental prowess as possible without breaking down. Basically, gamers try to play smart and creatively for hours, without ending up exhausted and unable to think clearly. While no other gamers talked about going over this edge, media reports of people who died or who suffered mental breakdowns after playing video games for extremely long periods suggest it is possible. Similarly, Ortiz de Gortari and Griffiths (2014) found that after marathon sessions, video game players sometimes saw images from the game or reacted to events in real life as if they were from the game, suggesting that they had not successfully tread the boundary.
Another aspect of treading the sanity/insanity line is negotiating the balance between fantasy and reality. Many gamers talked about how important it was to keep the game (i.e., fantasy) separate from the rest of their lives (i.e., reality). For instance, Ethan’s response to a question about what fictional concept from gaming he would like to bring into the real world highlighted his desire to draw a clear line between the two: One of those things that’s always been a pet peeve for me is people that can’t draw the separation . . . and so things, those things tend to be, I try to keep very, very separate. [Ethan, twenty-eight-year-old white male, interview]
Ethan implied that any blurring of the line constituted failed edgework. For him, even a minimal intrusion of gaming into the rest of his life meant he had gone beyond the edge. If he or anyone else carried a grudge from the game into real life, Ethan felt like that person had not succeeded in negotiating the line between fantasy and reality. Interviewees such as Ethan talked about how characters could dislike each other, but players should not take it personally. To ensure that he kept the balance, Ethan even made efforts after game sessions had officially ended to make sure others recognized the boundary: If I’ve had a combative night with somebody, I will go to that person after game and make sure, speak to them like we cool. [Interview]
By doing so, Ethan affirmed that he had successfully negotiated the line between fantasy and reality.
Like other edgeworkers, almost all of the interviews and most of the observation group members felt role-playing was central to their lives. Few, however, discussed gaming with non-gamers or acknowledged their interest to others. Most said that they did not bring it up unless they had clear evidence that the person to whom they were talking would be open-minded toward gaming. For instance, Kevin suggested that computer gamers are people with whom role-playing games could be safely discussed: The only time it ever came up was when . . . I worked in the computer section. So, occasionally, um, there would be guys who worked in the computer section . . . because to, they’re computer gamers. . . . Eventually, through conversation, role-playing games will come out and then eventually, it’s the appropriate time to say, you know, oh, no, I play World of Warcraft. Yeah, I also play Dungeons. It’s the perfect fit. . . . But . . . it’s just something I just can’t bring up to other business guys. Yeah, I play Dungeons & Dragons cause I think you would just get the (speaks louder) what (laughs) . . . cause generally when I ever told anybody that I play Dungeons & Dragons where, um, they weren’t a gamer or they never knew anything about it, they would give you like that sideline glance of like what is that . . . like it’s an oddity. [Interview]
Several gamers made similar statements. Not talking about their activity helped protect them from the stigma attached to gaming or being a geek.
Other gamers talked about not wanting to appear to confuse the game world with the real world. During the 1980s, moral entrepreneurs depicted Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the most popular and well-known role-playing game, as Satanic, claiming that role-playing games lured innocent children into cults (Grouling Cover 2010; Williams and Smith 2007). According to critics, gamers did not understand that the games were not real. While the moral panic eventually died down, the media continues to portray gamers as delusional or otherwise mentally ill. For instance, the tagline for Gamerz (Fraser 2005), a movie about a fictional gaming group, is “One Game to Rule Them All,” suggesting that the game takes over their lives in the way that the “one ring” in Lord of the Rings (Tolkien 2004) dominates those who possess it. In the movie, the players get so upset about their characters dying at the end of the campaign that they attempt to physically kill the GM. That movie, thus, could be read as a situation in which the players’ attempts to tread the line between sanity and insanity failed.
The gamers I studied did not want others to think they had crossed over from suspending disbelief into actually believing the game was real. Gamers repeatedly said “it’s just a game,” reminding others that they understood the game world was not real. They also frequently made jokes about movies like Gamerz (2005), laughing at the movie characters who did not successfully retain their sanity. On several occasions, Henry, a forty-six-year-old white male, lamented the making of the movie Mazes and Monsters (Stern 1982), which featured Tom Hanks as a gamer who began to think the game was real. Henry complained about the damage it did to gamers because the movie implied that gamers could not tread the edge successfully.
Ritual Preparation
Edgeworkers typically engage in a great deal of preparation, including checking equipment, planning trips, practicing skills, fortifying themselves mentally, and so on (Holyfield, Jonas, and Zajicek 2005; Lois 2005; Lyng 1990). Gamers likewise put much time and effort into preparing for play: they make characters in advance and think about games between sessions; they also prepare for risk-taking during the game itself. Because the action is not constant, gamers spend a large portion of every game session formulating plans and deciding which actions to take.
The main preparation for role-playing is creating characters. The group I observed spent six-and-a-half hours making the first set of characters. Even after that lengthy time, Dave, Jeremy, and I had not finished our characters. While the eight-and-a-half hours I eventually spent creating my first character was above average, the group often spent entire evenings making characters. This preparation time reduced the chances of failed edgework. Just as shoddy equipment increases the risk of a skydiver getting hurt, a poorly or hastily constructed character will be harder for a player to keep alive. Players thus often offered each other advice on which skills, powers, and tools to take, indicating that it was important to prepare one’s character for anything. Players prepared for risk-taking partially because failure had the (relatively short-lived) consequence of removing them from that game session.
Gamers also think about upcoming games. For instance, after I struggled to make a Shadowrun (a futuristic game in which characters make their living illegally) character during one game session, Malcolm told me that he and Matt “did the math and I think we can get you some points back,” then suggested how to improve my [game] character. Gamers regularly made statements that showed they thought about how to improve their characters and solve in-game problems, as well as wondered what would happen in future games. For instance, I picked out a spell for a character that required substantial character improvement before she could obtain. By thinking about the game between sessions, gamers increased the odds of successful edgework. They helped themselves and others develop intelligent and creative solutions to in-game challenges and create more durable, complex, and powerful characters.
Gamers continue to prepare for edgework while playing the game itself. This tendency makes gaming different from other types of edgework. Once a skydiver exits the plane, preparation is over. A gamer, however, can prepare for situations that are especially risky for a character, such as combat, during the game. While skydivers might make adjustments as they fall, attempting to alter their body position to ensure a better landing, such adjustments are time sensitive and do not put the activity on hold. Gamers, however, can pause the action of the game for as long as they like. It is standard practice for gamers to debate what to do in a situation prior to doing it, somewhat similar to a huddle in football. These debates can take minutes or hours. Matt, a twenty-three-year-old white male, and I once spent several minutes deciding whether to have our characters cooperate with a lord who was trying to arrest them. We both knew that if our characters ran, they might get killed. Other players warned us against having our characters run without back-up, but Matt and I saw the risk as worthwhile. Unlike the situation with Jeremy, Matt and I had each other’s support to justify our risk-taking. When we finally decided to have our characters run, they succeeded in doing so in less time than we spent debating it. The next week, most of the session was taken up with debating how to get our characters out of the legal trouble they were in. During these debates, characters are not actually doing anything.
In essence, gamers use these conversations to continue preparing for risk-taking. They can still adjust their strategies after they end the debate and resume the game action. After Matt and I decided to run, we sent our characters in different directions to make it less likely that both would be caught. Matt and I had to decide how to have our characters handle or avoid problems that arose as the game action unfolded. Debates such as these enhanced the ability of gamers to do edgework. By considering various options, gamers could more effectively push characters to their limits.
Control as a Consequence of Skill
All edgeworkers use specialized skills to participate in their activity. These skills give edgeworkers “the ability to maintain control over a situation that verges on complete chaos” (Lyng 1990, 859). Edgework, then, involves the ability to control situations that seem to outsiders to be beyond the ability of ordinary people to effectively control (Lyng 1990). While many forms of edgework require individuals to develop requisite skills, gamers often depend on each other, regularly asking for advice about the actions their characters should take. For gamers, edgework was a collective accomplishment, a result of pooled knowledge and skills.
Unlike other forms of edgework, however, gaming involved an obvious uncontrollable element of chance, in the form of dice rolls. Researchers have demonstrated that edgeworkers often deny the importance of chance, arguing instead that skydivers that failed from chance never had the right stuff or that stock brokers who lost in the market did not know how to play it effectively (Laurendeau 2006; Smith 2005). This obvious element of chance threatened the sense that game-world outcomes were a result of applied skill. Players countered this threat by cultivating an illusion of control. One way they did this was by emphasizing that they were always responsible for deciding on their character’s course of action. This allowed them to take credit for the successful edgework of their characters, even if a dice roll was involved.
Role-playing game books emphasize, in their descriptions of what the games are like, the control players have over what their characters do. For instance, the creators of Shadowrun described it this way: If the player does not want his or her character to go through the door, the character will not. If the player thinks the character can talk him- or herself out of a tight situation rather than resorting to that trusty pistol, he or she can talk away. (Catalyst Game Labs 2009, 15)
Unlike video games in which players cannot control what characters say, or even what their characters do during cut scenes, 4 table-top role-players can decide what to say and do. Because they can decide what to do, they are responsible for the outcome, not the dice.
Players considered control over their characters so important that they referred to GMs who took control from them as engaging in “railroading.” Interviewees repeatedly told me that they disliked it when GMs would not let players take actions, or prevented those actions from succeeding. For instance, as Toby said in an interview, I wasn’t the happiest about it at the time. . . . Henry was actually running it and so I was rolling to intimidate and I had, when you do that, you’re supposed to roll a d20 [a 20-sided die], add that to your intimidate score and then compare it to the target’s . . . and when I had done that, I had rolled like a 23 or something [a very high score that would succeed under most circumstances] and Henry didn’t even look at the monster’s defense. He just said, nope, didn’t work (pause) so . . . I mean it upset me at the time because I had made the character to do that.
Toby was upset by Henry’s refusal to let him succeed at the action. In essence, Toby felt that Henry denied him the chance to decide what his character did. While Henry let Toby make the roll, Toby thought Henry had already decided on the outcome. Toby took a risky action, but instead of succeeding through his own skill or failing because of bad dice rolls, he failed because Henry did not want him to succeed. Because of the GM’s position of authority in the game, players always face the threat that their risk-taking will end badly for their character, even if they have prepared adequately and luck is on their side (i.e., they roll well). Interviewees equated control over their characters with fun and were annoyed when GMs denied them control.
Many players also held dice superstitions that allowed them to believe that rolls were not entirely random (see Fine [1983] on dice superstitions among D&D players). Players held a wide variety of superstitions, including keeping the same dice you started the game with no matter how badly they rolled, not letting others touch your dice, and not rolling on your character sheet. These superstitions gave them opportunities for exercising a kind of pseudo-control. According to Langer (1975), there are four aspects of skill-based situations that people can use to create feelings of control over chance encounters: choice, familiarity, involvement, and competition. Players’ dice superstitions demonstrate all of these except for competition, which is probably lacking because table-top role-playing games are cooperative, rather than competitive.
For example, Matt’s dice superstition rested on adding choice (Langer 1975; Lyng 1990). Matt had “high rollers” and “low rollers,” dice that he thought tended to generate high numbers and ones that he thought tended to generate low numbers. By choosing to roll either his “high rollers” or his “low rollers,” he created the illusion that he had some control over the outcome. His dice practice also invoked the idea of familiarity (Langer 1975; Lyng 1990), as Matt was familiar with his dice (because he had owned and used them for a while) and had ideas about which were the best to roll under certain conditions. While most dice superstitions involved adding choice or familiarity, Malcolm added involvement (Langer 1975; Lyng 1990). He crossed his fingers when he made crucial rolls. By taking extra steps to sway the dice on special occasions, Malcolm implied that he had power that could be used to exert control, as circumstances brought him closer to the edge.
Cultivating Sensation
Lyng (1990) found that edgeworkers experienced several sensations while participating in their activity: self-actualization, altered perceptions of time, and oneness with the world. They also felt that one can understand the activity only by participating in it. There is, it might be said, a strong proprietary and subjective element to edgework—an element of in-group mystique. Gamers’ experiences were very similar.
Lyng (1990, 860) described self-actualization as being really alive, along with “exhilaration and omnipotence.” Gamers often described the feelings of excitement and power they derived from gaming. In almost every case, players created characters that were stronger, more dexterous, tougher, and faster than real people. One of my characters could shoot fireballs out of her hands, while one of Claire’s characters could kill with its claws. Likewise, Kevin, a thirty-eight-year-old white male, joked that the main difference between one of his favorite characters and him as a person was that he could not turn invisible. His description of the character showed how important being able to do what he couldn’t do as a person was: So to go invisible or something like that. But, um, I just liked him because, um (pause) . . . being the Halfling [like a hobbit from Tolkien’s books] thief who can hide and see what’s going on all the time before he can do something . . . I just enjoyed that, that concept. [Interview]
Kevin and many other players used their characters to give them a sense of power (i.e., the ability to see what others do not) impossible to achieve in the real world. Such perceptions of power are like the omnipotence reported by skydivers and participants in other extreme sports who feel like they can do the impossible (Ferrell 2005; Lyng 1990).
Gamers also derived a sense of power from the opportunity to take a wide range of actions in the world of a game. A lot of gamers also played video/computer games, which Sanford and Madill (2006) found to generate excitement and omnipotence. For instance, one of the adolescent males in Sanford and Madill’s (2006, 295) study said “you’re not limited to what you can do” about his experiences playing video games. His statement is strikingly similar to those made by table-top role-playing gamers. Gamers, however, felt that even video games were restrictive compared to role-playing games. As Malcolm pointed out, in a video game, the options are limited by the designer: [I] always get annoyed in . . . like a video game when your character says something and you’re all like what, no, no (louder), why would you say that? . . . And so if you were playing a role-playing game, you could not say that. . . . You can say whatever you want. [Interview]
Malcolm argued that there are only a few dialogue options in most video/computer games, and many times none of them seems reasonable. Interviewees frequently commented that video games, even MMO RPGs, did not provide them the feelings of power and control that table-top games did. While the video gamers Sanford and Madill (2006, 295) studied pointed out that they had options, such as “explor[ing]” areas or “grab[bing] a pizza,” they could not try to befriend, rather than kill, enemies. Interviewees recognized this difference between video games, even cooperative online games, and what they were doing. In role-playing games, gamers are limited less by game designers than by their own narrative ingenuity.
A player in a role-playing game is freer to, as some gamers put it, “go off the rails,” that is, do something no one else sees coming. Gamers often were exhilarated by such actions, and interviewees often said that the chance to do something novel was one of the main draws of table-top role-playing gaming. Additionally, good game sessions, they said, were ones in which they could do something unique, interesting, or unexpected, and make it work, thereby gaining approval from other gamers and experiencing feelings of power. For example, in the game Spycraft, both Austin and Toby developed unusual weapons—a Coke can with acid in it and a machine gun in a saxophone—that earned them praise and that they seemed proud to have imagined. Their characters were just doing their jobs, so they did not gain praise. Players, on the other hand, got prestige within the group.
Experiencing an altered sense of time is another aspect of edgework. During edgework, participants experience either time compression, in which time passes quickly, or time expansion, in which time passes slowly (Lyng 1990). Role-playing gamers often experienced compression. Members of the observed group demonstrated that they were often not aware of how much time passed during game sessions. Usually, around 1:00
This experience of time compression often contrasts with what is happening in the fictional world of the game. Gamers regularly spent hours on a character fight that corresponded to only a few minutes in the game world. For example, the group spent over two hours on a single combat the week Jeremy’s character was turned into a mentally competent zombie. The two hours were spent debating which combat actions to take, verbally acting them out, and making dice rolls for a combat encounter that was supposed to be less than 15 minutes within the time frame of the game world. Such situations suggested a perception of time that was altered in two ways: by taking a long time in reality to deal with a brief episode in the game world and by having real-world hours go by in what felt like much less time.
Finally, Lyng (1990) argues that edgeworkers believe their activity cannot be understood without participating in it. Gamers likewise claimed that gaming does not make sense to nongamers, that it is difficult to explain what the activity involves to an outsider, and that the only way to understand gaming is to play. What this suggests is that edgework involves both proprietary—this is our unique experience—and subjective—you can’t “get it” without doing it—elements. This was no less true for gamers than for skydivers and motorcycle racers.
Corey, for instance, told me he talked to his mother all the time about his games as a child. Both he and his brother played, usually at home. Yet he also told me, “My mother didn’t understand what the hell we were doing.” Kevin, too, believed that his family never understood his gaming: I never talk to them about it. . . . My brother’s is, um, more of a yuppie . . . business more, um (pause) and in the beginning the reason why I didn’t tell them was because I don’t think they would have understood. . . . I was raised in a, in a religious family, Christian, religious family, so they are—they heard the rumors like I did that Dungeons & Dragons is a bad, evil game . . . and I tried to explain it, but they’re [his parents] just from a different generation, so I don’t think they understand that concept of how the game goes. [Interview]
Kevin believed that certain types of people would never understand gaming, no matter how much explanation he offered.
Many of the gamers told me that they did not even bother trying to explain their activity to others. The majority of interviewees explicitly stated that they never or only rarely discussed role-playing gaming with people outside the community. Others indicated that they had come up with ways to explain it, although even these individuals said it took years to figure out how to do this, and they rarely did so unless asked. One interviewee said, I have at certain points. I just tell ’em it’s just a bunch of fun, you know? It’s, it’s like telling a story. It’s, I mean, I do the “cooperative storytelling” spiel now. I didn’t do that in the past because I didn’t really understand what was going on. It was just, it was just fun. [Corey, interview]
Corey claimed that, as a role-player himself, he did not even know how to put his experience into words. Corey initially shared the sentiment of the skydivers Lyng (1990) studied, who felt that language could not capture the essence of their experience. Corey later concluded that he could put at least part of his experience into words, just as some of Lyng’s skydivers found ways to articulate their experiences.
The difficulty of putting the gaming experience into words meant few gamers knew what role-playing involved when they first tried it. In most cases, they were told nothing or almost nothing about it when they were first invited to play. Emily’s introduction to role-playing was typical. During his interview, Toby and I discussed what he told her before the first game session she attended: When I [met her], I told her Tuesday nights I have this thing that I do, and she wanted to come. . . . (Me: So she didn’t really know—like you didn’t really tell her much about what you were doing beforehand?) Not really, no.
Basically, Emily showed up to the game with little idea of what gaming entailed. She had participated in MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons/Domains), 5 so she had experience pretending to be someone else. Even knowing that she had some relevant experience, Toby did not try to explain it to her.
Gamers sometimes said that even watching a group play would not really help people understand the experience. When Emily arrived her first evening, she seemed bored watching the group play. Interviewees reiterated the idea that she would not find watching the group interesting. For example, Trevor argued, We’ve had a couple of people [come to the game] who’ve been like oh, I know this person. I want to come hang out, but I don’t want to play. I just want to watch. . . . That seems to be the death sentence for their ability to participate in the game. . . . Because watching five people, six people sit around a table, talk back and forth at each other and occasionally pick up a couple of weird shaped dice and throw them has got to be, at least in my opinion, one of the most boring activities you can possibly engage in . . . role-play gaming is so much about just kind of getting involved in a story . . . that if you’re not going to get involved in the story, you’re not going to get anything out of being there, really. [Interview]
According to Trevor, merely watching would not only leave a person unaware of what role-playing is like, but would not even be interesting. Trevor’s statement mirrors what other gamers said. It also mirrors what the skydivers told Lyng (1990) when he asked what skydiving was like. If he wanted to know, they said, he should try it himself. The value of edgework depends, it seems, on not too readily granting access to the subjective experiences it generates.
Discussion and Conclusion
Gamers sitting at a table talking, rolling dice, and moving figurines do not experience the physical intensity of motorcycle racing, skydiving, or BASE jumping. Nor do they face the real-world risks associated with these paradigmatic forms of edgework. Yet they can imaginarily stand up to powerful foes, prevail in combat, and narrowly escape the destruction of their game-world characters. They can earn approval from others who witness their displays of skill and daring. In the course of play, gamers also feel alive and powerful, experience alterations in their sense of time, come to feel one with their characters, and believe that only other gamers can know what all this is like.
Because gamers do edgework differently than others, in-character and out-of-character actions are central to their experience. As shown above, gamers prepare for edgework almost entirely out of character. Group members accounted for characters’ skills and preparations with verbal statements saying a character practiced or purchased equipment during downtime. While players sometimes did combat preparations in-character, the group frequently spent minutes to hours debating how to handle a combat situation. Characters, on the other hand, would have had only a few minutes or seconds to prepare. Thus, the edgework here is not just that of characters, but of gamers.
Even without an edge beyond which damage is likely to be incurred, virtual edgework can be satisfying. The kind of safe edgework in which gamers engage is both old and new. Myths, fairy tales, songs, and theater have long allowed people to project themselves into fictional worlds, identify with heroes, and enjoy exciting adventures through the power of imagination—all while safely sitting and listening. Gamers do much the same, and in this sense they do something that humans have done for millennia. Other forms of low-stakes gaming might also be said to provide quasi-edgework experiences: friendly poker games in which bets are kept small (Zurcher 1970); pre-packaged “adventure” vacations (Holyfield and Fine 1997); and managed big-game hunts that seem risky but involve little chance of contact with dangerous animals. Online virtual reality games and training simulations also allow virtual edgework—people can be thrillingly immersed in virtual worlds, while their bodies and finances remain perfectly safe.
How can the foregoing analysis and consideration of these other edgework arenas help us to refine our theories of edgework? It seems that there are two theoretical questions on the table. The first and simplest is whether costs of failure must be physical and potentially catastrophic for an edge, and thus edgework, to exist. The answer to this question would seem to be no. It is a matter of how experience is constructed.
Initial studies of edgework focused on activities that put bodies at risk. It seems well established by now, however, that physical risk is not essential. I have shown how this is the case with table-top role-playing gamers, and other researchers have shown how this is the case with unconventional religious practices (Bromley 2007; Jones 2010), stock traders who take financial risks (Smith 2005; Wexler 2010), and people who take career risks (Hamm 2005; Sjoberg 2005). Again, what matters for turning an activity into edgework is how experiences of control and risk are generated and managed, not necessarily whether one’s body is on the line. While this broader understanding of edgework is helpful for seeing more of its manifestations, it has also sparked debate about exactly what ought to count as edgework.
Newmahr (2011), for instance, argues that scholars need a more feminist take on edgework. She points out that most edgework literature has focused on activities associated with men: extreme sports, motorcycle riding, and graffiti tagging. This focus, she suggests, has led scholars to privilege physical danger over emotional risks, which women are more likely to take. She cites the example of sadomasochism participants who enter into risky trust arrangements that put their emotions in the hands of sexual partners. Fincham (2006) likewise questions the narrowness of current views of edgework by noting that both participants and researchers often engage in “masculine posturing” when discussing edgework—a posturing that again tends to make physical risk its defining feature. Other scholars have criticized the edgework literature for ignoring the class and racial privilege that is often required to engage in the kinds of edgework Lyng and others initially examined (Miller 1991).
Alternatively, Rajah (2007) proposes that any activity in which participants use specialized skill to take risks and gain emotional rewards qualifies as edgework. For example, Rajah suggests that women who stay in violent intimate relationships engage in edgework because they use their knowledge of violence in general and their partner in particular to minimize their risk of being hurt. By doing so, Rajah argues, they come to feel like they are the authors of their own lives, gaining an emotional reward for their efforts. This way of defining edgework implies that it can be built into the circumstances of everyday life and need not be sought after as a special form of leisure. Worrall and Mawby (2013, 113) suggest that “embrac[ing] the experiences of women’s routine lives,” as Rajah does, can help us better understand edgework.
But if we expand the concept to include virtual edgework, or risk-taking in everyday life, what exactly does it help us to distinguish? If anything can be “edgework,” then the concept loses its utility for pointing us toward a kind of experience that merits analysis as something beyond the ordinary. As Roth (2010) and Simon (2005) argue, life is full of built-in risks and things to worry about: crime, car accidents, workplace hazards, illness, job loss, and so on. Sometimes the risks associated with these events are courted voluntarily (e.g., quitting a job before finding another one). But counting any instance of voluntary risk-taking as edgework again tends to negate the specificity and analytic utility of the concept.
It should be possible, however, to specify criteria that allow us to distinguish edgework from the risk-taking of everyday life. Extrapolating from my study of gamers and from other theoretical discussions in the literature, I propose three criteria that can be used to distinguish edgework from other forms of voluntary or routine risk-taking. These criteria broaden the concept beyond its original formulation—as research has shown is necessary—while also delimiting it to a distinct and empirically examinable domain of activity and experience. The criteria I propose all refer to how the experience of edgework is constructed.
First, edgework can be distinguished by the intentional courting of higher-than-usual risks of bad outcomes. The activities of everyday life—driving a car, crossing the street, shaking hands with strangers who might be ill, riding an elevator—create what can be called an ambient level of risk. The chances that such actions will yield bad outcomes are normalized, taken for granted, and accepted as largely unavoidable. As such, they are not properly understood as edgework. An essential element of edgework, I am proposing, is the conscious and voluntary choice of a course of action that entails a higher-than-usual risk of a bad outcome—whether it be loss of life, loss of wealth, or loss of face. Players, for instance, put a great deal of effort into creating and playing their characters and do not habitually put their characters at risk of death; to do so is to court risk beyond the ordinary. Without this element of intentional risk-heightening, edgework is indistinguishable from the background risks posed by human social life everywhere.
A second essential element of edgework is intentional self-testing. This is why a higher-than-usual level of risk is sought in the first place. The point is to see if the action that poses a heightened threat of loss can be handled. In this sense, edgework always involves putting one’s self, or at least one’s self-efficacy (Gecas and Schwalbe 1983), on the line. Edgework might also test one’s moral character, as I observed. In this sense, edgework puts one’s self-worth on the line. Managing the risks and challenges of everyday life can of course also put one’s self-efficacy and self-worth on the line. What distinguishes edgework, I am arguing, is the intentionality with which the activity is approached. While everyday life presents us with challenges, edgework involves intentionally seeking challenges to find out, as the saying goes, what we’re really made of. To put it another way, when we engage in edgework, we enter into character contests (Goffman 1967) with ourselves.
The third distinguishing characteristic of edgework is an exaggerated sense of control. Attributing the outcomes of edgework to one’s self—and thus boosting feelings of self-efficacy and self-worth—requires a strong sense of control. This is not to say that edgework involves merely cultivating a sense of control and not cultivating skill and real control. It involves both, and the more difficult and potentially damaging a form of edgework might be, the more skill it requires. We see this exaggeration of control on the part of skydivers who stress the importance of preparation, deny that random equipment failures occur, and blame deaths on other skydivers’ mistakes (Laurendeau 2006). We see it among players who believe they can mentally affect dice rolls. While randomness and a lack of control over events are accepted parts of everyday life, to transform an activity into edgework requires rejecting fatalism and cultivating the sense that events and outcomes are controllable.
These three criteria—intentionally courting heightened risk, self-testing, and cultivating an exaggerated sense of control—highlight the importance of what people must do to transform an activity into edgework. This conceptualization allows us to see that simply measuring the riskiness of an activity is not a useful way to identify what counts as edgework. Rather, it directs our analytic attention to the process whereby edgework is constructed as a form of experience that stands out against the background of routine and ambient risks. To ask What counts as edgework? is the wrong question, if we try to answer it by creating a list of activities that commonsensically appear more dangerous than routine activities of daily life. A better question is, What do people do to transform an activity into edgework and thereby derive from it a set of emotional and cognitive rewards that are not normally available from the routine activities of daily life? Instead of looking for what might seem to be unambiguous edges, we should look more closely at how all kinds of edges are made.
As people’s lives continue to move online, there will be more virtual edgework of the kind that gamers do. The growing popularity of online games, simulated communities, and social media suggests that in the future many more people will be taking risks that do not directly put their bodies on the line. Much of this computer-mediated risk-taking will become normalized and taken for granted. Against this backdrop, it seems likely that new forms of virtual edgework will arise. The criteria I have suggested above will perhaps be useful, then, to help see how this edgework is constructed. Again, the focus should be on how people use computer technologies and virtual worlds to court heightened risk, test themselves, and cultivate an exaggerated sense of control. However, because I focused on table-top role-playing games, the experiences of MMORGP players may be different. Further, researchers should consider whether the direct competition of PvP (player vs. player) environments in online games like World of Warcraft create different understandings of risk than what the cooperative table-top gamers I studied had.
In future research, scholars might compare risk-taking in games that involve individual competition to risk-taking in games that involve enduring cooperative units (such as World of Warcraft raiding parties). As I have shown, risk-taking is collectively constructed. It thus seems reasonable to suppose that computer gamers will take risks differently depending on whether or not they are part of a cohesive unit. The meanings of success and failure are also likely to depend on how other players are affected and how they react. This suggests the importance, as other researchers have suggested (Chen 2009; Gottschalk 2010; Messinger, Ge, Stroulia, Lyons, and Smirnov 2008; Williams and Kirschner 2012), of studying how gamers connect themselves, both cognitively and emotionally, to their online characters and avatars.
Virtual edgework, though physically safer for participants, poses other kinds of risks. The gamers I studied often said that the game was better than their real lives, that it served as an escape from feelings of boredom, anxiety, and powerlessness. Other edgeworkers, those who do and don’t put their bodies on the line, seek and find similar rewards. A larger question yet to be answered is thus how edgework matters for social change. The kind of edgework in which gamers engaged might inspire dissident imaginings of better worlds. But it might also produce no more than therapeutic relief that inclines gamers to tolerate political marginalization, crave physical safety at all times, and accept a brave new world of state surveillance. Real change, as always, requires stepping over the edge and playing for keeps.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Michael Schwalbe for helpful comments as this paper was in progress.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.