Jouer sans jeux, Part I
Here is an early section of a large essay I've been putting together, entitled "Jouer sans jeux." In the first substantial section of the essay, I attempt to communicate two particular ways in which role-playing games are unique not only among art forms, but among games, and therefore require their own critical apparatus. This is the first of those ways—and the less interesting one, sadly.
Player Agency
First, the issue of player agency, by which I mean the player's ability to enact their own individual will upon the particular landscape of play. A video game has the capacity to strictly limit a player's agency. Indeed, video games are in many ways defined by precisely how and to what degree they limit player agency. For instance, there are many things a player can do in Super Mario 64—most of them involve jumping. Some of the things a player can do in Super Mario 64 give the player access to even further possible things to do—by going to the trouble to collect some number of "stars," the player can literally unlock new areas of the game to which they did not before have access. This is a simple instance of a video game putting a strict limitation on the player's agency: they can move around and jump to their heart's content in one area, but not in another (at least not until they have performed sufficient chores). The game does not require the player to collect these "stars," nor does it particularly punish a player who doesn't bother. The game merely closes off those later areas until its conditions are met.
Even more broadly, the set of actions a player can take in Super Mario 64 is strictly limited to those programmed into the game. A player cannot dig a hole outside of Princess Peach's castle to bury their coins in, they cannot invite Bowser for dinner, they cannot even change their clothes. All possible actions in Super Mario 64—and indeed in every other video game—are always-already sanctioned by the game itself. This sounds perhaps very straightforward, even obvious, but the situation gets more complex at its edge-cases. There is, for instance, a particular technique discovered by Super Mario 64 speed-runners called a Backwards Long Jump (or a "BLJ," as they commonly style it). Without belaboring the technical specifics, the Mario avatar has access to a move called a "Long Jump," which increases his movement speed a considerable amount. If a player does multiple Long Jumps in a row, he would presumably accrue increasing speed as they stack one on top of another, but the programmers added a cap on Mario's movement speed to prevent things getting out of hand. However, this cap doesn't account for backwards movement, so if a player does multiple Backwards Long Jumps in a row, their speed increases ungoverned. If done correctly, this technique allows them accrue so much speed that they can blast through to the other side of some locked doors, thus gaining access to various locked areas without the requisite "stars."
Now it would seem on first blush that using Backwards Long Jumps in this way constitutes a set of actions that are not sanctioned by the game, and I do agree that the developers of Super Mario 64 likely didn't intend to allow this kind of behavior. But the intention of the developers is not what's at issue here, we are interested in what the game itself sanctions—and Super Mario 64, the piece of entertainment software, has plainly provided the player with the ability to perform this action. Shigeru Miyamoto would likely call it a "bug," and indeed Nintendo has released subsequent versions of the game that don't allow Backwards Long Jumps to be used this way, but ultimately the software either allows it or it doesn't. Players can employ the actions allowed by the game as they see fit (or rather, in whatever ways the game allows them to employ them). They can put additional challenges on themselves that are not strictly part of the game—such as completing the game as quickly as possible, or without taking any damage—but only insofar as the game has left them agential space to do so.
Contrast this with tabletop role-play, where the "game," such as it is, has no comparable capacity to limit player agency. Whereas a piece of entertainment software is a physical (or electronic, anyway) entity that can and does actively resist a player's attempts to change it or break it, a tabletop game book is just that: a book. The act of playing a video game sees players engaging the software directly, but the tabletop game book has only a marginal position in relation to role-play. The book sits on the table while players do whatever they want. The players may want to employ one idea or another in the book as part of their play, or they may not; the book just sits there. Strictly speaking, there is no game-object in role-play comparable to the game-object of a video game. Instead, tabletop role-play exists exclusively as an instantaneous, fleeting spielgeist that emerges from a specific instance of play—informed by a game book perhaps, among infinitely many other, comparable influences. Where a video game chips away at the edges of player agency to sculpt it into something meaningful, tabletop role-play takes player agency as infinite possible paints upon the canvas of play.
It is possible, of course, for a tabletop role-play book to expect and assume that players will subordinate their agency, by a free act of will, to those desires stated or implied in the book, and there are many players perfectly willing to do so. We might compare it to the "suspension of disbelief" we make in reading a novel, for instance. But the novel is not an art form concerned with agency—tabletop role-playing games are, which makes them perhaps uneasy bedfellows with this kind of expectation, as we will demonstrate in various ways.