"Read Instructions Carefully"
Thoughts on portal fantasies, role-playing games, and portal fantasies where the portal IS the role-playing game...
Sorry for the delay in getting this newsletter out. I’ve been dealing with back problems these past few weeks, which put a wrench in my ability to work. Hopefully, I’ll be more functional next month and we’ll get back to the regular schedule (which, in case you didn’t know, is [mostly] every third Thursday of the month).
Last April, we got a copy of Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumangi for our kids. This was a book that rocked my world when I was in elementary school, combining my love for board games with my desire for those board games to come to life. Candyland was probably the first board game that I imagined could be real. I played many a backyard adventure traveling through the Peppermint Forest, trying to evade Lord Licorice, hoping to make it to Grandma Nutt’s cottage.
Jumangi took my backyard imaginings and asked the question: What if the game COULD come to life?
Of course, in Van Allsburg’s book (and the subsequent movie adaptation), wishing for the game to become real led to more danger than one wanted. Playing a board game is a lot of fun, but facing a real lion or a stampede of rhinos is terrifying. Wishing for real adventure means facing the deadly consequences.
Although the animals and danger burst out of the board game and into Judy and Peter’s real world, Jumangi is similar in many ways to a classic subgenre of fantasy we now call the “portal fantasy.” Think of the Pevensies stumbling to Narnia or Alice tumbling into Wonderland or Dorothy cycloning her way to Oz. We start off in our world, then we go through a passageway or portal, and end up in some other world— a fantasy world—that exists in another dimension or universe.
Jumangi isn’t quite a portal fantasy in this sense—Peter and Judy stay in their own house, their own neighborhood—but the game itself serves as a kind of portal by which the animals and rainstorms jump into our world. It highlights the allure of games that depict worlds different from our own: We play the games because we want to imagine ourselves in these worlds. What makes Candyland appealing? It’s not the rules; it’s the world illustrated on the board. We want to pretend ourselves into that world, so we play the game and imagine.
Portal fantasies that use games as the passageway between our world and a fantasy world make this desire explicit. We’re all sitting around rolling dice and pretending to fight monsters in a dungeon, so what happens when we get sucked into the game, when the dice disappear and we have real swords in our hands?
Starting with Andre Norton’s Quag Keep in 1978, the 1980s and early 90s were filled with this subgenre of portal fantasy, the “kids get sucked into the role-playing game” story-line that even made its way into the D&D Saturday morning cartoon. I had a soft spot for these kinds of portal fantasies as a kid because I dreamed of jumping into the games too, of becoming my player character and fighting real dragons. Of course, just like Peter and Judy in Jumangi, we wouldn’t want to fight a real dragon: It would be too scary. But by reading about Peter and Judy—by putting “real people” into the fantasy game or vice versa—we could have that vicarious thrill of thinking, “What if this were real? What if the game could come to life?”
I saw a comment the other day on Reddit, in the OSR sub, and it hit on precisely the attraction of fantasy adventures games (for me):
“Some people just want to explore a fantasy world.”
Yes. Role-playing games, for me, are a way to explore a world other than our own. Unlike a book, which has a fixed story, the role-playing game has no fixed narrative. And even more so, the role-playing game allows the referee and players to explore the fantasy world without constraint. For me, the fun of fantasy RPGs is in the exploration, in the experience of discovering what’s around the corner of the dungeon or what’s in the next hex on the map.
My first experience with table-top role-playing was MERP: Middle-Earth Roleplaying Game. Why MERP? Well, part of the reason is that my parents didn’t approve of Dungeons & Dragons (the Satanic Panic stuff still lingered in the early 1990s), but another big part was that I had just read The Hobbit, and watched the Rankin/Bass animated movie, and I was obsessed with Middle-Earth. I wasn’t interested in being a character and developing a backstory or any of that. I wanted to BE in Middle-Earth. That was the attraction of the role-playing game. I wanted to explore that world. The character I played was just an avatar for myself: an avatar that allowed me to be in this world and see what was around the next hill or inside the next barrow mound.
This same desire is what attracts readers to the portal fantasies where the game comes to life or the players get sucked in. We want to get sucked into the fantasy world (that’s often why we play RPGs), and these portal fantasies allow us to explore the “what if” of actually going into the game. For me, these books included The Sleeping Dragon (Guardians of the Flame Book One), and The Twilight Realm, and others I can’t quite remember reading but have stuck in my subconscious, like Demons Don’t Dream (which is technically about a computer game RPG).
What I find interesting about this subgenre is that going into the game is a cautionary tale for the players. They are meant to realize, “Be careful what you wish for.” There’s a warning here. The desire to escape into the game is, perhaps, an unhealthy desire. It means you can’t face reality and you want to escape from it. Paradoxically, these novels (which are part of the fantasy genre) often end up reinforcing negative critiques of that very genre. “Fantasy is escapism,” and escapism is bad (so the critics say), therefore, the kids who play D&D and suddenly get transported into the game must be taught the lesson that living in a fantasy world isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
Of course, the kids also get enhanced powers, whether magical or martial, and their bodies transform into something more beautiful or stronger than their “real-world” selves, so in that way, the fantasy world has given them a chance to be something other than they are. It’s wish-fulfillment. But beneath the wish-fulfillment is the warning, the flashing danger sign: Life in a fantasy world—real, actual living—isn’t the same as sitting around the comfortable kitchen table rolling dice. There’s real cold and real fear and real wounds and real monsters.
It’s enough to make one say, “I would rather not,” when confronted with the idea of jumping into the game and experiencing it for real. These novels undercut their own genre; they are warning us off our desire for exploring fantasy worlds. Or, to be more charitable, they are telling us to stick to our dice and pencil and paper. Explore the fantasy world through the game; don’t let it become real.
Interestingly, in Jumangi, although the game puts Judy and Peter into (seemingly?) real danger, Van Allsburg’s narrative also suggests that this dangerous game is good for the children. They were bored before, unappreciative of what toys and leisure they already had, and the game’s risks shook them out of their boring everyday experience enough to make them reenter the ordinary world with renewed appreciation. The “recovery of wonder” at work, perhaps. Though highly dangerous, the Jumangi game functions as a tonic. It doesn’t say, “Your desire for escape is bad.” Instead, it says, “Your desire for something beyond the ordinary will lead you to rediscover the wonder of living, the wonder of being.” It’s ultimately a message that celebrates fantasy’s power to enliven.
Perhaps the reason so many of the portal fantasies of this sort, written for older teenage audiences, don’t resonate or have much staying power for me now is because they tend to denigrate the desire for escapism, or they serve merely as power fantasies for the characters, their growth coming not from entry into another world but through the super-powers, magic, or buff bodies they possess in this other world. These novels take on the quality of other teen novels of the era, where the point is to teach the characters a lesson about self-esteem, and mildly scold them about their desire for escapism. They’re only playing these games, the novels seem to say, because they are unhappy with their bodies or their popularity or their love life. So into the game they go, and it’s there that they’ll learn their lesson.
Sure, the characters in these novels do grow, their self-esteem boosted. The adventure shows them that with a little more discipline and gumption, they’ll be capable and good as they are, and it’s a false hope to wish to be someone else entirely. I’m not saying this is a bad message, exactly, just that it doesn’t have as much resonance as Jumangi.
That book, to my mind, is richer and more universal. There is a renewal of spirit at the end of Jumangi that just isn’t there for many of these RPG portal fantasies from the 1980s and early 90s. Yes, Peter and Judy learn a lesson, but it’s not about their self-image or their insecurities. Playing Jumangi invigorates them, and even though they want nothing more than to finish the game and set everything to right, there’s a sense, upon reflection, that the game was good, that the fantasy world was worth exploring. After they return the game to its spot by the tree, “both children were too excited to sit quietly,” so they go back to their puzzle from earlier and work to complete it. In the end, they are so exhausted, they fall into a restful sleep.
This excitement, and the restful sleep, and the joy with which the children share stories of their adventures with their parents points to the good magic of the Jumangi game.
In the novels for teens, like The Twilight Realm, this “good magic” is more ambiguous, the journey into and out of the game world more of a mixed bag.
Of course, that didn’t stop me from seeking out every RPG portal fantasy I could find back when I was eleven, because ultimately, for many of us who love fantasy RPGs, the idea of being able to transport into the game world is an allure too strong to resist. Some of us, as the anonymous Redditor said, “just want to explore a fantasy world.” And if we can vicariously explore it “for real” with the characters in a novel, then we’ll roll the dice and take our chances.
Blog Posts of Interest
If you want more about my first experience with table-top gaming, then you might be interested in this reflection from a few years ago: The Things That Shaped Me: MERP.
I also wrote about why I like old-school RPGs (or RPGs with an old-school approach, sometimes labeled OSR/NSR) in this post: Here Be Dungeons.
And continuing the old-school role-playing theme, this post about the meditative and creativity-fueling activity of rolling up characters might be of interest: 3d6, straight down the line.
And finally, since I’m still wandering around in the early 1990s, this post about what the early 90s were like and how elusive they are to find in today’s internet sheds some light on my experience with that micro-era: Looking for the early 1990s.
If you want more of my writing, my blog is always available HERE. I hope you’ll take a look!
That’s it for now! Thank you for reading! And please consider buying or pre-ordering my books HERE, or my short stories HERE.
If you’ve already gotten copies of my fiction, please know how appreciative I am. I’m so grateful for you support!
This newsletter is run on a patron not a consumer model, something I feel strongly about maintaining. I prefer the patron model because it means those who can support my writing monetarily have the choice to do so, but everyone is welcome to subscribe and read no matter what.
If you enjoy this newsletter and can support it with a paid subscription, I would be grateful for your support. Paid subscribers do get one special perk, which is access to ARCs (advanced reader copies) of my upcoming book releases. For $35 per year (or $5 per month), you’ll be supporting my newsletter, but you’ll also get copies of my books before they’re released to the general public. I hesitate to call them “free books,” because for $5 a month, you’re still paying retail price, you’re just getting the book early. I hope this is not betraying the spirit of the patron model!
As always, the newsletter will remain free and open to any who want to join me in exploring the various contours of the fantasy genre. Thank you to ALL my subscribers! I’m grateful for you all!