Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Abstract:

Nocturne_Alley, or N_A, is a LiveJournal-based Harry Potter RPG which ran for two years. NrAged is the discussion community created by fans a year into the game, and its forum for fan production completes a mutually defined reader-text relationship with N_A. Unlike more traditional RPGs, the players of N_A embody their characters, rather than perform them, as their 'real' identities are erased by a number of game restrictions: all players are anonymous, communicate with NrAged fans under the pseudonym 'a_player,' maintain the mystery of how the game operates, and uphold the illusion that the game is a reality, both for those playing and those watching. The players do perform, however, the ideal fan, by creating a believable paratext that represents the ideal fannish product. Likewise, NrAged functions as an ideal fandom by offering a ready-made communal space for accessing fannish versions of beloved characters, providing fans with an environment in which they can speculate about gaps in the narrative, and sustaining the pleasure of experiencing both the game and various forms of fan response. The dynamic between game and fan community occasions many instances of othering: during the game, the player only successfully embodies the character by stripping away the other parts of her identity; though NrAged watchers are aware of the fan who, in playing Harry, is the center of her fannish activity, that player's anonymity renders her invisible and unknowable to watchers; and the players, despite their positions as Big Name Fans both in NrAged and in Harry Potter fandom, cannot acknowledge their roles in these communities during the game, and thus remain others to their fans. The players have yet to reveal their online identities, which suggests that the ideal fan player is one who has sutured herself so completely to a beloved character that her own identity not only disappears, but becomes irrelevant to her production.

N_A is Nocturne_Alley, a LiveJournal-based Harry Potter RPG that ran for two years. LiveJournal is one of many types of online blogging software, and has become the chosen site for much fandom interaction since its creation. Any definition of fandom would require a number of books to complete, but briefly, fandom refers to a wide-ranging and heterogeneous community of fans who create various forms of art, discussion, analysis, commentary, and collections of data about their sources of pleasure, which can range from boybands, actors, and television shows to novels. Harry Potter fandom is highly complex, ranging from communities based on the certainty that Harry Potter and Hermione Granger are destined to be together, to those dedicated to analyzing the books in detail to understand Rowling’s universe. A specific subcategory of the fandom engages in playing with the idea that many characters are or could be queer, and stories or other works focusing on, for example, the idea that Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter are beloved enemies, are called slash, due to the backslash connecting the two characters paired.

I am consciously avoiding any type of ethnographic analysis of who fans are, or even why they do what they do. Henry Jenkins, Constance Penley, and Camille Bacon-Smith have each produced texts that attempt to address these questions, and their work opened the door for academic study of fans and fandom, as well as began the work of archiving a history of fan communities. That work was widely seen as presumptive within the slash community, and focused so much on the cheap spectacle of slash and the fans who write that it foreclosed the possibility of any meaningful conclusions about what fannish production does. My view is that any future scholarship must now actively work against such readings and their influence on the field; moreover, I would hesitate to ever claim that any universal profile of ‘the fan’ can ever be articulated.

If the term ‘polymorphously perverse’ applies to any fandom, it applies to Harry Potter fandom: though the largest focus is on pairings involving Harry Potter (slash Snape, slash Hermione and Ron, etc.), any kink, pairing, or scenario imaginable has not only been done, but done to excess—Lucius/Giant Squid, Dobby the House Elf/Sorting Hat, and, of course, many permutations of the Weasley family, known collectively as Weasleycest. A driving impulse behind fannish behavior is not only a fascination with engaging these characters on an emotional level as they are, or as we wish them to be, but a desire for more—a perpetual proliferation of Harrys, of scenarios in which Harry is saved from the abuse of the Dursleys by Snape, who then becomes his adopted father and mentor, of sexual encounters with Draco which leave the two boys more and better people due to their ability to love one another, etc. The key here is, of course, the et cetera—no story is ever satisfying enough, as it elides, ignores, or simply cannot contain the true richness fans crave, and no fan production can simultaneously supplement the lack perfectly and attain the legitimacy of being a suitable replacement.

Nocturne_Alley was initially conceived as a Harry Potter roleplaying game, taking place during the sixth and seventh years of Harry’s schooling at Hogwarts, and the moderators have stated that they had always intended the game to end at that time, after the defeat of Voldemort. Normal fans, most with prior experience in roleplay, came together and chose their characters, then requested applications from fandom to play the remaining open parts. They created journals, user icons, user info pages, the community, and began to play, setting plots and characterizations into motion that would build over the next two years until the final conflict. All of the usual suspects are there, from Harry and Draco to Ron and Professor Snape, and the reason given for these characters having journals at all is a project, designed by Dumbledore, to promote house unity through required posting in personal journals and the school community. Over two years, a number of important and interesting things happen: Harry and Draco begin a relationship, Sirius Black and Remus Lupin get married, and pranks, duels, detentions and misunderstandings all serve to tell an exciting story. But my focus is not on the events of the game itself, or even on the performance of a game by its still-anonymous players—without access to the players, any analysis of their perspective or intentions would be seriously flawed, if not impossible. Moreover, the issue of this game’s reception by the fandom is far more interesting.

NrAged is the discussion community created by fans a year into the game, whose title is a play on both Nocturne_Alley and Draco’s mood for almost all of his posts – enraged. This forum for fan engagement provides a clear window into what made this game so satisfying and successful for fans that it can be conceived of as an ideal fandom, and even an ideal fannish product. Most posts announced new contributions to the game, whether updates or comment threads, and analyzed their significance. Motivations, explanations, repercussions, and emotional responses were carefully suggested, explored, and evaluated, allowing fans, in essence, to be fannish about Nocturne_Alley, a fan production itself. The most fascinating and important aspect of Nocturne_Alley, is that what the NrAged watchers are watching is not, in fact, the game itself.

What we see in Nocturne_Alley is only a paratext of the game, which takes place in private chats between players who determine, then roleplay the events that then lead to what is reported afterwards. For example, the events leading up to Harry’s outing are never fully revealed—we merely see Draco’s post renouncing him, and then discover tiny details about Harry’s drunken attempt to kiss him later, in other posts. Instead, what the audience sees is a the wake of the game, rippling outward. The effects of choices, actions, and moments are, however, visible in the journal community, though they aren’t figured as diary entries or transcriptions, and things do happen within the ‘real time’ of a post and its responses. Ron’s reaction to Harry’s outing, to continue the example, happens in the game—his shock, defense, and query, “Is everybody gay?” occur in his post and the comment threads that follow. Yet the organizing framework and action of play happen, for the most part, outside of the community. Posts can set new plots in motion, but the plots, the reactions, even the experiences that will resolve the plot are determined, enacted, and experienced outside of Nocturne_Alley. This is a story written by the game itself, and the reader perspective is of an RPG taking place on LJ, though actually, Nocturne_Alley is a chat, or email RPG, which then is partially recorded in the journals.

To further clarify this issue, consider the experience of LARPing. That experience is often reliant on giving the storytellers ‘downtimes’—individual player narratives of what happens during breaks in the game. These downtimes are obviously part of the game: if you collect and read them, rather than watching or participating in the particular event, you experience events through a byproduct of the game, with enough hints and references to reconstruct the whole.

Though Nocturne_Alley is actually the wake of the game, it may appear on the surface as an experience of reading an epistolary novel, but in fact watchers are watching an experience of play—but only a partial one. Nocturne_Alley could be called an RPG novel, as the structure is being used to tell a story—many at once, as each character has a number of arcs, but the overall story is Harry’s relationship with Draco—even the war with Voldemort takes a back seat. This fact distinguishes the RPG from more goal-oriented games: though Harry is on a quest, that quest is a decided subplot to everything else that occurs, and its outcome is determined by his player’s actions, rather than by anything Harry himself does—the ultimate goal is storytelling, not winning the war. Thus, it is important to read Nocturne_Alley as story oriented, and as focused on the pleasure of playing the characters, playing out the determined plot arcs, and playing with the multiple and overlapping desires of fandom. Moreover, since the player perspective on the game is not actually a relevant part of reading the game’s wake, it is more fruitful to focus on what the NrAged audience knows, perceives, and is led to, through the experience of watching the story unfold.

Unlike more traditional RPGs, the players of Nocturne_Alley embody their characters, rather than perform them, as their 'real' identities are erased by a number of game restrictions: anonymity, communication with the community under the pseudonym 'a_player,' and maintaining the mystery of how the game operates. The effect of this embodiment is the disappearance of the players in the reading, essentially othering the characters from the actual fans involved. Yet a distinction must be made between embodiment and performance, here: though the players are embodying their characters, Nocturne_Alley itself functions as a performance, regardless of player intentionality, by its elevation of a private RPG into a defined, objectified, and displayed engagement of characters now available to an audience. It is structured to be read as a game, therefore it needs to be read as a performance. And because the fans of NrAged are reading the performance of the wake of a game, the game itself becomes ever more inaccessible and alien.

Additionally, rather than being constructed of individual turns, Nocturne_Alley is a layered space both for players and the audience. Posts occur without any regularity, beyond the once-a-week requirement: comment threads are often updated days after the initial post, individual plotlines continue in different places in the community, it is possible to read the posts from a specific day in nearly any order, and individual posts reflect not only different perspectives, but different details about the story, based on the character’s knowledge and experience. Moreover, conversations – especially between Harry and Draco – often occur in comment threads from posts made much earlier, in order to hide their interactions.

Like all RPGs, Nocturne_Alley involves elements of improvisation, but I am more interested in how certain elements of improvisational performance shed light on the interaction between Nocturne_Alley and its fans on NrAged. Not only the game itself, but NrAged thrives on the tension between what is known and what is unknown, and unlike traditional improvs, the drive to resolve any ambiguities is not complete. At the end of the story, we know—from Hermione only—one version of what happened to Voldemort, but a number of other things remain unanswered—who was the Head Boy, what happened with Harry and Draco, what Harry really did to defeat Voldemort, etc.

Though the players arrange anonymous Q&As on NrAged after the game’s end, the only other audience communications, to clarify and deal with the bits and pieces left out of the story, is through awarding gold stars. Given no explanation for particular acts, or insight into events that characters only refer to in passing, after the fact, many NrAged members engage in speculation which is occasionally rewarded by a gold star—no comment, no explanation of which player is validating the claim, no further contact – but the existence of these validations, affirmations that the watchers have gotten it right, implies not only that the audience is not an audience to the game itself, but that part of Nocturne_Alley’s pleasure depends on the speculation about events that are not self-explanatory, that get left out of the frame of the LJ stage.

So, what is important about the reception of this performance, this game played off-stage and partially recounted? To return to the issue of how the online RPG, as a hypertextual performance, implicates the audience and affects reception, I use Giannachi’s definition of hypertextuality to contextualize fannish desire, which emphasizes the performative nature of reading and viewing hypertexts, as well as the ability of the viewer to move beyond the interface and engage a work of art in a more open, connected way, thus multiplying the viewer’s position by allowing her to exist simultaneously in the real and virtual world.

Not only does fannish desire refigure the separation between subject and object, through such methods as coproduction, reproduction, and appropriation, the key issue here is that a complete reading of a hypertext is not only impossible, but antithetical to hypertextuality itself. Finishing the text would result in an end to the desire for more, and fannishness, as a style of desire and a framework for configuring desire, requires a perpetual production, a perpetual pursuit of more configurations, more proliferation, more exploration. That perpetuity is central to what fans do, and NrAged provides fans with an environment for reception and response as well as reproduction, a place to expose and play with the gaps in the narrative, allowing watchers to sustain the pleasure of experiencing the game along with various forms of fan response over an extended period of time. This is somewhat like watching a TV show every week, but production here is much more fluid and variable, requiring a watcher to chain herself to the computer to make sure she doesn’t miss a post. Thus the fannish pleasure of being part of NrAged is simultaneously with the text, and subsequent to the text, in a cycle of production, response, and re-production.

Nocturne_Alley, however, also contributes to this construction of an ideal fandom, in both experience and product, because the players perform ideal fans by creating a product that, because it is simultaneously fannish and textual, is in fact an ideal fannish product. Harry’s player gets to be Harry, but this Harry is not Rowling’s: the Harry of Nocturne_Alley is only a Harry, one of many, but the player’s embodiment and subsequent disappearance from considerations of the character grant that Harry legitimacy. This is not just another story, in which it’s clear that this Harry is fan-made and requires the suspension of disbelief; this is a game, a performance, and NrAged fans use this specific Harry to spur their own creations, thus elevating Nocturne_Alley’s Harry to an original or originary enough creation to treat it almost as they do Rowlings’s. There is, of course, the additional layer of pleasure in knowing that the Nocturne_Alley Harry resembles their own desired versions of Harry, including slash, Draco as the Slytherin Sex God, Sirius’s leather pants, and other tropes that have become canonical to fandom.

So now we need definitions:
A Harry: one of many proliferations, all equal, dependent on preference.
The Harry: that which an A Harry derives from, starting as the original, the Harry in Rowling’s urtext. However, Nocturne_Alley creates an A The Harry.
Complete Harry: Harry who requires no fannish intervention, but who is only complete for a given fan, and can’t possibly be complete in the overall context of fannish production. Complete Harry is ultimately a fantasy, because he both represents and contains fannish desire. That desire arises from a perceived lack in the original, which leads to fannish production: should that lack be filled, there would be no further need for discussion, analysis, art, fiction, or any other creation, and fannish desire is, in the end, a desire not only for creation but for perpetual reconfiguration of texts. The goal of both players and fans is Complete Harry, but that goal is never attainable, as the desire is the lack of Complete Harry, so the result is a proliferation of Harrys, and at most A Complete Harry. The lack of Complete Harry is a motivation for the desire. Satiation is antithetical to the desire itself, and a complete text or character is antithetical to fannish production.

From a fan perspective, Rowling’s original The Harry is not sufficient—he occasions fannish desire, but immediately fails to satisfy the desire for a Harry who has super powers, a father figure, a perfect relationship, a nine-inch dick, etc., and so the initial goal of fan production is twofold: to form a Complete Harry, and to never reach that goal. Nocturne_Alley, because of the transformative embodiment undertaken by the players, which improves upon the original and then erases the productive process of that improvement, creates A The Harry, and this new A The Harry spawns another round of fannish production. Fannish production derives from the The-ness of The Harry.

Finally, then, NrAged and Nocturne_Alley figure an ideal endpoint of fannish production—but only figure it, first because an endpoint of fannish production, like the hypertext, cannot exist, and second because gaps in the narrative, the distance from the game itself, are what allow the story to be an endpoint. The Harry of the game is, in fact, A Complete Harry for the player, but no watcher can ever reach or read the completeness, because full disclosure has been denied. No watcher will ever know what happened with Harry and Draco on that drunken evening, what Sirius and Remus’ wedding vows were, who the Head Boy was, or even how Harry and Draco’s players played. Accordingly, Nocturne_Alley’s particular take on these characters becomes iconic, crystallized into authentic form by the NrAged reception, yet the game/story never supplants either the original, with its copious possibilities for transformation, or any other Harry, even if it’s written by a thirteen-year-old girl who wants him to have wings.

When talking about player identity disappearance, my argument is necessarily evaluative, rather than causal: if we knew who Nocturne_Alley Harry was, that would decrease/ruin the The-ness of Harry. Further, the players have not revealed their online identities, which suggests that the ideal fan player is one who has sutured herself so completely to a beloved character that her own identity not only disappears, but becomes irrelevant to her production. The dualism between the desire for Complete Harry and need for that desire to be unsatiated is continually reinscribed, and thus the ideal fandom needs to never be obtained, for if they reveal their identities, they make a claim to have found/been a Complete Harry. Only when anonymous, do they represent the fantasy without foreclosing it, thereby providing a temporary resting point in the process of perpetual refiguring that is central to fannish production

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