The TTRPG in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility

This blog post contains my analysis of TTRPGs using the ideas in Walter Benjamin's influential essay The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, if that wasn't obvious by the title. In his essay, Benjamin discusses the development of new forms of media created by technological advances around the turn of the century. He uses a critical Marxist lens to analyze the social and material conditions that determine the role of art in society. Assuming that his basic premises are true, I think there is a lot of insight to be gained from using them to look at the TTRPG hobby.

There is a huge amount of discourse around this nearly 100 year old essay, and I am only moderately knowledgeable of it, having watched a few lectures and listened to a few podcasts on it. I will try to focus mostly on one of the main themes of the essay, the idea of aura versus exhibition value of art, which was discussed at length in my cursory research. Aura is the inherent physicality, history and presence of an object or person. Exhibition value, is the value of the reproduced art as a commodity accessible to and consumable by the masses.

Benjamin discusses the new forms of media from his time: photography, sound recording and film. In comparison, TTRPGs are much less technologically advanced, even though they are newer. TTRPGs encompass many forms of media at once, making up an ecosystem of play. This includes the medium of play itself, which exists in our minds and words while playing, game texts, adventure modules, the notebooks of game masters and players, and so on. 

One comparison he spends a lot of time on is theater versus film. Film is more or less the technologically reproducible version of theater. The aura of the performer is destroyed in film creation, while theater requires physical presence, so it allows aura to remain. As Benjamin puts it, "Aura is bound to [the actor's] presence in the here and now."

Benjamin says that an audience receives a film, reacts, and immediately regulates its reaction. In this way, the masses absorb media as distraction, habituating themselves to new modes of apperception. This is in contrast to the way it was in the past, when the individual was absorbed into a piece of art in quiet, solitary, asocial contemplation. Benjamin's view is more or less that this mass, regulated reaction is a progressive, proletarian experience, whereas solitary contemplation of aura is regressive and bourgeois. However, contrary to what Benjamin says, in a movie theater filled with individuals, aura is anything but absent. If an audience can receive mass produced art, react and regulate its reaction, the aura of audience members themselves affect each other as they perform being in an audience. 

A similar dynamic exists in the TTRPG, where the group reacts to the fiction they are producing themselves, and regulates their reactions. Just as members of the audience of a film experience each others auras as they watch together, the individuals playing a TTRPG experience each others auras. Beyond affecting each other as members of an audience, they are also performing and creating fiction, distracting and habituating, reacting and regulating in a tightly closed loop. The aura once only accessible to the asocial elite bourgeoisie, becomes more and more prosocial and democratized in the TTRPG hobby space. TTRPG play brings a return to aura, but with its role inverted. 

Where the technology that produces film can be used to manipulate media and reveal dimensions of reality and experiences that do not exist outside of film, the TTRPG medium of play is produced in the mind. No media even exists as true record except for as memory, GMs notes, adventure modules, and game texts and in some cases, audio or video recording of play. Players often prioritize the idea of immersion, an experience of fiction that evokes powerful responses in players. Immersion represents the height of distraction versus quiet solitary contemplation, which may be why it is such a valuable experience to so many players. I would even say that immersion and distraction are the same thing.

Mass reproduction can not create exacting technological copies of the medium of play of TTRPGs. True, zines and books can be mass produced, but fiction produced by play can not, because it doesn't come from a film projector, but the human imagination itself. Any game text or practice; systems, procedures, settings, modules and the like, all seek to reproduce fiction in some way or another. A player reads a text, and then something is imagined. One player describes their imaginings, and another player imagines it in their own unique way. I think imagination as film projector and game text as film reel works as a rough analogy, except that each individual will reproduce fiction uniquely in their own way, and that fiction produced enters a melting pot of other fiction. 

TTRPG capital must be removed from the mass reproduction of game texts in order to allow the masses to regulate their own consumption in their desire to know themselves and their class. Benjamin discusses how the number of readers has increased with the growth and extension of the press, and as a result, so have the number or writers and opportunities to write. In our current advanced technological society, nearly anyone can have a blog and an itch page. In TTRPGs, we can move towards the ultimate conclusion of Benjamin's example, where reader and writer are the same, bypassing capital as a mediator. 

TTRPGs give us an opportunity to experience our own unique auras and react to those of others. As we develop a dialogue with the people in our groups through play, and with others in the hobby space through the sharing of our zines and ideas, we can learn to be audience as much as we are artist, to obliterate not aura, but the dualistic view of artist and audience itself.