I had been handed a blank check, and I didn't know what to do with it. I talked to friends, classmates, professors, family, anyone I could think of to find a good idea. I went for a while with "experimental literature," but I ran into too much resistance from defining "experimental" to get started. Eventually, a revelation struck me. I love video games. I love tabletop games. I love weird art, especially stuff that allows you to be a part of it. I love choose your own adventure stories. The common thread was a piece of media in which the audience actually participated in the art. I called these kinds of art "choice-driven texts" to honor the role of audience choice, and I set off running.
By the time deadlines began to loom, I had meticulously searched and researched for my 16 texts. We were invited to compare work in a class meant to help with the thesis project, and I was mortified. My classmates had collections of Old English poetry and French cinema and nihilist philosophy, and I had a motley collection of weird art. But as I talked about my work, everyone seemed to feel the flip side of the coin--they all had conventional collections of proven art, and I was blazing a trail somewhere else entirely. My "Choice Theory" solidified in my mind, and I knew I was onto something.
I organized my 16 texts into a spectrum. At one end would be the least interactive (though still interactive), and the other end would represent maximal interactivity. The least interactive was John Cage's 4'3", in which the real performance is the audience making quiet sounds while a pianist doesn't play. The most interactive was the fascinating tabletop game Don't Rest Your Head by Fred Hicks, in which very few rules and highly creative character powers designed by the player allow for massive freedom. Along the way were podcasts, movies, video games, poetry books, graphic novels, performance art pieces, and "experimental" novels--and D&D 5E. I chose the module Lost Mine of Phandelver by Rich Baker and Chris Perkins for several reasons.
Firstly, Lost Mine was the big push for modules at the beginning of 5E's time. It was described by many as the unofficial starting point for 5E players, a sort of low-level module where you could learn the new rules with a classic D&D story. Even actual play D&D podcasts latched onto the module as a way to ease into the new edition. Lost Mine was something where I could point to different recordings of people playing the module and show how different player choices were and the effect that had. It was a truly vital piece of evidence in my reasoning, and Lost Mine accomplished it perfectly.
Secondly, Lost Mine was about as straightforward D&D as you can get. There's a captured ally, some nasty foes, a few traps and puzzles, leveled loot at the end--it's incredibly D&D. By using Lost Mine, I could use a module that captured what modern D&D is about and how it references its roots. That meant I could call in all of D&D as a related example, and since D&D is the beginning of tabletop games, I could at a stretch talk about tabletop games. And that meant I could justify Don't Rest Your Head even though I had no documented playthroughs of it (I would get this one later on with my wife). So Lost Mine being very classic D&D allowed me to take some liberties in talking about broader TTRPGs.
Lastly, Lost Mine established something very important: just because you give the audience the power to make any choice like D&D does does not mean you automatically become the most interactive media ever. Not only did Don't Rest Your Head since the game is radically freer about player abilities (not to mention the manual explicitly states it's an "expert game" meant to facilitate storytelling, not combat), but a performance art piece came in as more interactive than Lost Mine: Rhythm 0, a performance by Marina Abramović in which she laid out over 70 objects (a feather, blue paint, a revolver and bullet, a razor, etc) and invited the audience to use the objects on her--she was the object. Things got out of hand, and Abramović suffered injuries, sexual assault, and an attempt on her life. I reasoned that this was more radically interactive than Lost Mine for reasons I hope are clear. In any case, freedom to choose is complicated, and Lost Mine helped me to illustrate that.
So D&D played an important role in my Master's thesis in several ways, and I don't think that it really could have played out any other way. Readers who have checked the publication dates of the articles here on this site may have noticed that there were a handful of articles before grad school, none during grad school, and then large amounts whenever I wasn't teaching--this is in part because working with my choice-driven texts including two tabletop games really helped me to understand them better, because I had learned to be a better writer, and because I had realized more fully just how much these games meant to me. And it turned out that was a lot, as the four and a half years that followed turned out to contain hundreds of new ideas and interpretations. In a lot of ways, grad school and my Master's thesis turned out to be what made this site what it is.
My thesis ideas didn't go away after graduation. In a podcast I do with the player of Ell, Ais, and Lethanin, we've spent out second season digging into my thesis for half of our content (while my cohost spends half our time on their own sprawling topic). That has had a terrific advantage in addressing my work--whereas my professors knew either nothing about my texts or knew vaguely of the idea behind the texts (what choose your own adventure means, the general concept of roleplaying games, the gist of what I was arguing), my cohost is a longtime gamer and fan of experimental, weird art. You can see where we would be friends given the shared experience and interest. We've gotten to tease out some interesting and dazzling conclusions and ideas in the podcast, and it's been a blast to really refine what I worked on in grad school.
And of course, working with TTRPGs in a deep academic capacity made me think differently about the games and how they're played. That helped me grow as a GM--I had had to explain what a tabletop roleplaying game is about five dozen times while working on my thesis, and that meant that I had to understand how to communicate big ideas about the games very clearly, and that helped me to explain game ideas to my players more effectively. Another benefit was learning how to think in greater depth about things I had already formed ideas about--I turned this attitude towards my writing here on the site, and I ended up able to create detailed guides on all manner of subjects that had never occurred to me before. After all, this site came to have articles on tattoo styles among my homebrew groups, a one-shot based on the movie Napoleon Dynamite, and four novels written about my last D&D character. Taking D&D on academically helped me to think new things, and that really unlocked a lot of possible avenues to explore here.
When I reflect on my thesis, I am often left fairly baffled. I recall the months of trying to convince university professors that choose your own adventure books written for kids and violent video games and a book where all the pages are split into strips so that you can rearrange the lines in the poems was worth academic study on the same level as Shakespeare. It was exhausting work that rarely had a satisfying conclusion. It was really only once the whole thing was assembled that I could explain what I was doing--I needed a sequence of escalating examples to illustrate what my very abstract idea actually was. It helped me communicate better, and ultimately, I think I still went into my thesis defense very nervous. I'd felt confidently on my written exams, which had been tailored to my thesis (at least, kind of--even my advisor didn't know my texts well enough to write questions I could work with, including one question that was unanswerable because it specified text genres that I didn't have represented in my work). But orally describing what I'd spent two years building, with the consequence that I didn't graduate and would have to abandon grad school altogether for financial reasons, was still a lot to contend with. I sat down for my defense and hoped for the best.
My panel was my advisor, a professor I'd had in my first class in grad school, and a comics studies professor I had never met aside from begging her to be in my panel since she would at least understand the graphic novel I had chosen. Together, the three of them knew two texts and the general thrust of my arguments. I had an hour to convince them that my pop culture smorgasbord mattered. They asked for explanations, expansions, and clarifications of things I had written in my oral exam. They poked at relevant details, probing for content and meaning. They took in explanations of things that were not represented on my written exams, like texts that hadn't come up. (They were especially intrigued by Rhythm 0, which was to them the most convincing evidence of what I had to say.) I answered to my best ability, trying always to both add new ideas that would complete my overall vision and bring things back to the overall point I was trying to make: we need a new field of study, a new language, a new conceptual framework to understand these choice-driven texts. I created that vocabulary for the thesis and proposed that any text that offers choice to the audience be granted a different status, one that recognizes the role of the audience.
In the end, I was sent out of the room for my panel to deliberate. I waited anxiously, reviewing my words to see if what I had said would be enough. I knew that I had taken a huge risk by compiling an atypical project. For other students, their selections represented a decision making process guided by what was most literarily valuable within a genre, what interesting takes could be gleaned from a particular combination of art. But for me, my selections had to justify a new field of study; they had to define the concept I was describing and give a foundation to my work. I hadn't just built a class--I had built a theoretical framework, and as I waited, I wondered if my panel thought it was a worthwhile effort to have committed to.
I was called back in. I was told by three smiling professors that I had been granted my Master's degree, and I was commended on my work. My advisor said that seeing the project from start to finish had been an exciting pleasure. The comics studies professor expressed shock, having had little concept of how sprawling my work would be beyond my chosen graphic novel, Batman: A Death in the Family. The professor I had had for my first class was the biggest surprise. He was normally a reserved man, and quiet, but in this moment, he spoke effusively, saying that I really had discovered a new field of study, that it seemed worth exploring, and that he wished me luck making a career of it. The panel agreed that my work was the most interesting and creative they'd ever seen. I felt a wave of relief that lasted for days. I had done it. I hadn't just gotten a Master's degree, but I had gotten it with the respect of my heroes, the people I wanted to be like.
When I reflect on the fact that I spent two years building a Master's thesis that included a smattering of weird art, I'm not surprised. That's who I am. I'm not going to contest that. But for Lost Mine of Phandelver and Don't Rest Your Head to be included in a project that was uniformly deemed valuable, interesting, and creative--that is really special to me. When I learned to play D&D and was introduced to the world of TTRPGs, D&D was not cool yet. D&D was something people barely understood if they did at all. It was a pasttime exclusively practiced by the nerdy, and it was considered a fairly niche interest. That's all changed now. D&D has a huge, successful movie (and likely a franchise); Stranger Things raised the profile of D&D; 5E has brought many new players into the fold--it's a different world than I started playing in. But that old world still lives in my heart, and to bring the lowly, nerdy, strange D&D representation to a Master's thesis felt rebellious and fun. I hadn't just won my panel's approval--I had put my favorite things on the line, made myself vulnerable, and asked for judgment only to be approved of and lauded. I felt like D&D was vindicated and that it had vindicated me.
So maybe's it's no surprise that when I graduated my program and had lots of free time before I could start working as a teacher, I turned to D&D. In February of 2021, two months after completing my Master's degree, I turned back to this site. I posted this brief summary of a campaign I had stopped taking notes on long before and a little note that I would be trying to post more often. And before the three other days of February had passed, I had posted four new articles. Regular readers of this era of Over the DM's Shoulder know that my productivity comes in bursts--several weeks or months of frequent updates, and months of few updates. But 2021 was where the foundation for this site came from. I wrote 121 articles that year, nearly half of the total content on this site as of this writing. I really do believe that writing about and working with D&D in my Master's thesis was the thing that enabled all of that output, and I'm proud to have used what I learned in grad school to be able to better write for this site.
Final thoughts: few things have touched me in this life like TTRPGs have. The hundreds of guides here attest to that, as do the novels I wrote about a D&D character, as does the inclusion of Lost Mine in my Master's thesis. And I'd like to share something about my writing for this site that I've never said elsewhere. I like to think that people can benefit from the advice, worldbuilding, original games, and whatever else they may connect to that I've made here. I see lots of visits on my site, but I don't know how many of them are legitimately interested readers. What keeps me writing, nearly 250 articles and almost 10 years after starting this site, is that it makes me happy. Every guide to my homebrew world helps me know my world better. Every how-to helps me decide what actions I want to try to take. Every session notes recap helps me connect to my own campaigns better. Every original game makes me stretch my creative abilities. I benefit from all of this, which is why I've taken to urging you, the reader, to do the same in your work. So yes, I hope there are gamers out there reading all of this and learning from it. And yes, I like seeing the article count get higher and the visit count spike--it feels nice. But ultimately, D&D just makes me happy, and I write here because it allows me to enjoy that happiness. And since D&D makes me happy, Lost Mine showing up in my Master's thesis was probably inevitable--it's just part of who I am at this point.
That's all for now. Coming soon: the core values of each group in my homebrew setting and how they pursue them, the flags of each major city in my homebrew setting, and education in my homebrew setting. Until next time, happy gaming!
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