The fantasy genre shares many commonalities with modern media, video games and fanfiction websites in particular, with user participation and interactivity featuring foremost among them. According to Burn in his exploration of the fantasy genre as a multi-modal entity, it is believed that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings begat the role-playing genre of video games and popularized the art of role-play outside of musty old books and tomes (Burn, A, 2005. 'Potter-literacy - From Book to Game and Back Again; Literature, Film, Game and Cross-media Literacy', in 'Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature Vol. 14, No. 3.'). It can be theorized that the depth of the lore within Tolkien's works, including detailed histories and languages, allowed his readers to explore the underpinnings of the customs and cultures inherent within Middle-earth, thus giving rise to the phenomenon of role-playing.
Developing on Tolkien's model of fantasy fiction, character archetypes are constructed in a manner that affords the readership the opportunity to empathise, or resonate strongly, with selected characters within the fiction, which then provides a kind of 'platform' for interpreting the worlds created through the imagination of writers and their otherworldly settings.
In this way, readers are invited to participate within the fantastic goings-on in a work of fiction, making it feel as though the readers are experiencing the ebb and flow of dramatic prose alongside the heroes. This structure became the catalyst for what gamers recognize today as the RPG (abbreviation of 'Role-Playing Game'), digital worlds that invite gamers to customize their own avatars as they see fit for interaction with a foreign realm.
It should be noted, however, that not all RPGs allow for this level of customization, as some are more plot-driven than others, such as those of the Final Fantasy video game series, whose protagonists are crucial to the development of the story. This might explain the recent surge in popularity of the WRPG (abbreviation of 'Western Role-Playing Game') market over the more predefined JRPG (abbreviation of 'Japanese Role-Playing Game'), the former allowing players to mould their characters and stories to their own tastes, while the latter adheres to the fixed elements of traditional fantasy.
Likewise, fanfiction, as an extension of the proprietary fiction that generates it, operates in much the same way as a RPG, but instead of merely inviting the reader to participate in the fiction, fanfiction does away with the established structure of the proprietary fiction and lends the author the rule-set needed to make it anew, giving them the opportunity to alter the course of the story and events in whichever manner the author sees fit. It could be said that one type of role-play invariably leads to another.
Role-play in fanfiction allows readers/players to adopt the personas of as many or as little favoured characters as they wish, doing away with the conventions of the original plotline in favour of a new, possibly branching, storyline that may even feature new characters and events. Moreover, this suits Burn's description of the cross-pollination of proprietary works of fiction in new media as a source of literacy (Burn, A, 2005), providing fans with the means to exercise their creative capacity within the constructed worlds of literature and new media.
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