Role-Playing as Critical Revision: Remixing Ideologies of Race, Gender, and Politics in Dungeons & Dragons

• In Event: Engaging Popular Culture as World-Making: The Everyday Practices of (Re)Storying Histories, Futures, and Positionalities

Abstract

Objectives
Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a role-playing game in which a “game master” designs an immersive world for other players to explore. Players design and embody fictional characters that encounter quests and solve problems within the world. This paper considers how six youths composed worlds that confronted and remixed problematic notions of race, gender, and politics in traditional Dungeons & Dragons lore. I ask: How are issues of race, gender, and politics imbued and negotiated in youth-generated immersive worlds?

Perspectives
New Literacies Studies (New London Group, 1996; Street, 1985) emerged from sociocultural theories of learning and frame how I conceptualize literacy practices within role-playing games: meaning-making as socially situated (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Thus, NLS research examines the ways in which meaning is constructed between multiple stakeholders, with multiple literacies, across nonlinear iterations of design (Curwood et al., 2013; Lankshear & Knobel, 2006). This paper focuses on the literacy practices within a particular affinity space (Gee, 2007) of youth gamers. Recognizing that play and role-play intersect with issues of race, gender, and politics (Garcia, 2019; Garcia, 2021), I work toward a critical analysis of my participants’ speculative worldbuilding practices.

Methods and Data
For the past three years, I have partnered with EdQuest (pseudonym), a nonprofit organization. EdQuest is an extracurricular community that teaches youth how to create and facilitate role-playing games. From September 2021-June 2022, I facilitated a Worldbuilding Workshop course with six youth from EdQuest. The goal of the course was to allow each participant to facilitate their own role-playing adventure. During these ten months, we generated a breadth of multimodal data, including: 63 hours of play session video recordings, 22 hours of retrospective design interviews (Dalton et al., 2015), and participant role-playing artifacts.

To account for the layered, ideological dimensions of participants’ worldbuilding, I created and adapted a framework of critical game analysis based on Garcia’s (2019) three spatialities of analog gaming literacies and Flannagan et al.’s (2013) 15 elements of game-based values. Then, I used nexus analysis (Wohlwend, 2021) to identify moments of gameplay that represented a nexus of critical encounters with personal histories, game mechanics, and Dungeons & Dragons lore.

Results and Significance
This paper highlights critical moments of role-playing in a campaign facilitated by a youth named Justin (pseudonym) titled The Drow Civil War. In Justin’s campaign, players encountered the Drow (i.e., a race of dark-skinned elves that live underground). Unlike the male-dominated, light-skinned elven societies above ground, the Drow are a matriarchal society of grey and Black elves that worship a chaotic evil spider goddess named Lolth. The Drow are an overtly racist and sexist component of the D&D canon. In response, Marc tried to create a campaign that “deleted” [sic] problematic elements of Drow lore. The findings of this paper examine moments of critical play in which Justin and his peers portrayed the Drow as a peaceful society whose theology and way of life has been misconstrued and stereotyped by other civilzations. These moments of role-play illuminate how youth can leverage collaborative authorship to remix iconic narratives toward equity and justice.

Author

• Alexander P. Corbitt, SUNY - College at Cortland
  Presenting Author