Playing Differently Together: Examining How Divergent Paraplay Mediated Co-Authorship in a Virtual Role-Playing Community

• In Event: Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Role Playing, and Embodied Escape: (Re)Imagining Learning in the Peripheries of Play

Abstract

Objective
Gameplay is a situated practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in which participants convene around a shared repertoire of play-based rules and mechanics. As “third places” (Steinkuehler & Williams, 2006) beyond spatialities of work and home, games provide unique content and contexts for literacy learning (Squire, 2006). But despite the narrative, environmental, and ludic (i.e., rules-based) elements that bind games and gamers, the activity of gameplay can be a diffractive project by which participants negotiate divergent actions, affinities, and goals. Sometimes these moments of diffractive activity constitute “paraplay” (Freyermuth, 2021), by which participants engage in interactions that extend beyond the rules and content of the game. This paper examines how divergent moments of paraplay in a virtual, youth-led role-playing game (i.e., RPG) community yielded contested and collaborative opportunities for narrative storytelling. I ask: How do divergent moments of paraplay in a virtual role-playing campaign coalesce to negotiate and shape collaborative narrative composing?

Theoretical Perspectives
To understand how paraplay mediated collaborative RPG composing, I thought with concepts of gaming spatialities (Garcia, 2020) and game-based coauthorship (Burroughs, 2014; Tan et al., 2017; Simkins and Steinkuehler, 2008). Specifically, I considered how moments of paraplay manifested “in the game,” “at the table,” and “beyond the table” (Garcia, 2020). Then, I examined how participants’ paraplay coproduced new meaning-making practices and narrative trajectories in their RPG campaign.

Methods and Data Sources
This study is part of a three-year collaboration with an educational nonprofit organization named EdQuest (all names pseudonyms). During the 2021-2022 academic year, I facilitated an online course for EdQuest titled The Worldbuilding Workshop. Six adolescent boys enrolled in the course and took turns facilitating six-week RPG campaigns. This paper examines a campaign created by a participant named Olly. Data generation included game artifacts and Zoom recordings of play sessions – totaling nine hours of audio and video data. Data analysis occurred in three phases: 1) Coding transcripts for moments of paraplay, 2) Analyzing participants’ resistance to and joint participation in paraplay, and 3) Tracing how paraplay impacted how participants coauthored Olly’s RPG campaign.

Findings and Implications
My findings highlight how participants engaged in discourses about divergent (e.g., historic weaponry) and shared (e.g., The Marvel Cinematic Universe) affinities that extended beyond the scope of Olly’s RPG campaign. As paratextual interactions beyond the game, these moments of diffractive play generated new lore, jokes, and meaning-making practices that shaped participants’ in-game storytelling. Furthermore, these moments of paraplay were laden with ideology and power differentials that yielded tensions and resonances between the participants. Some participants’ bids to engage in paraplay were taken up more readily than others. For example, one participant’s paratextual critiques of racist and misogynist tropes in Dungeons & Dragons lore were met with varying degrees of rejection and solidarity from peers. Implications for this work consider the politics of paraplay – namely, how the ability to reframe and decenter focal texts (such as games) is imbued with social and ideological frictions between participants. These findings highlight how processes of coauthorship are informed by playful alignments and contestations from beyond the text.

Author

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University