Queer Youth of Color Negotiate Commitments to Justice Through Aesthetic Literacies During Speculative Roleplaying

• In Event: Critical Game Literacies for the Abolition of White Supremacy and Hetero-Patriarchy

Abstract

Role-playing games led by queer youth of color have the potential to illustrate ways that youth might transform game systems to imagine speculative futures and worlds. Drawing on Muñoz’s (2009) concepts of queer futurity and Crenshaw’s (1991) intersectionality, this study is grounded in a data set from a year-long youth participatory action research (YPAR) project. In the YPAR project, youth engaged with the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in ways that foregrounded queer gaming as a speculative resource.

Although analog roleplaying games such as D&D can reify racism and sexism through the rulebooks and through participants’ gameplay (Garcia, 2017; 2021), the youth in this project set out to play D&D in ways that manipulated the games material and aesthetic resources in ways that moved gameplay mechanisms and discourse toward social justice. To these ends, youth imagined what socially just fantasy worlds might look like if they were free of homophobia, sexism, transphobia, racism, and other oppressive structures.

For data collection, youth recorded all of their gaming sessions and conducted in-depth discourse analyses using critical tools (Fairclough, 2010) of their gameplay in order to pinpoint how they were changing the gaming mechanics and their own discourse to work toward critical narratives, characters, and experiences. Findings suggest that youth did augment and transform both the gaming mechanics and the gaming discourse in ways that worked toward socially just futures. They changed the rules of the gaming system, invented new mechanisms to give players advantage and disadvantage, and carefully chose language that would be more inclusive.

However, youths’ experiences were not without tensions. Sometimes youth experienced competing social justice aims. For example, the youth discussed that sometimes when they were working toward eradicating homophobia in their game they may have inadvertently reified racism and that when they worked toward creating anti-racist narratives, they sometimes accentuated homophobia and also normative assumptions about gender performance. This study in particular explores these areas of tension in youths’ critical roleplaying by focusing on how the gaming mechanics and player discourse interacted with intersectional forms of oppression.

This study contributes to understandings of critical literacies, gaming literacies, aesthetic literacies, and social justice-oriented approaches to education.

Authors

• Scott Storm, University at Albany - SUNY

• Karis Michelle Jones, Baylor University