Wizards as Batteries? Youth-Generated Critiques of Colonization in an Online Role-Playing Campaign

• In Event: Decolonizing Magic as Research Method, Narrative Practice, and Instructional Design

Abstract

Role-playing games (RPGs) are sites of speculative promise and precarity (Garcia, 2017, 2021). While RPGs provide players with expansive tools to create their own rules and play-based narratives, they are also imbued with politics of race, class, gender, and ability. Dungeons & Dragons, for example, has a long history of racist and heterosexist lore (Flanagan & Jakobsson, 2023; Kung et al., 2022; Limbong, 2020; Stang & Trammell, 2020). Interested in how youth contend with the ideological dimensions of magic and play-based worldbuilding, this study examines how six adolescent youth (re)storied White racialized ideology and themes of colonization through collaborative storytelling. I ask: How do six youths in a worldbuilding course resist and reify hegemonic renderings of race and gender through play-based composing practices?

To interrogate how youth gamers resisted and reified colonization in an RPG campaign, I think with restorying (Thomas and Stornaiuolo, 2016; Montes, 2022) and critical whiteness studies (Corces- Zimmerman & Guida, 2019; Jupp & Lensmire, 2016). Thomas and Stornaiuolo (2016) defined restorying as the “reshaping [of] narratives to better reflect a diversity of perspectives and experiences” (p. 314). As an act of narrative justice, restorying works to restore historically minoritized ways of knowing and being that have been subjected to colonial violence (Montes, 2022). Taking a second-wave critical whiteness studies (CWS) perspective, I examined how participants unmasked and disrupted the hegemony and social stratification of Whiteness (Leonardo, 2009) through improvisational role-play (Tanner, 2018).

Data for this paper was generated from a 10-month online course titled The Worldbuilding Workshop. This paper specifically follows an eight-week campaign created by a participant named Andy (pseudonym). Andy’s campaign followed a group of rebels seeking to overthrow a tyrannical nation named Duscal. Duscal is an oppressive nation whose entire supply of energy is sourced from enslaved wizards. The youth participants engaged in 12 hours of role-play on Zoom to coauthor the fate of Duscal and its people. Additional data included three hours of retrospective design interviews (Dalton et al., 2015) with Andy. To analyze the audiovisual data, I followed an iterative framework of qualitative examination (Srivastava & Hopwood, 2009) across three recursive phases of coding. Acknowledging the “reflexive turn” (Mauthner, 2003) in qualitative inquiry, I coded my data according to dialectical relationships and contradictions between participants’ compositional goals and practices.

My findings examine the ways that youth participants coauthored and interrogated issues of race, gender, and magic in Andy’s campign. While Andy and his peers frequently critiqued systems of capitalism and dehumanization throughout the campaign, their play-based storytelling typically flouted discussions of race. When I drew parrallels to Duscal and the Antebellum South, they mobilized color-evasive language (Annamma et al., 2016) to avoid critical conversations about race. Thus, their play simultaneously worked to subvert the Othering of magical bodies while disregarding the ways in which magic and enslavement are historically racialized. Implications for this work consider the complex ways that abstract liberalism (Bonilla-Silva, 2021) both shapes and undermines the project of critical play and coauthorship.

Author

• Alex Corbitt, Syracuse University