Dungeons, Dragons, and Developing Literacies: The Sociocultural Literacies of Tabletop Role-Playing Games

• In Event: 52.082 - Multiliteracies, Connected Learning, and Opportunities for Equity: Exploring Key Principles of Literacies Research in the 21st Century

Abstract

Though literacies are enacted in myriad contexts, the emphasis of a much contemporary multiliteracies research has skewed inherently toward the digital. Literacy development in digital spaces, with video and audio projects, and modalities that are now frequently uploaded, streamed, and shared on screens take up much of the mantle of multiliteracies in the 21st century. Likewise, the connected learning principles (Ito et al., 2013) that explore the intersection of interest driven, academic, and peer-supported forms of learning are often associated with digital ephemera like videogames (Kow, Young, and Tekinbas, 2014), digitally-mediated civic engagement (Kligler-Vilenchik, 2013), and online writing production (Black, 2005). This study looks at how the “increasing multiplicity and integration of significant modes of meaning-making” (New London Group, 1996 p. 64) are found flourishing in the affinity spaces (Gee, 2004) of tabletop roleplaying games.

Since their inception with the publication of Dungeons and Dragons in 1974 (Gygax and Arneson), arguably the first in the genre, roleplaying games have been complex hybrid spaces for peer-supported, multiliteracies. Through translating and interpreting information across myriad rule books, arcane rolls of strange polynomial dice, and the ideas and suggestions of other participants around a table, role playing games highlight how streams of information in varied modalities constitute rich narrative opportunities.

Building off of 18 months of ethnographic fieldnotes participating in local gaming communities, this study looks at the literacy practices and connected learning enacted around gaming tables. In addition to expanding how we look at multiliteracies and connected learning by taking a turn away from the distinctly digital, this study also considers how spaces of multiliteracies are both virtual and physical; like Leander and Boldt’s explanation of “bodies” (2012), this study explores how narrative worlds are in “constant movement in an environment that is itself always in motion, the potential for variation is almost infinite” (p. 29). As a result, the complex literacy practices illustrate a non-digital account of multiliteracies. The tabletop where players convene and the fictional realms their narratives create intersect and disrupt one another.

By exploring tabletop roleplaying games through a lens of connected learning and multiliteracies, this study takes a step back from the technophilia of analyzing solely digital reading and writing practices. In doing so, it illustrates how multiliteracies are an integrated component of everyday meaning making.

Author

• Antero Garcia, Colorado State University