Playing Dungeons & Dragons in an Era of Terror, Violence, and Discrimination

• In Event: 44.034 - Children's Books, Dungeons & Dragons, Twitter, and Coding: Tools for Ingenious Negotiations of Nondominant Learner Roles

Abstract

Objectives/Theoretical Framework:
Throughout months of increased #Blacklivesmatter activism, rising death tolls from horrendous terrorist events, and the U.S. Presidential election season highlighting political and ideological divides within the country, I spent approximately four hours each week fighting off goblins, pillaging towers of villainous sorcerers, and plundering the treasures of fiendish dragons with youth in Northern Colorado. In an era where “connected learning” (Ito et al., 2013) emphasizes the interest-driven learning practices of youth in largely out-of-school environments, this study explores how such engagement shapes the civic identities of players.

Through an ethnographic analysis of tabletop roleplaying game player communities, I approached this work by exploring the perspectives, questions, and experiences of the youth players in two tabletop gaming community spaces. As newer players learned the rules of a complex game like Dungeons & Dragons and other players built friendships around these games, exploration of identity, race, and political action were reflected within the narrative of the game’s virtual world. With harassment and violence in video game communities vis-a-vis Gamergate (Hurley 2016; Sullentrop, 2014) spilling into the non-digital gaming community as well as escalating national and global terror, this study explores how players took up in game politics and how such articulation can transfer into non-gaming, “real world” engagement.

To understand the learning practices within gaming and how these transfer and shape out-of-game identity practices, this study builds off of ethnographic analysis of virtual world gaming communities (Boellstorff, 2008; Nardi, 2010) and gaming communities (Chen, 2011; Pearce and Artemisia, 2011). Though these studies largely come from gaming studies and anthropology, they also adhere closely to the sociocultural explanations of contemporary “communities of practice” (Lave and Wenger, 1991) and “affinity groups” (Gee, 2004).

Methods/Data:
Methodologically, this study builds off of data from a larger 24-month ethnographic study of tabletop gaming communities in order to focus specifically on the identity practices of youth participating in these gaming communities. Through grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1990) that looked at the language, identity, and learning practices of participants, this work ultimately builds links between fantasy-driven conceptions of identity, fantasy definitions of “race” (e.g. humans, elves, dwarves, etc.) and western definitions of racial identity (white, black, Latino, “other”). Building links along these lines, this study ultimately builds a framework of civic identity, expanding Cohen et al.’s (2014) conception of a contemporary “participatory politics.”

Findings:
Considering the historical, Eurocentric roots of Dungeons & Dragons (Peterson, 2012), this study explores how race is conflated with identity in complicated ways within a gaming virtual world and how this affects out-of-game identity. Taking up Jenkins, Ito, and Boyd’s (2015) description of a “connected civics” that “may not be about the government, but […] about governance, and [...] involves trial by fire in experiencing what happens when you have power and authority” (p. 162).

Significance:
By analyzing what it means to play fantasy-driven tabletop roleplaying games in the current sociopolitical climate of violence and fear, this study looks at the political relevance of extracurricular engagement for marginalized communities of youth.

Author

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University