Transformative Potential of Immersive Experiences Within Role-Playing Communities (original) (raw)
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The Transformative Potential of Immersive Experiences Within Role-playing Communities
Revista de Estudos Universitário , 2022
Analog role-playing games provide an avenue for players to explore a diversity of experiences and self-concepts by playing out new roles in a collectively created discursive reality. The role-playing group's establishment of this bounded fictional reality is significant, as it often contradicts social structures and norms found outside of the magic circle of play, as well as the social identities performed within them. This article provides a theoretical framework for this process, discussing the nature of consensus reality as a force that can suppress forms of identity expression that individuals find authentic and how play can inspire agency for individuals within it. We discuss how analog role-playing games such as live action role-playing (larp) and tabletop games can provide transformational containers for individuals to explore new ways of being, relating, and enacting beliefs within the small bubble of their community, while taking place within the wider collective consciousness. This framework describes such containers through the metaphor of alchemy, in which change processes are ignited that must be sufficiently held by the group in order to complete the process of transformation while maintaining feelings of safety. Borrowing language from personal development groups, we describe such processes in terms of expansion and contraction, both of which are necessary for transformation to occur. We also discuss the social risks involved with non-normative forms of self-expression, as well as risks specific to role-playing environments in terms of ways in which safety can be compromised or challenged. Thus, this article will emphasize maximizing the benefits while minimizing pitfalls of such an environment. Throughout the article, we compare these affordances to similar groups processes such as drag and queer performance spaces, as well as queer kinship communities, within which participants can often express identities that feel more authentic with regard to gender and sexuality. Finally, we discuss how the larp we are designing, Euphoria, can combine the agency to explore and express non-normative genders afforded by queers spaces with the magic circle provided by a role-playing game as a potentially transformational container.
Virtual Avatars: Trans Experiences of Ideal Selves Through Gaming
Markets, Globalization & Development Review, 2018
This article aims to explore the experiences transgender gamers have with avatars. Building on a foundation of identity construction theories from both media studies and queer studies, this study theorizes that these gamers will use their virtual world avatars to experiment with gender performance and ideal selves. These theories of identity construction are explored and examined through digital ethnography, by using the participant observation method, in which trans gamers are interviewed about their experiences with avatar creation and use. Based on the evidence gathered from those interviews, this study concludes that trans gamers in general tend to create avatars who reflect their ideal selves, especially early in their transitions. Thus, the game worlds function as contested spaces where gamers experiment with the performance of alternative, fluid identities. Those identities can then cross the border from virtual to physical, affecting people's lives and corporeal bodies.
“We don’t want it changed, do we?” - Gender and Sexuality in Role Playing Games
Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2008
Video games in virtual worlds serve as reference points in negotiations of socially efficacious meanings. Therefore they entail the potential either to reproduce and affirm or to challenge traditional concepts of identity. This article presents findings of an in-depth content analysis of three role playing games with a male avatar belonging to the Gothic-series that was published between 2001 and 2006. Focal points of the examination were issues of gender and sexuality, how they are incorporated in narrative, interactions and rules of the game series, and how they are being discussed on fan sites and player forums.
Games and Culture, 2023
This article analyses LGBTIQA+ playing experiences of Animal Crossing New Horizons (ACNH). It first surveys LGBTIQA+ players of ACNH, with questions regarding ways of playing, identity, community, and fanfiction practices. It also analyses LGBTIQA+ ACNH YouTube videos, divided into three main categories: design, gaming, and fanfiction. The first category, design, is analysed quantitatively. The second and third categories follow a qualitative analysis, grouping findings into seven sub-categories: 1) decorating, 2) celebrating Pride, 3) counter-gaming, 4) weddings, 5) coming out, 6) self-determination and encouraging discourses, and 7) community building. Explorative results show that, although out-game LGBTIQA+ experiences are necessary for queer self-realization, the in-game experiences of our sample help non-cis-straight identities and communities. They also demonstrate that diversity and intersectionality are fundamental in the ACNH queer community sampled, and that LGBTIQA+ players perform queer counter-gaming: transforming the game's tools and affordances to encourage self-expression.
Performing Critique: Queer Video Games as Critical Method
On_Culture, 2019
Against the backdrop of a growing concern for the fate of critique in the current era, queer video games such as tranxiety, Dream Daddy and Gone Home have begun to engage players in the process of critically examining their own assumptions and immersing them in a performative critique, particularly as it relates to non-normative lived experiences. Alongside exploring whether these games are ‘merely’ the result of critical game design, such that players are enlisted to perform critique, or if queer play is more than a prescribed behavior, this article will utilize examples from across various video game platforms and genres to demonstrate that whether trying to survive daily life as a trans woman in the beginning stages of transition in tranxiety or exploring the dating life of Maple Bay’s latest resident in Dream Daddy, queer video games serve as a platform through which players are encouraged to perform critique via queer play, that is to say, playing outside of traditional video game and character norms. Embracing a productive nexus of critical reflection and performativity, queer video games demonstrate that critique is well served by participatory media. Critique has entered the digital era and, though transformed, it is alive and well.
I Exist: Improving the Representation of Queer Perspectives in Videogames [EXTENDED ABSTRACT]
2016 Digital Games Research Association of Australia (DiGRAA) National Symposium, 2016
Queer representation in videogames is gradually becoming more prevalent, but even as the inclusion of queer perspectives in games increases, there is limited research being conducted in the area (Shaw 2009). Research that is being conducted seems focused on quantifying the amount of queer representation (Shaw & Friesem 2016), rather than on the qualitative impacts it has on those accessing videogames. In May 2016, I conducted a survey that aimed to identify the ongoing impact of positive and negative representation of queer characters and themes on both queer and non-queer audiences. This survey received 158 responses and allowed me to identify issues with representation, including the comparative prevalence of same-gender attracted characters, the way character customisation tools and pronouns are being used to depict diverse genders, and the use of ‘optional’ queer content and playersexuality in games as an attempt to appease queer players. Respondents provided insights into why these particular aspects of queer representation are problematic, and this paper presents a foundational analysis of these issues.
Gay for Play: Theorizing LGBTQ Characters in Game Studies
The Game Culture Reader, 2013
This paper began as a presentation at the SW/TX PCA/ACA & PCA/ACA conference in San Antonio, in 2011. It hopes to position modes of reading gender in games other than those prescribed and proscribed by the games themselves to show that GLBTQ characters, themes, concerns, issues, etc. are far more available--and should be--within game spaces than otherwise advertised or presupposed.
Queering space: LGBTQ* gaming as a form of resistance and community development
2023
This paper will be looking at the influences of the creation of LGBTQ gaymer groups in the gaming world and within the LGBTQ communities itself. Through queering space and community development theory lenses, I look at how gaming that is dominantly viewed as being a straight, white, able bodied and a male space can be queered by the inclusion of LGBTQ players/gaymers. Using a critical ethnographic method through interviewing gaymer group leaders, I will explore how gaymer groups have had an impact on combating the harassment experienced by LGBTQ players/gaymers and how these groups have created their own communities that act as a form of queering up space and resistance to homophobia
Performative identity and the embodied avatar : an online ethnography of Final Fantasy XIV
This thesis explores the performative enactment of identity and embodiment through an online ethnography of the online game Final Fantasy XIV. It is argued that online identity must be viewed as performative, that is, enacted through speech and action, and embodied via the avatar, which acts as a body project for the player. The avatar identity is also constrained by the notion of authentic identity, which denotes how a single body is expected to hold a single identity. The thesis makes contributions to three areas. Firstly, in substantive terms, the thesis contributes original sociological knowledge of online social interaction, drawn from an online game and its related spaces, which remain under-researched sociologically. Secondly, the thesis makes a theoretical contribution through a theoretical framing of how online, embodied identity is achieved in an online game in a performative fashion, which is centred on the body of the avatar, coupled with the speech and actions of the player. Finally, the thesis also offers a methodological contribution through its original use of photo elicitation in online interviews, and furthers the debates around (online) ethnography. An 11 month programme of fieldwork was undertaken, comprising 36 asynchronous, image elicitation interviews, extensive participant observation of the game over the 11 months, and observation of the official forum lasting nearly six months. The thesis concludes that online identity and embodiment in these spaces are heavily constrained by norms drawn from everyday life, such as heteronormativity, and racism. The game design is also influenced by the developers‟ norms and values, such as the avatar appearance. The possibilities for performative identity and embodiment are severely constrained by the community, who reify the game space as separate from “real” life and reject the inclusion of non-normative avatars.
Identity Performance in Roleplaying Games
Computers and Composition, 2015
This article argues that roleplaying games have the potential to challenge, encourage, and subsume the privilege of the stereotypical gamer, one who is white, male, and heterosexual. Though roleplaying games as they are currently designed are neither ideal nor perfect, the article contends they embrace feminist programming strategies and offer those who do not want to play a straight male avatar the opportunity to develop and explore identities through characters in ways that other genres do not. Roleplaying games extend the privilege of representation to other gaming demographics, giving players the opportunity to "play who they are" in the digital world, whether they are able to, or even desire to, explore this identity offline. Without the diversity of representation found in roleplaying games, players would be unable to participate in the potentially fruitful criticism of stereotypes and the ability to interact with players and characters different from themselves.