Literacies of Intersubjectivity and Gaming

Script

Think back to the dark, strange days of the Pandemic. Chances are, if you weren’t stressing over loved ones, or desperate to sanitize every surface in your home and workplace, you might’ve found yourself in the throes of an entirely new kind of boredom. The kind that comes with an excision from many of the things and communities that bring colorful joy to our precarious lives. That’s right. I’m talking about the extreme boredom that could bring a person to tears. Or maybe that just was the 50th movie you watched, or that book you finished quicker than you meant to. For one late Autumn evening, it was my brother, my partner, and two of our friends that were brought to tears. And it was my fault. My sin? Well, I killed the greatsword wielding wise-cracking raccoon fighter with the breath-weapon of a dragon. But who really made them shed tears for their friend shaped walking armory? Was it me, their dungeon master? Or was it something else?

Hi my name is Jadyn Cearnal, I am a second year MA student of cultural anthropology at the University of Arkansas.

First let me be reflexive and iterate my background and position. I’ll be talking to you as both a researcher and a participant, where I will engage in autoethnographic analysis as both a player and an observer. For those of you who are unfamiliar, dungeons and dragons is one of the more recognizable tabletop roleplaying games that came to prominence in the 1980s. Some of you may know it as a contributing force to the Satanic Panic, and up until fairly recently, was mostly enjoyed in clandestine gaming environments due to the stigma surrounding it from the dominant social climate.

Tabletop roleplaying games are defined as games that are typically played on a table, like common board games, but with a roleplaying element. Roleplay here means that players create and then perform the roles of characters in the game – usually with the guidance of a rulebook, and mediated by a gamemaster or dungeonmaster, shortened to GM or DM respectively.

So, about the grieving group of individuals that I hosted at my table. How does this scene relate to literacy? Let me take you back to when it all started, just as a dungeonmaster would guide their players through the world they created together.

As your guide, we will walk down the path of theory into the magical forest of literary game studies. Our destination? Undecided. For in this world, and many others like it, the way forward may be named, but where it truly goes and how it affects us is a matter of multimodal interpersonal, psychosocial negotiation. But for now, let’s explore the lore that academia holds regarding our setting. Our adventure begins with a look into the critical capacity that intersubjectivity occupies in tabletop roleplaying games. During our journey I aim to demonstrate how intersubjectivity, creative worlds, and soft canon enable participants to construct and enact community literacies.

The campaign at the center of my autoethnography began, like most campaigns, when a collection of individuals collectively agreed to move from being members of a broad public community with varying degrees of relationships to becoming literati of their own communally-constructed site of gaming . This type of social site is commonly referred to as a fictive world. These worlds crafted via intersubjective roleplay are so much more than mere fiction. As materials, they are represented by a rules framework, and by a gaming space that may be physical like the gaming table (the genre’s namesake), or digital via online spaces (virtual tabletops). Sometimes both. Beyond what is “tangible,” these worlds are sites of impressive and productive emotional, psychical, and social experiences. Notably, these experiences are unique to the microcommunities that foster them. This is possible due to the intersubjectivity inherent to roleplay and communal gaming.

These conceptualizations of communal roleplaying set a stage for emergent literacies to become available to the players – dungeonmasters included. As social subjects consenting to build a place of shared mental existence, they become intersubjective gamers.

You might consider this group as having their own community or culture. You wouldn’t be wrong. Emergent in these roleplay experiences are dialectical literacies of canonization and intersubjectivity. The fictive milieus that roleplayers inhabit foster a literacy of intersubjective existence, bound to each unique community of players, characters and the myriad of Latourian actors that aid in shaping their social environments. That’s right folks, NPCs shape our mental lives too.

So, you are probably aware that canon is the authoritative account of information regarding a media work, this originally referred to religious texts. In the realm of franchise canons, fan driven discourse has many terms used to describe the mode and context they are produced in. You have fanon, where fans decide what could or should happen in a media’s canon. There is also headcanon, which is usually more speculative and individual. Much of this fan discourse is experienced through fanfiction, defined against the official material that spawns it.
Differentiated, the canon that TTRPG players establish and govern and sustain are the products of an actionable fanon. The players themselves are the story, a living literature that is as much narrative as it is ludic. This relationship is intertextual though, and I offer a tripartite schema of written rules, player creations, and habitation of the game world. This phenomenon is called Soft Canon. Coined by Wee – where players construct what is canon in their worlds based on what resonates with them and by what is remembered.

So we created a fictive world. Players agreed and were encouraged to create characters using personal resonances, engagement with self – to play as anthropomorphic animals. But not just any animals – animals that were central or emblematic of themselves. Their interpretation of this metric varied, their choices were all elevated to the same status of “playable species.” Each one was important to the players in richly different ways. They were all of them chosen together to flavor the world and to interact with one another’s senses of self. Racoon for the player with a strong nostalgia and excitement for similar media characters. Tiger for the player who treasured her cultural heritage and social integration of that animal into their school life. Fox for the player who identified with social traits of the animal, reflective and meticulously chosen as a form of loving oneself.

And speaking of love, the emotional spectrum of experiences in these games is chasmal and swirling – inhabiting the world, the players (PCs and DM) will live and truly feel emotions evocative of the experiences contained therein. Players feel fear, consternation, pride, embarrassment, power, friendship, infatuation, anger, happiness, frustration, sadness, humor, intelligence, honor and luck. They will also feel betrayal, pain, grief, love, isolation, ecstasy, comfort, sympathy, solace, seen, effervescence, and safety. All of these contribute to affective resonance of soft canon.

And further into making soft canon, many DM’s dread or baulk when their campaign goes “off the rails” when players exercise their power of canonization. Similiarly as a DM, I have presented the PCs with characters that I thought they would connect with, or be sympathetic toward, only to be met with suspicion, apathy, and awkwardness. Initially, this does seem to be a refusal of canonization. However, in true Foucaultian style, this rejection is productive all the same. Oppositional valuation serves to bolster that which is accepted as canon. In its original form, fictive canon is most clearly defined by what it is not – unauthorized or derivative. Though GMs arbitrate the rules and worlds of the game in an official capacity (per the rules: they “run” the game or campaign), a great deal of productive power is shared with “their players.”

In exercising that power, players also create multimodal representations of the game world via art-work. They perform work to further impress their feelings and perceptions of their shared world into a collection of tangible and intangible literature. Players have produced portraits of their characters, group art of their entire party and more. Multiple players have produced artwork of the same world event, showcasing the differance of collective storytelling and the living milieu at large. All of the players’ versions of art are very different, but simultaneously working to synthesize a singular, shared world of memory. A player of mine has even made a short animation in the vein of a tv show opening sequence to illustrate the length, depth, and mere capability of their world to be represented as a full scale media production. The power to shape the intersubjective world is in the hands of all who share it. What players produce has bearing vis a vis what DMs produce for their worlds. The impact it has on players is a communal endeavor. Crying is often considered a free action.

Now that the campaign has been on indefinite hiatus (us gamers prefer this term to the various alternatives such as dead, ended, canceled, unlikely to return, etc) I have had players transition to the traditional literary mechanisms of production. One player has begun to novelize the shared world, producing book accounts of the adventures. Another has gone and written what they consider to be fanfiction, where the account of their character is narrated on the blended authority of memory and dramatization. All of this is productive and sustaining of the soft canon. These actions of producing one’s own perceptions of the intersubjective site is an exercise in self and interself literacy.

Which leads us back to that Autumn night where I made my players cry. But did I really? Or did my players make themselves cry? On that night, their player characters entered a high stakes fight and, in the ensuing battle, a player character’s life points dropped to 0. Mechanically, the character died. I turned to the player and asked “what are your last words?” The player choked up, thought for a moment, then, in character, said to the others at the table something poignant. His words, in turn, caused the other players at the table to emotionally react. In that moment, the intersection of intersubjectivity and collaborative meaning-making saw the players engage in and enact the community literacy they had themselves created up to that point. So no, I can’t take all the credit for the resonating affects of such a damn good story. I share it, happily, with my coconspirators at the table.

To wrap up, the canon is real, and it is alive and it is dynamic even if the world is no longer visited in the traditional sense. It is referenced against the canons of others campaigns, it is discussed and internalized by its players years after they last visited as a group. This canon, like so many others that these individuals engage with, will have a lasting effect on each of their selves. It will remind them that through roleplay, one may learn about oneself in ways not possible elsewhere, and a literacy of knowhow and navigation of that self, as a subject of a shared place of play, is possible in gaming.

Bibliography

Alberto, Maria. 2021. “Creating Canons in Tabletop Role-Playing Games Played Online.” In Roleplaying Games in the Digital Age: Essays on Transmedia Storytelling, Tabletop RPGs and Fandom, 113-125.

Bowman, S. L. (2010). The Function of Role-Playing Games. Chapter 6 “Roleplaying as Alteration of Identity.” Jefferson: McFarland and Company.

Casey, Edward S. 1996. “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” In Senses of Place, Basso and Feld, eds. Santa Fe: SAR Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1978. History of Sexuality I: The Will to Know. New York: Pantheon Books.

Moss, Beverly J. 2003. A Community Text Arises: A Literate Text and a Literacy Tradition in African-American Churches. Cresskill: Hampton Press.

Salen, Katie., & Zimmerman, Eric. 2003. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Taylor, T. L. 2009. “Play between worlds: Exploring online game culture.” Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wee, Kellynn. 2024. “If it’s held dear, it’ll get pushed through. Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs).” In International Journal of Cultural Studies, 27(5), 675-693.