Volume 9, Issue 4, 2022
Articles
- When Worlds Collaborate: The Style of Early Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Despite some successes in the contemporary gaming community at creating spaces for diverse players and perspectives, examining the early roots of the tabletop role-playing (TTRPG) game community as a subculture that was dominated by white men provides vital insights into why the community still struggles with issue of race and gender. Examining early example of race and gender in TTRPGs highlights the inherent biases and some initial attempts to engage with those biases. Using fanzines, personal reflections of the author’s own experience as an African-American gamer since the 1970s, and the game manuals and the ten years of Dragon Magazine as primary sources, this article will argue that there was a distinct subcultural style of TTRPGs that reflected and reinforced white male-dominated boundaries.
- Depicting the Human Relationship to Nature and Culture: Transactionality and Homo Economicus
This article examines the issue of the depiction of the human relationship to culture and nature in games via a philosophical exploration of how similar issues have been depicted and debated in anthropology and archaeology as well as in environmental history. In recent years, parallel investigations of the representation of colonialist themes, and along with that the representation or indeed misrepresentation of race, traditional societies and other cultures more generally, have been much discussed in the tabletop and other games media and scholarship. This article contends that, while games scholarship has rightly recognized and documented the reproduction of colonialism in particular in tabletop games, there appears to be no comparable level of awareness that games typically cast the human relationship to anything in the game environment—other players, nature—as a transactional, means-ends relationship, which can have harmful effects and represent peculiarly modern rather than universal human preoccupations. A philosophical exploration of the history of such transactional depictions in the so-called homo economicus conception, social Darwinism, as well the examples from environmental history, will be offered to illustrate the arguments.
- The Magic Circle as Occult Technology
This article builds on a broad conception of the magic circle as a way of understanding the interactions, participation and meanings generated by games. However, this article argues that the magic circle is not only a metaphor for understanding the boundaries of play; it is a technology that paradoxically erects and disturbs ontological divisions and a ritual technique that enacts—as do many forms of magic—a relationship between people and things. Drawing on speculative and animist philosophies, the article seeks to shift discussion away from anthropocentric ideas of play and consider, instead, the magic circle as a technology through which mutual participation and mutual immersion between “world” and “player” is revealed.