Magic Circles: Tabletop role-playing games as queer utopian method

Abstract

This paper explores the connections between utopian approaches in performance studies, queer strategies for community building, and the world-creation tools made available by tabletop “pen and paper” role-playing games (TRPGs). Particularly, drawing on the varied modes of reality offered by each of the above, and they ways they can support experimentation with alternative societies, relationships, and political ideologies. Beginning with a contextual analysis of Dungeons & Dragons, it outlines the structure, history, and current iterations of tabletop roleplaying games, towards an understanding of how the form can be used in the construction of playful, microcosmic utopias sensitive to queer experiences of solidarity within marginalisation. To illustrate this usage, Avery Alder’s queer, post-apocalyptic TRPG Dream Askew (2019) is later explored as a particularly appropriate case study to illustrate this usage. The paper goes on to look at how the conception of Utopia as a world apart (as in Thomas Moore’s ‘No Place’), the establishing of a ‘Magic Circle’ (coined by Johan Huizinga) as a zone of shifted possibility in both game and performance contexts, and the genres of science fiction and speculative fiction, can be used together to facilitate a form of collaborative storytelling. This type of storytelling is noted as being politically significant in the ways it consolidates the roles of performer and spectator, engaging with Augusto Boal’s critiques of passive spectatorship, and framing of performance as possible “rehearsal for revolution” [1974(2008): 135].