Playing House in a World of Night: Discursive Trajectories of Masculinity in a Tabletop Role-playing Game

Abstract

This study uses excerpts from the transcript of a tabletop role-playing game (RPG) session to examine how male players enact ideas about masculinity. The game is a non-traditional, small-press “indie” game called Ganakagok designed by the author; in the game, the characters are men and women from a quasi-Inuit culture living on an island of ice in a world lit only by starlight. As the game begins, the imminent arrival of the Sun is announced, and game-play is about how the people of this culture deal with the approaching dawn. In one such game, the players of three male characters went through interesting character arcs in their interactions with each other and with female players; those arcs seemed to depict movement among different models of masculine identity. One implication of the study is that RPGs afford a fruitful site for reflecting upon ideas in discourse, and so it is possible for role-playing to serve as an aesthetic as well as an expressive medium—as art as well as play, in other words.