Dramaturgies of Being: Agency, Pedagogy and the Self-focused Performance of Tabletop RPGs

Abstract

When approached as a performance medium, tabletop role-playing games, or TTRPGs, demonstrate a dramaturgical method that allows for the exploration of an individual player-performer’s agency, as well as the limits thereof. At the same time, the rule frameworks that structure play work to create experimental and pedagogical environments where suppositions about reality can become true within the virtual play-space, and thus allow space for speculative performances of said reality; if the rules say that something is true, what then becomes true by extension? The combination of these elements allows for the construction of ‘dramaturgies of being,’ which facilitate the performance of identity within the speculative framework, and thus the testing of said identities. Avery Alder’s 2018 game Dream Askew presents a dramaturgy of being for queer postapocalyptic identity exploration, community building, negotiation of agency, and teaching through simulated experience.