Dungeons & Dragons, An Analysis: The Structure Of Gameplay And The Power Of World Creation
Open Access DepositedThis paper draws from Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, Game Studies, and Literature to conduct a cross-disciplinary analysis of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a popular tabletop role-playing game. Campaign creation serves as the primary analytical tool for this research into D&D. Going through the process of creating a campaign as a researcher allowed for a structural analysis of D&D at every level of campaign building. The inspection of each step of a campaign proved valuable as a tool to consider the possibilities within D&D and the type of imagining it fosters. Through the lens of campaign creation, this piece identifies the erasure of certain identities and the discriminatory practices built into D&D manuals, uses character creation to analyze identity production in D&D gameplay, and considers the altering of time and space that occurs as D&D is played. Additionally, theories of speculative fiction and speculative futures from Donna Haraway and Isabelle Stengers are juxtaposed with D&D asserting that D&D play can be an analytical tool for imagining in the same way that speculative fiction from authors, such as, Octavia Butler can. Concluding this piece are various pedagogical tools created to provide potential solutions for the lack of representation identified in the structures of D&D
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