Taking power (un)seriously : Understanding players' power fantasies in tabletop role-playing game play experiences

Abstract

Power has been a concept of recurring relevance for studies in the social sciences, Game Studies, and other fields. Specifically, it has been a focal subject for tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) since its origins as a play form, where players accrue power and status as a form of character progression. Since TRPG play is materially carried out in the imagination of players in a collaborative manner, and since an essential aspect of TRPG play is that players have an impact on how play and story unfold, the ways they imagine power is driven not just by game texts, but also by their own cultural understandings of it and their own desires. The concept that can allow us access for studying these imaginary understandings of power is the power fantasy: a concept that has seen wide use in both academic and casual contexts but that is laden with derogatory meanings. I argue that this work highlights the value of power fantasies as an object of study, since it allows us access to the complex ways in which we understand and dream of power itself.

In this work, I set out to understand what kinds of power fantasies players seek out within TRPG play. To achieve this, I first carried out a theoretical background review to construct a definition of power fantasy that allows access to it as an object of study. After this, I conducted four semi-structured interviews with young adults from Chile who had played in a TRPG session at least once in the last year and asked them questions regarding their experiences doing “cool” things and achieving feelings of empowerment during play. I then conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of their responses from a grounded theory perspective, and I was able to produce two overarching themes of analysis: what meaningful play is to the interviewees, and what kinds of power fantasies they pursue during play.

My findings show the interviewees understand instances of meaningful TRPG play as experiences that rely on collaborative effort, clear communication, and well-conveyed expectations and boundaries, leading to the construction of a prescriptive ideal of good TRPG play characterized by an overwhelming feeling of uncoordinated and unmediated cooperation. This ideal form of play, which I have called synchronicity, which can be read as the aesthetic experience of social cohesion through collaborative play.

Additionally, the power fantasy I could observe from the interviewee’s accounts is a power fantasy characterized by players seeking out a form of power that is highly agential and focused on their personal capacity to make things happen during play, but that is also reliant on the affordances that play gives players to create their characters and act during play. In this way, it can be understood as a process of subjectivation through the play experience, where the elements that constitute play are both knowable and measurable by everyone at the table. This, I argue, allows these power fantasies to be read as psychopolitical power fantasies.

These fantasies allow players to explore self-assertion and self-expression in ways that are defined directly against the oppressiveness of the demands of serious behavior from them in everyday life, and as such materialize as a specific form of it: the power fantasy of unserious success, where players are able to make use of their privileged knowledge of how the world works and what matters within it to achieve their goals in ways that are intentionally unconventional, risky, or silly.