Shawn Dorey and Sarah Stang: Play-by-post-roleplaying and Queer Identity

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Play-By-Post Roleplaying: Ludic Structures, Creative Play, and Queer Identity

Shawn Dorey, alumnus of the Games Institute, and Sarah Stang, PhD candidate in the Communication and Culture joint program at York University and Ryerson University, will be presenting their co-authored research at the Queerness and Games Conference in Montreal, September 29-30, 2018. The two plan to explore the connections between play and queer identity development through play-by-post-roleplaying (PBPRP).

Dorey published their article, "Play by post roleplay: Where player becomes designer and designer becomes player", in First Person Scholar, May 2017. They began by defining PBPRP as "the act of taking the role of a character, and implanting them into an imaginary world that may or may not be based on some greater metafiction" and "using the power of prose to bring these worlds to life through lush description and carefully implemented dialogue" (Dorey, 2017). Through experiences of their own and observations of other play experiences with PBPRP, Dorey argued that PBPRP has recognizable ludic structures, thus it should be classified as a "game" and should be studied as one in game studies.

Before Dorey's article, PBPRP had been considered to be collaborative writing by other game studies scholars. Dorey's new take on the phenomenon caught Sarah Stang's attention. She responded in the comments section to reflect on her own experiences, further demonstrating the ludic structures governing PBPRP. But also, Stang remarked that her queer identity developed in part through PBPRP with friends.

October 2017, Stang published her own article in First Person Scholar entitled, "Friendship, intimacy, and play-by-post-roleplaying", in which she expanded on her ideas about queer development. She argued that when it comes to queer identity development, PBPRP does not happen in a magic circle because, "With my writing, I was literally changing the game world, but I was also changing my physical world. For me, there really was no “magic circle”: roleplay was as important to me as any other type of social interaction, perhaps more so" (Stang, 2017).

One year later, September 2018, Dorey and Stang will present the next steps of their research. The two will present their personal anecdotes about participating in PBPRP communities in order to connect their experiences with theoretical paradigms of identity, play, queerness, and social hierarchies. They have two missions: to create a meaningful and rich conversation that will advance PBPRP, and other creative roleplay, as a topic of interest in game studies and other academia; and to empower queer identity and agency by investigating how they emerge and take shape in PBPRP.

"Overall, the purpose of this presentation is to discuss an under-researched form of gameplay and encourage our audience to build on, respond to, and continue to explore the topic" (Dorey and Stang, 2018).

Works Cited

Dorey, S. (2017). Play by post roleplay: Where player becomes designer and designer becomes playerFirst Person Scholar. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/play-by-post-roleplay/

Dorey, S., & Stang, S. (2018). Play-by-post-roleplaying: Ludic structures, creative play, and queer identity. Queerness and Games Conference. https://qgcon.com/qgcon-2018/talks/play-by-post-roleplaying-ludic-structures-creative-play-and-queer-identity/

Stang, S. (2017). Friendship, intimacy, and play-by-post-roleplaying. First Person Scholar. http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/friendship-intimacy-and-play-by-post-roleplaying/