“‘Let’s Play a Love Game’: Role-playing Intimacy and Relationships in Games”
Sarah Lynne Bowman
Originally presented at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference, April 13, 2022.
Description:
At their core, analog role-playing games are inherently relational. Whether the goals of the players center upon achieving a goal, feeling empowered, or experiencing strong catharsis, role-playing is seldom experienced alone. For that reason, relationships of all sorts — familial, romantic, sexual, colleagial, even antagonistic — are a central part of role-playing design and play. Therefore, the study of relationships and intimacy becomes important as a lens not only to understand dynamics in and out of role-playing games, but also to understand the human experience.
Role-playing occurs in a state of dual consciousness from a first-person audience perspective (Stenros 2013), meaning that players experience these games both as a character immersed in the fiction, but also as an observer to their character’s behavior in the unfolding story. This perspective offers the opportunity not only to feel powerful emotions and experience intense intimacy with others through play, but to reflect on these dynamics through post-game processing, debriefing, and integration (Bowman and Hugaas 2021). Such reflection becomes important, as role-playing intimacy can become erotic (Brown and Stenros 2018), confusing (Waern 2010), or potentially detrimental to existing relationships as a result of bleed (Bowman 2013; Harder 2018).
This presentation will discuss intimacy and relationships in role-playing games from multiple perspectives:
1) Psychological concepts such as attachment theory (Kirschner, 2020; Bockarova, 2019), transactional analysis (Berne 1996), and the drama triangle (Karpman);
2) Role-playing games that reproduce dysfunctional dynamics, such as Vampire: the Masquerade, as well as games designed to focus specifically on fostering intimacy between characters, such as Dream Askew (Adler 2013).
The talk will conclude with important elements needed to promote feelings of safety, trust, consent, and mutual care when role-playing intimate dynamics.
Bio: Sarah Lynne Bowman, Ph.D. is a scholar, game designer, and event organizer. She is a Senior Lecturer for the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland and the Coordinator for Peace & Conflict Studies at Austin Community College. McFarland Press published her dissertation as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity (2010). Bowman has edited for The Wyrd Con Companion Book (2012-2015), the International Journal of Role-playing (2016-), and Nordiclarp.org (2015-). She helped organize the Living Games Conference (2014, 2016, 2018) and Role-playing and Simulation in Education Conference (2016, 2018).