TPI Seminar 2022: Reparative Play in Dungeons & Dragons — Giuseppe Femia

This presentation was delivered on October 21, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.

Description:

Spaces for queer discourse remain limited and continue to be marginalized in media. In an act of reclamation, the Queer community has claimed their space in one of the more resistant media forms: games and gaming culture, specifically role-playing games. In pursuit of queer inclusivity and media diversity, many queer individuals turn to the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as a much-needed form of self-representation. The game’s free-flowing rules, and heavy reliance on world-building, contributes two key elements towards the act of reparative play (play as a form of healing and reparation): 1) it affords individuals room to craft their own stories within a greater arching narrative, and 2) it encourages the use of personalized characters—often avatars of the players—as a way for them to exist in a safe space. My work focuses on reparative play through D&D as a means of creating therapeutic rhetoric for individual queer players. Through the creation of the game world and its contents, members of the community can tell their own story and represent themselves in ways that other media simply lack the means to. In the process of carving out these spaces of discourse where they are more accepted, community members can self-actualize in their own narratives and develop themselves further as people with a shared social experience. This presentation is founded on Sarah Bowman’s The Functions of Role-Playing Games, Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, Kara Stone’s “Time and Reparative Game Design,” Josephine Baird’s “Role-playing the Self,” and Matthew Orr et al.’s “A Qualitative Exploration of the Perceived Social Benefits of Playing Tabletop Role-Playing Games.” These scholars observe role-play as a method of queer performativity and identity exploration. Based on their work, I pose reparative play as a powerful rhetorical tool that affords the creation of progressive queer discourse.

Bio:

Giuseppe Femia completed a BA (English, Rhetoric, Media, and Professional Communication & Honours Arts and Business) and an MA (Rhetoric and Communication Design) at Waterloo. Now a PhD student, Giuseppe’s research in game studies, media studies, queer studies, and disability studies observes different types of gaming media and the appeal it has to its audience. Giuseppe is the current Podcast Producer for First Person Scholar and is pursuing a Certificate in University Teaching from the Centre for Teaching Excellence to complement his experience as a TA and the scholarship he has done in the academic realm of teaching and learning.  

 

 Click here to read PDF of slides.  

 

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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.

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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).