Reparative Play in Dungeons & Dragons

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 work is founded on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling, Kara Stone’s “Time and Reparative Game Design,” and Sarah Lynne Bowman’s The Functions of Role-Playing Games. These scholars observe storytelling 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.

Learning Objectives

1. Understand how queer discourse can be created through RPGs.
2. Able to recount potential applications of both reparative reading and reparative play.
3. Apply safety tools to their own role-playing games.
4. Understand how queer failure can be applied to depictions of disability in RPG systems.