Halfway between J. L. Moreno’s psychodrama, Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed (forum theater), and storytelling by the fireside, role-playing (RPG) is a collective storytelling technique in a supportive setting where listening and speaking are preserved and valued.
Role-playing creates a social, emotional, and creative bond between participants through shared storytelling, while also helping them rediscover their ability to imagine and tell stories together.
Each participant is, simultaneously or in turn, author, actor, director, and spectator. Role-playing is practiced in small groups of about half a dozen people, behind closed doors, in order to maintain a supportive environment conducive to feeling comfortable.
Tabletop role-playing games and critical studies: towards a critical narrative performance of the world
Role-playing is not simply a narrative pastime. It is a complex cultural practice, at the crossroads of several disciplines—aesthetics, philosophy of language, critical pedagogy, narrative anthropology—which make it a legitimate subject of critical studies. Although it originated from the hybridization of military wargames and literary fantasy worlds, RPG quickly emancipated itself from its playful origins to become a reflexive, performative, political, and artistic medium.
Define the game, define the role
The classic theories of play by Johan Huizinga (Homo Ludens, 1938) and Roger Caillois (Les Jeux et les hommes, 1958) provide an initial framework. Role-playing is defined as a separate space, structured by rules, where players embody characters other than themselves, while engaging emotionally. Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation, 1981) detects a more radical form of simulacrum: RPGs do not represent reality, they invent other possibilities.
But it is John Austin’s theory of speech acts (How to Do Things with Words, 1962) that clarifies the practice: to say in play is to do. Imagination becomes action. History becomes shared discourse. And shared discourse becomes world.
The role as narrative co-construction
This is where recent role-playing theories come into play. Ron Edwards asserts that a game’s system determines what really matters during play (System Does Matter). Coralie David analyzes narrative co-creation as a social and aesthetic process. Avery Alder (Monsterhearts, Dream Askew) politicizes fictional intimacy to make it a tool for exploring oneself, gender norms, and marginality. The work of Sarah Lynne Bowman (The Functions of Role-Playing Games) clarifies the cathartic, therapeutic, and identity-building virtues of gaming.
The TTRPG then becomes a collective performance in which tensions between oneself and others, between fiction and politics, between rules and improvisation are explored.
Critical practices, alternative forms
Many theatrical practices echo this approach: Augusto Boal’s theater of the oppressed, Jacob Levy Moreno’s participatory methods, Jerzy Grotowski’s poor theater. Like them, RPGs stage bodies that act in order to transform themselves.
Critical Studies find fertile ground here: in games, relationships of domination, social structures, and normative narratives can be subverted, renegotiated, and deconstructed. Experimental narrative games (e.g., The Quiet Year, Dialect, Sleepaway) question dominant languages, forms of memory, social structures, and collective myths. RPGs become critical performances of the world.
Transdisciplinary approaches abound. Callon and Latour’s sociology of translation helps us to think about the intertwining of actants (players, rules, objects, narratives). Critical pedagogies (Freire, Albert-Fedolak) show how role-playing in an educational context can promote speech, cooperation, and political analysis. Art history also offers examples, from the Surrealists to Joris Lacoste and Brenda Romero.
A form of negotiating reality
To sum up, I like to think that RPGs are the ultimate form of negotiating reality. They are a participatory, open, performative, critical aesthetic device. A perpetual negotiation. An art without spectators. An art that creates worlds rather than representing them. That is constantly renewing itself. It is not just a practice. It is a poetics. A politics. An epistemology. A utopia.
Galac ! 