By Ben Platt
It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be”
What happens when we combine TTRPGs, an artistic medium that often depends on the productive forces of failure, with utopianism, a ‘philosophy of hope’[1]that expresses the ‘desire for a better way of being’[2] but which has been undermined by its ties to the social and political failures of the 20th century?
TTRPGs often build their mechanical foundations on the bedrock tension between success and failure through action-resolution systems that some game studies scholars identify as one of ‘three key design areas […] relevant for all types of RPGs.’[3] Failure, for many players, makes the eventual successes that emerge through these improvisational stories all the sweeter. As Sarah Lynne Bowman remarks, ‘even players who enjoy various types of games for entertainment… locate their pleasure as rooted in the mental challenges necessary for success and the competitive gratification inherent to outwitting an opponent.’[4]
Utopianism, on the other hand, seems to have been undermined in the popular imagination due to its association with failure. In our current socio-political climate, ‘to call a political ideology or project “utopian” in this context was not only to signal that it was unrealistic or unrealizable,’ but also that utopianism as a whole is ‘irresponsibly and actively dangerous, an effort to exert political control over whole societies, freeze history, deny social complexity, and treat human beings as so much raw material for the fulfillment of grand philosophical visions.’[5] These visions were more often than not ‘the emanation of a single, individual will, a fantasy of total control.’[6] Remnants of a utopian desire persist, but have to contend with the bleak socio-political landscapes where they are often drowned out by the ‘empty din of globalized neoliberal capitalism’ and the general consensus within ‘mature capitalist liberal democracies’ that the ‘prospect of gradual progress under consensual, relatively depoliticized, liberal or social-democratic governance’ is the best path forward.[7] Because of its perceived failures, utopianism as a method of representing and bringing about concrete ‘replacement ideologies’[8] and ‘full-fledged alternative communities ready to supplant existing institutions’[9] has lost much of its foothold in the contemporary imagination, despite the urgent feeling that we need a better world now more than ever.
Not all utopianists see failure as anathema to the utopian project, and not all TTRPGs are designed to tell stories of victory and triumph. Some games, such as Ten Candles, Trophy Dark, The Quiet Year and The Deep Forest choose to focus on failure, bittersweet and negative emotions, and utopian communities that inevitably come to an end. A game like Dialect, designed by Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu, can help us understand how reorienting ourselves to failure and negative emotions through TTRPGs can create room for us to imagine and bring about alternative, better worlds.
Dialect focuses exclusively on failed utopias and contains no traditional action resolution mechanics. A single session of Dialect tells the story of an isolated community, referred to as the Isolation, ‘through its beginning, rise, and end’[10] as it attempts to carve out a place in the world separate from a hegemonic society looming in the background. This is a game ‘about language and how it dies,’ so that story is told through a language players invent that is tied to three central Aspects that define their isolation. As Hymes and Seyalıoğlu explain, ‘Aspects are either a single word or a short phrase that represents something fundamental about the Isolation. These will be the touchstones of your society, and the initial seeds from which the language grows.’[11] For example, the Martian outpost might have Aspects such as ‘Earth Destroyed by War’, ‘Shrine to NASA Mars Rover’ and ‘We Are All Children.’ These Aspects will change as your community and language evolve throughout the game until, inevitably, the community and its language die at the hands of the hegemonic society of the world outside the Isolation.
The game’s subject matter aligns with what we might expect from a representation of utopia. Hymes and Seyalıoğlu state explicitly in Dialect’s introduction their intent to champion language preservation and cultural pluralism and resist the alarming rate of language loss in our world. They clearly identify the killers of these languages: ‘they are being lost to the mundane everyday pressures of money, violence, social prestige, climate change, and frayed community.’[12] After stating this intent, they proceed with the rules of the game, but bookend the rules with another essay by Steven Bird which provides instructions on ‘how players of Dialect can fight language loss both across the world and within their own community.’[13] This is a game about bringing about a better world through fostering linguistic and cultural plurality in its fictional world and our real world.
Each session is framed by a backdrop that provides the outline of an Isolation for players to make their own and flesh out during play. These backdrops are written by a wide array of designers alongside Hymes and Seyalıoğlu and provide initial worldbuilding prompts, questions to define two of the Isolation’s three Aspects, and transitions between the three Ages of play that structure the story. The tones and settings of these backdrops vary, but one thing is consistent: the Isolation ‘will be left to simmer in what makes them special. They will change because of it.’[14] A utopian story must necessarily ‘assert its radical difference from what currently is’[15] in order to offer an alternative vision of a better world and way of being, and Dialect’s attention to the Isolation’s differences from the normative world creates this distance. More often than not, what makes the Isolation ‘special’ is the way in which members of the community are marginalized and oppressed by the normative world outside. This oppression can be abstract, as in Hymes’ and Seyalıoğlu’s ‘The Compound,’ wherein ‘a group has barricaded itself against a world they can no longer take part in’ and who ‘will create a new Utopian home.’[16] However, at least as often the sources of oppression and marginalization are crystal clear. Laura Simpson’s ‘Slave Uprising,’ Alex Roberts’ ‘Beyond the Village,’ and Ajit George’s ‘Velayuthapuram, Tamil Nadu 2006’ are respectively set in the aftermath of a violent uprising of enslaved people; in the ruins of an urban hellscape among a band of queer artists, laborers, and hustlers; and an imprisoned Dalit community in rural India.[17] The varying axes of oppression within these and other backdrops create the pluralism that contemporary utopianism requires and that accompanies the game’s explicit commitment to bringing about a better world.
This thematic pluralism is supported by the game’s depiction of the diverse and often contradictory perspectives that arise in truly democratic spaces.[18] Although all players are members of the Isolation, they each relate differently to the Isolation’s Aspects; players’ characters are modeled after fifteen distinct archetypes that are largely defined by their role in the community and their relationship to its Aspects. The Leader, for example, identifies with all of the Aspects, but draws their power from one in particular, whereas the Oracle identifies with two of the Aspects and foresees one of the Aspects being the Isolation’s ruin. Each player relates differently to the fundamental Aspects of their community’s identity and, crucially, are each given equal power at the table. There is no Game Master running the game and Hymes and Seyalıoğlu explicitly state that ‘in Dialect all players have equal authority at the table and a shared stake in the narrative.’[19] This democratic approach combines with Dialect’s pluralism and the improvisational nature of TTRPGs to create contingent and open-ended stories that run counter to utopianism’s authoritarian potential, representing instead ‘a greater pluralism, provisionality, and reflexivity’ that defines much of contemporary utopianism.[20]
All of these aspects line up with popular expectations of utopia. The game is committed to representing counter-cultural communities, often of marginalized identities, existing in isolation outside a looming hegemonic society, in order to inspire players to fight for a better linguistic and cultural future in the real world. What clashes with these expectations is the game’s divergence from the narratives of success we are taught to expect from much utopian fiction and from our gaming experiences. Why focus on counter-cultures that inevitably fail as opposed to successful utopias? Why build the game around ‘negative’ emotions? And how does grounding play in language impact players’ utopianism beyond the tabletop? Understanding the ways in which failure, negative feelings, and language are all intimately tied up in imagining alternative, better worlds can begin to answer these questions.
Many current utopian scholars have come to identify failure as an integral part of imagining utopia, for better and for worse. Ruth Levitas emphasizes that failure is ‘an inevitable part of the process of trying to think utopia itself.’[21] Fredric Jameson makes the case that our utopian imaginations are ‘hostage to our own mode of production’ as dictated by our lived reality. Because of this, ‘at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment… and that therefore the best Utopias are those that fail the most comprehensively.’[22] For both Levitas and Jameson, the most valuable utopian texts are those that reveal the structures and limits of the utopian imagination. To do this, they must be more than ‘compensatory fantasy, mere wishful thinking.’[23] They must imagine alternative social realities radically different from existing hegemonic structures, but they must also fail, and they must fail convincingly. Jameson proposes that utopia is unimaginable, ‘as a result of the systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners.’[24] But Levitas thinks this goes too far, and cautions against ‘[o]veremphasis on openness, process and impossibility.’[25] For Levitas, some aspects of utopia are more imaginable than others, and the limits of what we can imagine can be shifted over time. Failures create new possibilities in their wakes. Not only does Levitas’s approach attempt to reconcile utopianism and its strong associations with failure, but it creates space for a utopianism that remains reflexive, critical, and able to iteratively improve itself through failure.
Such an approach to utopianism dovetails with critics examining our relationships with success and failure and their emotional associations. For Jack Halberstam, failure can be a means of countering the nationalist and capitalist hegemonies that depend on success stories laden as they are with assumptions linking success to profit, a positive attitude, and a morally upright nature rather than structural advantages in society.[26] ‘Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.’[27] He proposes an alternative ‘queer art of failure,’ a ‘refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing.’[28] The queerness of this approach derives from the verb form of queer, ‘to mean reorienting, redirecting, deviating from and causing to deviate.’[29] Failure itself can resist oppressive structures that support narratives of success above all else. Embracing failure in this way necessarily means entering into spaces with a complicated mix of positive and negative emotions, but this too can be generative.
Sara Ahmed explores how ‘the history of happiness can be thought of as a history of associations’ guiding us toward certain ways of being that are tied to happiness in the dominant consciousness. This associative power means happiness can ‘be used to redescribe social norms as social goods,’ and because happiness is assumed to be a ‘self-evident good,’ its association with those social norms becomes evidence itself regarding the value of those norms. Ahmed draws on ‘feminist critiques of the figure of “the happy housewife,” black critiques of the myth of “the happy slave,” and queer critiques of the sentimentalization of heterosexuality as “domestic bliss”’ to underline her argument that ‘we are directed by the promise of happiness, as the promise that happiness is what follows if we do this or that.’[30] Understanding happiness as an object that can direct us towards normative structures supports Bonnie Ruberg’s assertion that ‘a refusal to have fun represents, I believe, a rejection of the heteronormative status quo that takes place on the level of the body.’ For Ruberg, ‘no-fun games’ ‘can productively bring into question the traditional goals of video games, those who play them, and pleasure more broadly.’[31] The promises of success and happiness can be used to create ‘a perpetually distant goal that keeps the neoliberal subject in line with the heteronorm.’[32]
When we play a game like Dialect that asks us to embrace failure and negative emotions, we can ‘uncover underexplored modes of experience, both as players and as queer subjects in the world’[33] to imagine stories that are motivated by ‘the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable,’ that ‘quietly [lose,] and in losing [imagine] other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.’[34] These failed utopian visions can ‘generate new ones, Utopian visions that include those of the past, and modify or correct them,’[35] and can carry those visions and affects ‘beyond the game, driving us to find other playful, powerful, and overlooked site of counter-affective potential in our lives’ in games and out of games.[36] Failed utopian narratives must maintain a delicate balance to motivate players in this way by offering what Mathias Thaler calls ‘bleak dreams, not nightmares.’ These stories sustain ‘a hope that is constrained by the memory of violence and suffering, yet powerful in its aspiration to mobilize oppositional agency.’[37] Dialect offers what Katherine Angel Cross refers to as an iterative ‘laboratory of dreams’[38] within which players can imagine transient utopias from a plurality of perspectives without succumbing to the authoritarian streak that threatens other utopian visions or being tempted by narratives of nationalistic and capitalistic success. Players are not only required to share power equally with other players and their contrasting visions of utopia at the table, they do so knowing that what they create will fail, but there is hope to be found amidst the sadness as well.
Dialect balances the potential bleakness of failure with the hopefulness of utopia by evoking a wide range of positive and negative emotions with every card and Age transition. The game takes place over three Ages that see the Isolation change as it draws nearer to its end. During each Age, every player plays a card from their hand, which can either be word-building cards or action cards. Word-building cards contain concepts (such as ‘Work,’ ‘Friend,’ ‘Environmental Feature’) and allow players to create new words or phrases that connect the concept on the card to an Aspect of their Isolation. Action cards modify words and phrases that have already been created. Players then roleplay a conversation using the newly created or modified word based on a prompt at the bottom of the card, making their characters’ relationship to the newly defined word clear. Once players have taken their turns, they draw a card corresponding to the upcoming Age.
Age 1’s deck contains almost exclusively word-building cards that run the gamut of emotions. It is a generative age of language growth where the good mostly outweighs the bad and the Isolation comes into its own. Sixteen of the twenty-five cards in Age 2, on the other hand, are actions rather than word-building concepts, marking a shift in the Isolation from generative growth to the foreshadowing of the end. This shift is reinforced by the inclusion of concepts like ‘traitor’ and ‘faction’ among the few word-building cards, helping to depict a divided community. Age 3 is a slimmer deck of fourteen cards, eleven of which are actions. The three word-building cards offer light in the midst of the Isolation’s end: the concepts are ‘promise,’ a ‘unity saying,’ and a ‘symbol of hope,’ asking players to roleplay scenes of ‘words they can live by,’ ‘moments of courage,’ and ‘finding hope in the darkness.’ The arc of the game bends toward failure, but not without hope, and not without creating moments of joy, happiness, and community along the way. The Isolation that a group creates will not be a perfect blueprint of utopia, nor will it be a nightmarish anti-utopia implying that a better world is not even possible. It will be the story of a failed counter-culture whose failure does not preclude it from generating moments of profound beauty and connection alongside its strife and eventual end. This potent mix of positive and negative affects creates room for players to explore a more complicated emotional space, where success and happiness are not straightforwardly mapped together. Increasingly, games studies scholars are recognizing the importance of such complicated emotional spaces for players,[39] spaces that are prime opportunities for engaging with failed utopias precisely because they include negative emotions.
The game’s ability to iterate on these visions of utopia and to have players leave the game motivated to bring about a better world relies on the game’s narrative and mechanical focus on language. The mechanical systems of TTRPGs are important to consider when exploring their utopianism. Dialect transforms language itself into a component of the game, asking players to create and use new words and imagine themselves and the world through this new language, opening imaginative spaces that were previously impossible, tied to a community or way of being in the world fundamentally different from their own. Dialect’s focus on language blurs the line between the game and the real world, generating messy utopian visions that take on a life beyond any single terminal utopia, carrying over into future games or into real social and political action.
Language is inherently political and a major contributor to our imaginative ‘mode of production,’ a fact recognized by colonial powers that use linguistic violence as one method of alienating indigenous peoples from their culture, identity, and land. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues, language is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture, which is why it ‘is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe.’[40] Language carries ‘the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history’ and, even more so, carries ‘the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings.’[41] Hymes has agreed, remarking, ‘language is a tool, and it’s a tool that we can wield, and it’s a tool that has a lot of identity built up into it, but it’s also a perpetuator of power and other structures and beliefs.’[42] Dialect undermines unjust power dynamics by intervening at the level of language so people can rearticulate their reality and orient themselves towards their social, political, and more-than-human environment differently.
Dialect makes language itself the site of imaginative resistance against the violence of oppressive structures. Language is not treated as a transparent medium through which players interact with each other. Instead, players encounter language as part of the material interface with the game, together with their own bodies, and components such as the game cards. Although language is an interface at the edge of the game, at the same time it is a dynamic object at the heart of the game, which can be actively transformed through play.
The key to language’s transformative potential in Dialect lies in the way Hymes and Seyalıoğlu have rendered language as a material component of play, thereby defamiliarizing it while allowing it to be transformed. All components in analog games act as material interfaces that draw the player into the game world, whether they be miniatures, character sheets, or maps. But for the most part, these interfaces draw a line between the game world and the real world; as Janet Murray describes, game components often function as “threshold objects” that “draw the player into the game world while simultaneously maintaining its boundaries as a distinct space.”[43] Threshold objects serve as material interfaces with which players can interact with the game world. They exist both in the world of reality and in the imagined world of the game, occupying what Paul Wake characterizes as a “double space.” Wake maintains that “analog games are bound by their materiality, by their location (the kitchen, the game room, the café), the tabletop, and by the worlds of their components,” and this materiality creates “a dual space between the two, existing materially in ‘our’ world and imaginatively in the world to which the components function as an invitation.” According to Wake, analog games can “[exploit] the ambiguity of these intersecting play spaces” through their material interfaces. [44] Not only do these material interfaces offer an imaginatively generative ambiguity, but interfaces themselves can have a powerful impact on players; Claus Pias asserts that ‘[at] the interface, not only do players take control over a game, but a game also takes control over its players.’[45] The material interfaces of a game create something like an ecotone between the imagined world of the game and reality and play a crucial role in allowing the experimentation and emotions that take place within a game to transfer out into the real world.
In Dialect, language itself is the central game component and material interface through which players interact with the game world. Language is the threshold object, the “invitation” to the imagined world of play, but it is also necessarily a part of our imaginative mode of production, shaping how we relate to the game world. Through play, players can collaboratively modify their linguistic means of relating to our world and carry the results of those experiments with them forward into future utopias, changed by their interactions with the game and their new languages. This motivation to inspire real change is necessary to keep ‘Utopia open as a space in which to reach out to the real possibility of a transformed future’ rather than simply serving as an empty dialectical process that fails to bring about any real change.
Using language as a material component of play allows the words and phrases invented in a game of Dialect to exist inside and outside the magic circle simultaneously. Dialect achieves this by having players physically record information about the Isolation and its language on index cards that are arranged in concentric rings corresponding to the three Ages of the game. These cards are moved, modified, and even destroyed as the game progresses, letting players spatially imagine and tactilely engage with the Isolation’s culture through its language. Every TTRPG necessarily depends on language to mediate play at the table, but in Dialect, players can transform that language, and actively remediate their play by design. This experience allows players to reflect on the constraints limiting their utopian imaginations while iteratively working to shape new visions in future plays of Dialect and in their own real life.
The game’s conclusion emphasizes these implicit effects. After Age 3 ends, players receive a Legacy card that contains three reflection prompts. Each card contains a variety of positive and negative prompts, but once each player has offered their final reflection on their individual characters, collective community, and language, the game ends. Hymes and Seyalıoğlu encourage players to debrief the game and to engage critically with the experience the group just had, and once this meta-reflection is over, players are left with one final message: ‘you are the sole speakers of your dialect now.’[46] Despite being a game ‘about language and how it dies,’ the language does not completely die. Players leave the table as the sole speakers of this language that carries the history and values of their collaboratively created Isolation and the messy emotions that the end of their transient utopia inspired. When reflecting on this experiment, perhaps an awareness of some of their imaginative limits can arise alongside a responsibility to carry the values of their Isolation forward with them into new utopian visions. Such future visions might come from iterating upon this reflexive process through future transient utopias in Dialect or from players’ actions as social and political agents emerging from the game’s bleak dreams armed with new linguistic resources for relating to the world around them.
Dialect will by no means makes activists or revolutionaries of its players, and the reading of the game I offer is not meant to portray a universal experience of the game. But through its explicitly utopian goals, its embrace of failure and negativity, and its centering of language as an inherently political and immersive analog interface, Dialect creates a structured space in which it is possible to ‘experiment with forgotten futures and the utopias we dare not dream’[47] by engaging with the queer art of failure in ‘the acceptance of the finite’ and ‘the embrace of the absurd.’ In doing so, ‘rather than resisting endings and limits,’ it ‘[revels] in and [cleaves] to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.’[48] In doing so, perhaps it can ‘[throw] off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet,’[49] teach us to ‘fail again, fail better,’[50] and recognize that ‘empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers.’[51] Perhaps TTRPGs like Dialect can give us space to imagine a utopianism that is reflexive, responsible, and, ultimately, doomed to fail, but that fails over and over again until, just maybe, all those failures combine to bring about a world that stories of success, joy, and mastery alone could never imagine.
[1] Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 30.
[2] Ruth Levitas, ‘For Utopia: The (Limits of the) Utopian Function in Late Capitalist Society’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 3.2–3 (2000), p. 27.
[3] Staffan Björk and José Pablo Zagal, ‘Game Design and Role-Playing Games’, in Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, by José Pablo Zagal and Sebastian Deterding (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018), p. 327.
[4] Sarah Lynne Bowman, The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010), p. 83; Mary T. Nguyen, ‘Mind Games: With No Aversions to Diversions, Columbia’s Adult Gamers Come Together for Social Fun and Mental Challenges’, Columbia Daily Tribune, (Columbia, Missouri, 9 March 2007); Bill MacKenty, ‘All Play and No Work: Computer Games Are Invading the Classroom — and Not a Moment Too Soon’, School Library Journal, (2006), p. 47.
[5] Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives, ed. by S. D. Chrostowska and James D. Ingram (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017), p. xii.
[6] David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Paradigm 14 (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press : Distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 65.
[7] Chrostowska and Ingram, Political Uses of Utopia, pp. xvi–xxii.
[8] Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jason R. Hackworth, Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019).
[9] Kimberley Kinder, The Radical Bookstore: Counterspace for Social Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021), p. 8.
[10] Kathryn Hymes and Hakan Seyalıoğlu, Dialect: A Game About Language and How It Dies (United States: Thorny Games, 2018), p. 2.
[11] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 17.
[12] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 1.
[13] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 117.
[14] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 2.
[15] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), p. xv.
[16] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 69.
[17] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 94,100,98.
[18] See Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Radical Thinkers (New York: Verso, 2009).
[19] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 2.
[20] Levitas, “For Utopia,” p. 39.
[21] Levitas, “For Utopia,” pp. 38–39.
[22] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xiii.
[23] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 125.
[24] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. 289.
[25] Levitas, Utopia as Method, p. 124.
[26] Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005).
[27] Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 2–3.
[28] Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, pp. 11–12.
[29] Jess Marcotte, ‘Queering Control(Lers) Through Reflective Game Design Practices’, Game Studies, 18.3 (2018) <http://gamestudies.org/1803/articles/marcotte>.
[30] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 2–14.
[31] Bonnie Ruberg, ‘No Fun: The Queer Potential of Video Games That Annoy, Anger, Disappoint, Sadden, and Hurt’, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 2.2 (2015), p. 110.
[32] Ruberg, “No Fun,” p. 112.
[33] Ruberg, “No Fun,” p. 122.
[34] Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, p. 88.
[35] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xv.
[36] Ruberg, “No Fun,” p. 122.
[37] Mathias Thaler, ‘Bleak Dreams, Not Nightmares’, Constellations, 26.4 (2019), p. 1,22.
[38] Katherine Angel Cross, ‘The New Laboratory of Dreams: Role-Playing Games as Resistance’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40.3/4 (2012), pp. 70–88.
[39] Doug Maynard and Joanna Herron, ‘The Allure of Struggle and Failure in Cooperative Board Games’, Analog Game Studies, III.III (2016); Jane McGonigal, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (New York: Penguin Press, 2011); Jesper Juul, The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games., Playful Thinking Ser (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013).
[40] Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, (London and Portsmouth, N.H.: JCurrey ; Heinemann, 1986), p. 4.
[41] Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, Decolonising the Mind, pp. 15–16.
[42] Gil Hova and Emma Larkin, ‘Words at Play’, Ludology, p. 20:45-21:06.
[43] Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (New York, NY: The Free Press, 2017), p. 134; Paul Wake, ‘Token Gestures: Towards a Theory of Immersion in Analog Games’, Analog Game Studies, 2019 <http://analoggamestudies.org/2019/09/token-gestures-towards-a-theory-of-immersion-in-analog-games/>.
[44] Wake.
[45] Claus Pias, ‘The Game Player’s Duty: The User as the Gestalt of the Ports’, in Media Archaeology : Approaches, Applications, and Implications, by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), p. 166.
[46] Hymes and Seyalıoğlu, Dialect, p. 65.
[47] Cross, “The New Laboratory of Dreams,” p. 85.
[48] Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, pp. 186–87.
[49] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, p. xii.
[50] Samuel Beckett, Murphy, 12th edn. (New York: Grove Press, 1938).
[51] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 256.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010)
Beckett, Samuel, Murphy, 12th edn (New York: Grove Press, 1938)
Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969)
Björk, Staffan, and José Pablo Zagal, ‘Game Design and Role-Playing Games’, in Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, by José Pablo Zagal and Sebastian Deterding (New York, NY: Routledge, 2018)
Blyth, Mark, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
Bowman, Sarah Lynne, The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010)
Chrostowska, S. D., and James D. Ingram, eds., Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017)
Cross, Katherine Angel, ‘The New Laboratory of Dreams: Role-Playing Games as Resistance’, Women’s Studies Quarterly, 40.3/4 (2012), 70–88
Ehrenreich, Barbara, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, 1st ed. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009)
Graeber, David, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Paradigm (Chicago, Ill.), 14 (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press : Distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Hackworth, Jason R., Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019)
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Benjamin Platt earned his MA from Oregon State University and is currently an independent scholar, working at the intersection of ecocriticism, affect theory, and games studies. His research focuses primarily on how a broad range of texts, from contemporary ecopoetry to tabletop roleplaying games, can prompt , and even demand, political and social responses from their readers.
This article will be included in the forthcoming collection Utopia on the Tabletop (Ping Press). Thanks to the British Science Fiction Association, the Sussex Humanities Lab (Open Practice Group), and the University of Sussex School of Media, Arts and Humanities.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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