We were lucky enough to chat with Kellynn Wee, researcher and designer of tabletop roleplaying games, about solarpunk, utopia, memory, narrative and chance, the TTRPG scene in Singapore, and much more.
Hi Kellynn. Why don’t you start by introducing yourself?
Sure, my name is Kellynn Wee, and I’m currently a PhD candidate at UCL. I’ve been looking at play communities in Singapore, and how players relate to fantasy and speculative worldbuilding in tabletop roleplaying games. I have a background in anthropology, so I’m interested in the social relationships and meanings that emerge from these play communities – in how games can become sites to explore different relationships and identities, and how games allow us to deal with different forms of value, different approaches to uncertainty, or new ways of imagining the self. I’ve also been working on a climate futures game, Move Quietly and Tend Things, which I describe as a bittersweet utopia.
This research involves a lot of playing games, right?
Oh for sure. I’ve never played so many games in my life! I recently calculated and it was nearly 250 games in about twenty months of ethnography, which should kill my passion for games, but somehow hasn’t. And I think that’s a good sign.
Wow! Has the play sometimes felt like work?
It’s a good question. There are always interesting tensions between play and work, right? Have you read Play Money by Julian Dibbell? It’s about quitting his day job and becoming a full-time loot farmer …
No, but that sounds kind of up my street.
Well, there were definitely games that felt like drudgery. I think it’s because of the volume of games I played. Some games just didn’t spark. It might be the dynamics of the players at the table, the kind of energy people are bringing to it. Roleplaying games are so dependent on the particular constellation of individuals at that point in time.
Right.
But even when they don’t quite spark, it’s not exactly like work. I mean, I still had fun!
That’s good! I guess ‘work’ and ‘play’ is one wobbly binary, and then ‘work’ and ‘fun’ is another wobbly binary? There is some interesting writing by Bo Ruberg about the variety of emotions associated with play — fun is an important one, but it’s not the only one.
Sure.
You are researching the games and the players and the communities. But can I ask about games themselves as research tools? I’m wondering how games and play have been used in anthropological research historically, and whether you see potential for using them in new ways in the future.
Well, it’s pretty common for games to be pedagogical tools, right? They’re ways to place students into an anthropological frame of mind. I know that games have been successfully used to reframe research findings beyond textual outputs. For instance, I recently attended a talk by Andrea Pia, who designed a game for students to explore the topic of Chinese rural migration. They transformed their research into an interactive digital narrative where you’d make choices for a migrant character to proceed through the world, and it used photos, videos, quotes and characters that derived from Pia’s fieldwork.
That sounds interesting.
Yes, it was really interesting. Using games as research methodologies though? Maybe that’s something that hasn’t been explored all that much, or at least it’s something I’ve yet to fully grasp myself. I wonder why not though, right? Playing, especially role-playing, and ethnography share many principles. The first thing that comes to mind is the art of asking questions well. There’s this act of iteration, of only understanding whether a method works by doing it, and then coming back to ask what sort of tools or approaches you need to get to an understanding that you want. There’s the act of making the implicit explicit, of paying attention to what is unsaid as much as what is said. There’s the consideration of different relationships, different identities, how people are going to come together and interact in the same space. There’s this element of sharing sensorial or bodily space.
These are all aspects that anthropologists pay attention to. And so do tabletop roleplayers. A roleplaying game can also make aspects of relationships and elements of social currency visible. I also think games can act almost like a kind of meta-reality tool. While anthropologists and other social scientists often act on the principle of making the familiar strange when thinking about their work, I think games can often carry out the opposite act of making the strange familiar–exploring peculiar worlds and peculiar viewpoints by using everyday tools that help us frame our capacity for action regardless of the circumstances. So yes, many game practices resemble ethnographic practices and ethnographic thinking. It’s exciting to think what might be done with that, but it’s still a question I’m exploring.
Your answer is making me think of this interview as a very rules-lite roleplaying game.
Should I roll some dice?
Actually, I’d love to ask you about dice! And how dice and fiction intersect, I guess. It might involve some participatory deliberation beforehand. ‘What is this going to mean?’ Some parameters are determined, explicitly or implicitly. After the die roll, there’s more negotiation. ‘What did that just mean?’ So can you talk about dice in tabletop role-playing?
Well, dice only has meaning in relation to the group. Anyone who’s played a bunch of TTRPGs will probably agree. A natural 20 signifies different things at different tables, and these meanings are often hotly negotiated and contested by everyone present. The meaning of success or the satisfaction of rolling well is very contextual. It’s fascinating considering this is one thing that is an objective result, right?
I’ve played games where the dice is all-important, where they’ve become sort of like gacha competitions. So, dice become just a way to roll for bizarre items or outcomes. It’s no longer really about telling a cohesive story, but about seeing what you can pull out of this gacha machine. It’s this pleasure of illogicality, of scale, of spectacle, that people enjoy.
But I’ve also seen games in which the results don’t really matter. People like to say that they do, and they always say that they let the dice tell the story. But when you’ve got a pro Dungeon Master who’s weaving the storylines and everyone’s invested in a specific kind of story arc, or tone, or emotional conclusion, the dice don’t really stand a chance. They might determine a narrative outcome, but not necessarily a narrative experience.
It’s interesting. I think I know the kind of games you mean. And yet it feels to me that rolling the dice does make an important difference. Even if it’s not massively determining the direction of the narrative.
Dice can definitely create major branching points; one simple example relates to the question of whether you live or die. But a clever group can also steer things around those dice rolls, to repair the narrative in spite of a consequence that occurred due to a die roll. If something occurred that would be completely dissonant to the story, they will find ways to avoid that gamble, to mitigate its consequences narratively, or to quickly agree on a storyline that “feels” right. Or the dissonance is resolved through a collaborative act of attaching meaning to an unexpected consequence so it doesn’t feel out of place. Ultimately, regardless of the plot, the narrative experience is preserved. I think that’s what happens with groups who are good at playing together and who agree on what they want out of a game.
So maybe the numbers become a kind of texture on which you paint the story?
Completely.
Maybe that’s a good cue to talk utopia, actually. Maybe it’s just glib, but I feel like there’s a resonance between the creatively evolving expectations of a TTRPG storyline, and the way a utopia can actually be constantly evolving too. But what happens when we bring them together?
As a baseline, let’s say we’re imagining worlds that are very harmonious, where resources are relatively abundant, where terrible things seldom to people — maybe even never happen to people. Can games about these worlds be fun? Can there be exciting stories told in these worlds? And if so, how?
Oh boy, I have grappled with this question for quite a long time. It’s something I’ve explored through Move Quietly and Tend Things. If I were to write a really utopian game, then would the traditional tensions of TTRPGs — enemies, scarcity of resources, maybe even deep emotional interpersonal conflicts — would all of that occur? What would be compelling to people who are playing a game, which is really all about deliberately putting obstacles in your own way so that you can get over them?
That’s Bernard Suits’s definition of a game, isn’t it. Voluntarily overcoming unnecessary obstacles.
Yes, exactly. I was playing Cezar Capacle’s Scraps, for example. It’s a bit of a resource-gathering game. I really like it because of how it uses this clever Tetris mechanic as a key part of the game–it ties in with the game’s ethos of careful salvaging, crafting, never taking more than you need. It’s a non-violent game, and there’s a symbiotic relationship with nature that the game asks its players to explore.
With utopia games I think there’s an issue, at least for me, with fidelity to genre. When I played Scraps, I found that it was very easy to veer into a fairytale, as opposed to the more solarpunk genre that Cezar was going for. It was the first utopia game I’d ever played, and I found it hard to land on the right point on the sliding scale between magic and science. I found it hard to understand how a utopia game can introduce tension – and maybe stakes – without the soothing, happy ending of a fairytale genre.
That feels familiar! If it’s a world without conflict, or where conflicts are fundamentally transformed, suddenly there is this allure of allegory and magic. How did you approach it with Move Quietly and Tend Things?
My conclusions around a utopia game really took a long time to develop. When I started writing it, I did think, “If this is all happy, then what is the point of playing it? Is there a risk of making a very static picture?” I didn’t want to make a fairytale; I didn’t want to make a world where everything was perfect. What would that world look like, anyway? A perfect world for whom, exactly?
So Move Quietly and Tend Things has ended up being a bit of a bittersweet utopia. That’s the word that my playtesters have often used to describe it. The game is set on a derelict megastructure somewhere in a flooded Southeast Asia. I suggest in the game that it’s set in the ruins of Marina Bay Sands near the Gardens by the Bay, which is a symbol of Singapore, which in turn is often a symbol of an idealised, techno-optimistic, solarpunk Asian future. In the game, the players are cut off from the rest of the world, and the game begins with a sense of insularity as you build out this little world together and make a place that comes alive with character relationships. It’s a peaceful futuristic world that eventually turns backwards on itself, because the game is about dealing with a history that hasn’t been fully resolved. Players unearth repositories and relics that float up with the waves, stuff that hints at the cost of this utopia. They have to decide if they want to remember this discovery, what it means to remember this discovery, or if they want to forget it. They explore how these decisions impact their world.
You’re sort of pulling in the past, which is our present, into the game. So it is a hopeful future, where players explore a different politics of care. But at the same time, you’re sort of drawing in the conflicts of the past into the narrative. So that might be a kind of cheat! It’s hard to make a game about this topic. I don’t know, what do you think?
I love the sound of that approach. It reminds me a little of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa where I grew up, and other restorative transitional justice processes too I suppose. More broadly, I guess it’s tempting to see all narratives in terms of conflict, but we don’t have to. It sounds like, with Move Quietly and Tend Things, you have these elements of mysteries gradually unfolding, and a kind of collaborative worldbuilding, and the fun and horror of seeing our own society estranged, and especially these bewitchingly complex questions about what to remember and how to remember it. That’s what gives you tension and transformation, what gives you jeopardy, what gives you high stakes. You could frame it all as ‘conflict,’ conflict between different ethical values or something. But I feel like that’s a stretch. I guess I would resist the idea that all narratives desperately ‘need’ conflict, especially violent conflict over scarce resources for basic needs. If you just look at actual books and films and shows, many of them are just aren’t about that! But I think roleplaying games have a way to go to support more varied storytelling. There are some games that are doing so, like maybe Chuubo’s and Glitch by Jenna Katerin Moran, and The Good Society and other games by Vee Hendro and Hayley Gordon.
Yes, I think so. Like you, I’m also drawing from my own historical positioning as part of a carefully constructed and very young state. Our relationship to history is, like every other nation’s, incredibly complicated. My country’s material composition changes drastically every thirty years. We’re really small, and very crowded, and things are constantly being torn down or rebuilt. So the window of opportunity for revisiting a piece of your past is narrow.
There’s an intense sense of nostalgia that people in Singapore feel, that feels very accelerated, and there’s this pervasive, sharp sting of loss that echoes because the thing that was here ten years ago is gone. People get nostalgic about old shopping malls and McDonald’s outlets. I used to work for the Singapore Memory Project, which was focused on collecting oral histories and sharing bits from the past, and I saw firsthand how nostalgic people felt about the most mundane everyday things, like bus depots. You can leave for a few years and come back and feel just totally lost in this megapolis of new things. That was the feeling that I was drawing from, when I was thinking about what could come from the past. I wanted to refuse the idea that stuff can just go away. And I guess a testament to how obdurate things can be, how things can just stick around in the world for centuries. Because in my country, you just get rid of stuff.
Or do you?
In some ways the game comes from that feeling, rather than some really precise academic argument. A game is a very different endeavour from writing anything academic. I had to be comfortable with the fact that I was never going to be an expert on climate politics in my country. I would never know the same things that an environmental historian would know. I tell myself that that’s okay because I’m still a citizen of the world. I can still have a vision about it. But that was hard. Unlearning a lot of that academic training – needing to carefully substantiate every claim – was tough.
Can you tell us a little more about what climate futures means to you, and how it relates to the game?
The game, at the end of the day, is about a community that is alive, and thriving, and stable, but which has failed to reckon with its complicity in what makes it that way. The players get to choose if they want to bury the past or reckon with the past and the choices they make have particular consequences. It’s not what I set out to write, but it’s what it has become.
And I realised that this climate future I was writing about, that I was asking people to play in, is really a climate present. Singapore, too, is a beautiful little city, a jewel of modernity and brightness and wealth, an island in a flooding world. But its land growth depends on importing sand from Cambodia and destroying Cambodia’s mangroves, its migrant labourers – who suffer from the brunt of climate injustice – are drawn from elsewhere in Asia and are treated badly, it is fixated on economic progress over the equitable redistribution of wealth. And these are questions that many people in Singapore don’t want to reckon with.
So maybe that’s where the bittersweetness comes in. It’s a utopic future, but the bitterness lies in the question of – how did they get there? Were they complicit? What was the cost? Why is the community so small and so insular? Where is everyone else in this world? Who or what was lost in this process, what were the series of choices that led us here, who paid for this shining climate future? Maybe buried deep inside the game is a call to action, to practice the act of reckoning.
Do you also encounter Southeast Asia refracted through the lens of those Eurocentric speculative imaginaries? For instance — maybe moving away from D&D — you mentioned before this interview how images of Singapore often pop up as ‘inspiration’ on the r/Solarpunk subreddit.
I don’t really know how to deal with this issue of how the aesthetics of Asian supercities are used in both dystopian and utopian imaginaries of the future. Through a friend’s recommendation, I remember encountering Astria Suparak’s work — Asian Futures, Without Asians — that I think has articulated a lot of the tensions and complexities in these imaginaries much better than I ever would. Just as a person dealing with both ends of it, and not as any kind of expert on the matter, I guess I feel resigned.
And of course it bothers me too. It asks me to deal with my very complicated feelings about Singapore, which is seen, just like you said, as a solarpunk utopia–all green architecture and clever technology to mitigate the effects of climate change. Singapore looks fantastic, but there’s this deep disconnect between the aesthetics of environmental success, and the actual realities and costs of these creations.
So what is a hopeful Asian climate future? A lot of people look to the work of Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, of course; this idea of clean, wind-powered, bright futures. What other aesthetics of Asian futurism are possible? I’m not sure. I think it’s still an open question.
Architecture is political, of course, but I wonder if it can sometimes be more equivocal than we tend to acknowledge? So for example, you take one look at the Blade Runner type city, and you’re supposed be able to say, ‘Here is a particular type of like hyper-neoliberalism gone rampant.’ I wonder if we didn’t jump to conclusions, might we find alternative socio-economic correlates for those aesthetics? Might games help us to associate maybe multiple different political and social meanings with the same set of aesthetics?
Sure, that’s definitely a possibility. I really like that idea. But I think in some sense the political and social assumptions of a particular set of aesthetics are also so deeply encoded into the aesthetics that it can be very hard to move away from. In Move Quietly and Tend Things, for example, there are drones; in the game I have them as sort of slightly outdated, clunky, half-broken things as opposed to the Black Mirror-esque image of these super killer bee drones, but they still elicited very strong reactions from players, who were like, “in my utopia there aren’t any drones.” And that’s a fair response for people for whom drones are war weapons and surveillance tech. And then I ask myself, why am I trying to make drones cute? Doesn’t that in itself tap into a particular kind of discourse? The mixed feelings we have about technology as a cure-all to the ills of climate change seep into the games. I’ve found in playing Move Quietly and Tend Things that there’s a real fondness for the analogue–objects that we feel we can grasp all the affordances of, rather than things that are networked, which we find more sinister.
I also wonder if tabletop roleplaying games are the best vehicle for remedying the associations we have with specific aesthetics. Of course TTRPG books can have gorgeous art that help to frame the worlds we play in, but at the end of the day it’s already such an effort to create and sustain an intersubjective world together. TTRPG game books already often need to refer to prior inspirations drawn from other media in order to help players understand the aesthetics of an imagined universe; for example, I’m thinking about games like Brindlewood Bay, which asks us to think about the aesthetics and genre of cozy murder mysteries like Murder, She Wrote; or a recent game I read called Apocalypse Keys, which draws from the aesthetics of Hellboy. I wondered what I should write as a referent for people playing Move Quietly and Tend Things. Imagine the aesthetics of r/solarpunk, but make it your own? Is it less demanding for a viewer to explore an alternative association to aesthetics in a more fully formed story–a video game, a book, a TV show? I love TTRPGs, but I’m not wedded to the idea that it’s the best form for everything.
How has the playtesting been generally?
I have playtested it a number of times. There were some surprises. At one stage, as we were crafting this world, I attempted to introduce interpersonal conflicts—people having divergent desires or ideas of what a good world looks like. This particular playtest turned into something akin to a parliamentary debate, which is the way we’re conditioned to discuss the future, right? Like politicians. “I want this future because of A, B, and C.” That observation fascinated me, and I knew I needed to change things because that wasn’t my initial intention.
People go to all kinds of odd places when not given enough information. The first few playtests were so open and improvisational, and went so far from what I thought I had set up. I said, ‘This is post climate collapse,’ and they said, ‘Okay, we’re building mushroom islands in the sky.’ I had to say a lot about what I wanted to do, testing the balance between structure and openness. The experience was very bizarre and very interesting. I’d like to playtest it a little more to see how the pacing works and to observe what people can do with it. I believe we’re nearing the end, though.
There is a challenge here about giving players that space for imagination and desire to run wild. That can be exhilarating. To have that permission to dream, to imagine those mushroom islands in the sky, to learn to disregard that deceptive little voice that’s always telling us, ‘It’s unreasonable, it’s impossible, be sensible, you’ll only make things worse.’ But the challenge is to provide that space, while still rigorously testing out these possibilities, enhancing our understanding of what is concretely possible. If we’re doing both those things, then perhaps we’re educating hope, in Ernst Bloch’s sense.
Oh gosh, it’s tough. Considering the types of futures generated through the games, I also believe the outcomes were significantly influenced by the pre-existing dynamics of the playtesters. Like, when I was playtesting with friends, the primary aim was to have fun. So, concentrating hard to meticulously imagine the future wasn’t as important as making others laugh, or building on someone else’s idea, or making someone else feel heard.
Right. Maybe ‘yes, and …’ isn’t the best way to design institutions and formulate policy. I think that connects with a second challenge. When given ample freedom, players often adopt existing narratives about the future. They may develop a feeling of ownership over them, and a sense of agency, and maybe a sense of legitimacy through collaboration. These narratives, however, are generated and manufactured elsewhere. Players will ‘invent’ a techno-fix narrative about climate change because it’s what they’ve been drip-fed through the media. The promises that this is the space to create something new and alternative aren’t always fulfilled.
I wonder if people can envisage plausible non-techno-utopian futures. I noticed that when I refrained from introducing concepts like hydroponics or drones, players veered drastically towards the realm of magic. Without such imagery, it was challenging to avoid straying into magic. The dominant narrative of a hopeful future is that technology will solve all our problems.
And I think also that this idea of envisaging the future is attached to an element of solutionism, that you have to somehow fix climate change through a game, just as you said. But I don’t know how, and I don’t know if I want to ask players to become policymakers or protestors, or if that’s something that a game, within the three hours you’re playing it, can do. Can players make totally new narratives through games, especially with something like climate change, where it’s so daunting to understand and so existential to think about? What do I, as a designer, have to do in order to facilitate that?
Something I really struggled with was making this game enjoyable, not just pedagogical (though of course the pedagogical can also be enjoyable). At the end of the day I turned toward emotion, which is why the sticking point of the game ended up being bittersweetness. To ask players to consider the question of “what did we lose to get here?” might or might not be a radicalising move. Like I said, I do think a game is an invitation rather than a manifesto, just because the form of a game is always an incomplete sentence.
I also feel like the politics created in these games weren’t necessarily radical alternatives to what we have now. There was still a fairly centralized authority at the core. And, I don’t know, maybe we just don’t have a lot of room for imagining how else we could be organized. These are hard questions that I’m honestly still grappling with.
Anecdotally, I do feel like people tend to reach for changes that are technological and infrastructural, rather than legal or economic. On the other hand, I feel like there’s also so much desire for those caring relationships you touched on. Between people, and between humans and nature. And of course these things are all interconnected. So a player might enter that possible world by dreaming up a cool new product or service, or because they are so hungry to care and be cared for, but with the right game and the right group they could still discover many different aspects of that possible world.
Yeah, I agree. I remember there was a point in the game where I was trying to play around with ontological experiences. So I asked people to imagine being an object or a plant. And then that just became really hard to play because, how are you acting as a plant? Do you have desire as a plant? Do you have intention as a plant? Initially I said this was all about inhabiting more-than-human subjectivity. But as a game it just fell apart. Because how do you continue from there without anthropomorphizing it or making it something spiritual?
It’s hard, isn’t it! It is interesting to think how that might intersect with Rights of Nature and Earth Law movements, where natural entities sometimes get legal standing. So who gets to speak on behalf of the plants, and how do they approach that task? I wonder if there are any particular #RPGSEA games that you’d like to shout out, perhaps with connections to these themes of utopia and dystopia?
Let me see. It’s funny, because I know everybody by their Discord handles, which is often not the name they publish under! There are a number of really interesting worldbuilding games. There’s one by Munkao and Zedeck Siew called A Thousand Thousand Islands, a series of zines based on Southeast Asian cultures.
I’m not sure I’ve encountered anything that deals with the utopic. That’s not to say there aren’t any – I’ve probaby just not looked hard enough! I’m hoping to get some time and space to map the games gathered into this repository called Across RPGSEA put together by Momatoes, who won an ENnie for their work. RPGSEA faces issues of production and capital, right? Things like Kickstarter and PayPal don’t work so well for a lot of people here. The number of indie designers able to secure funds to make and distribute games is small. So the community is smaller than it probably should be. The development of game cultures also varies from country to country.
I’m also currently working on a book chapter with indie game designer Thomas Manuel on indie apocalypse games made by Southeast Asian designers. This is based on the premise that the apocalypse isn’t necessarily something that occurs in the future; for many people in Southeast Asia it’s something that’s already happened, whether that’s the Vietnam War or the violence of imperialism or the consequences of World War II – or something that is, temporally, unfolding right now. The games we’re looking at include Apocalypse Keys, ARC: Doom, and Navathem’s End, all of which ask you to hold off (or accept the inevitability of) an impending apocalypse. It’s still something that we’re working on but I’m very excited about it and awed by Thomas’s insight on the matter!
I think in general, many RPGSEA games draw on a Southeast Asian spatial politics. The island network has its characteristic shifting centers of power, its characteristic reciprocal relationships. That can be a big change from the kind of hierarchies and territories you get in more Eurocentric settings, that kind of king-and-castle ideology.
Can I ask a bit more about your fieldwork in Singapore? Am I right in thinking there was a lot of D&D?
D&D in Singapore has really taken off. I mean, it’s taken off internationally, especially since actual play, where professional voice actors play games on stream, has become more popular. Singapore has followed this trajectory. Following the lifting of COVID restrictions, there was a kind of mushrooming of play studios across Singapore. These studios offered tabletop roleplaying games to the public and focused on delivering these game experienced over their retail arms, which was quite a new concept. They were inroads for those not already involved in the gaming community. It became possible for people to work as full-time professional DMs. Many of the games I played were in these studios.
Does that commercialisation change the way people behave or the experience of the game?
When I interview professional GMs, they have really well-developed ideas about gaming. They’re very reflective, they have developed philosophies about what they’re doing. But there’s always this line that comes in, where they say, “Well, people are paying.”
Right!
“They’re paying, so you want to make sure they’re having fun.” There’s a sense that pro DMs see themselves as entertainers, and that they need to foster agreeability at the table, and to referee between different types of people in ways that don’t diminish their experience as paying customers. But having fun is a really subjective thing. Very quickly the play studios I visit develop their own play cultures and their own play communities depending on who DMs there and what players they attract. Sometimes it institutionalises, for example, TTRPG safety tools as a mode of practice. It leads to relatively formal, explicit acknowledgements of what collaborative storytelling means. It sets limits, because you’re largely playing with strangers, which can be both freeing and constraining for players.
How about, you know, the materialities of these studio spaces? The fact that they take place in studios, rather than somebody’s home?
The studios I’ve been to focus on providing what they would call an immersive play experience, not just through professional DMs who are often trained in improv or theatre, but also through their tech setups, which include, you know, smart lighting, surround sound, tons of miniatures. Minis and battle maps have been around forever, of course, but I think some of these additions are quite new, especially with lighting, sound, with the digital interfaces that people use. They’re very elaborate. The production values are high; they mimic the production values of actual play shows like Critical Role. From what I’ve seen, this materiality can scaffold play and help people access the epic moments of revelation and emotional catharsis that they’re looking for.
Even home games are picking up on this trend, so it’s not just limited to studio spaces. I’ve played in home set-ups where the DM has bought these special lights that mimic the texture of water, or have full-on table set-ups with a television screen set underneath glass so that they can project battle maps on it.
Obviously many D&D publications are very Eurocentric. Did you observe that manifesting during play? Were there specific points of friction you can recall, or ways of localising or adapting D&D? Is a certain cultural distance ever part of the appeal — maybe not just roleplaying an epic fantasy perspective, but also perhaps a Western perspective?
I think that’s bang on. I do think that people enjoy playing in these fantasy worlds precisely because it’s so far away from everyday reality. In a way the cultural distance is doubled for Singaporean players: the first distancing comes from playing in a fantastical world; the second distancing comes from playing in a Western fantastical world. Instead of Southeast Asian worlds, imaginations of Asian fantasy here tend to reflect East Asian worlds and genres due to the influence of cultural industries like manga, manhua or anime. I’ve played in many D&D settings modelled after feudal Japan, for example. I suspect Southeast Asian fantasy is mainly perceived here as folklore and superstition rather than a genre, which I think has to do with how we as a culture value and make sense of these imaginative realms.
Of course there are also many creators who are very intentional about adapting D&D to local contexts. Tinker Tales Studios has an elaborate sub-world that’s rooted in Malay folklore and Celtic stories, and TableMinis has an ongoing live game, Makcik & Magicks, that’s set in contemporary Singapore. But it’s hard. There does seem to be the risk that you let in too much reality, and the game becomes less fun.
Another example I’ve been thinking about is the usage of accents in tabletop roleplaying games. It’s common for DMs to use accents to denote different characters; I’m used to attempts at British accents for aristocrats and elves, Scottish accents for dwarves, a sort of Cockney accent for working-class, man-on-the-street types, that sort of thing. But I remember at a very early game at a play studio my DM was using a Cantonese accent and a Malay accent to speak. Accents, of course, denote not just ethnicity but class, and immediately these attempts were coded as funny. The table interpreted it as comical. But I wondered why. Why didn’t we interpret the accents the same way we readily interpreted other accents – as a work of performance on the DM’s part, or a play on genre? I also remember very early on in a game I played I used a Singaporean accent and everyone begged me to stop doing it. They said it was ruining the immersiveness, that it felt cringey. There’s a lot here that I think is really interesting, about how we perceive our own usage of English, about what accents in a game that’s conveyed mainly through speech can connote in our immediate, visceral responses to it.
That said, what I think about what some of these play studios are doing is changing our responses to these accents as a way of localising D&D. Makcik & Magicks incorporates a lot of working-class characters and they use Singaporean accents and Singlish; it’s not seen as comical, it reads as very sincere, and it works beautifully. Tinker Tales has Call of Cthulhu worlds set in Singapore where the DMs and characters use not only accents but also different Englishes to connote class–a university graduate campaigning for women’s rights speaks very differently from a working-class beer-chugging uncle who’s a part-time mover for a living.
I could really go on–but to delve deeper into that question of Eurocentrism. Play styles are not drastically different. There is undeniably a global language of play that echoes in Singapore. But what I have noticed is that, when discussions about race in D&D arise, these tend not to reflect Singapore’s racial context, which comprises a Chinese majority and various minorities within Singapore. Instead, these conversations tend to map onto American racial politics.
That is really interesting. I mean, even outside of gaming, I certainly notice that people here in the UK tend to be quicker to talk about racism and anti-racism in US contexts than closer to home.
Right. For example, there was this whole world that I played in which had its own kind of version of Black Lives Matter. Moments which referred to race would usually draw on memes and references to American politics. Again it’s the cultural distancing that makes it possible; it makes it ironic, it makes it more of a referent than a reality. But you wouldn’t often see reflections of racism against, say, Malay Singaporeans in the same way. It was very rare that people would use D&D as a mirror to talk about race in Singapore, or gender in Singapore, or any other kind of significant social issue.
I did play in a studio, Tinker Tales, that offered an invitation to these real-world explorations. There was a long-running Call of Cthulhu game which they ran which I found fascinating–it was set in Singapore, and you could play at the cultist table or the investigator table. The cultist table, to me, was an invitation to explore the question of what constituted evil in Singapore. At that table I played a fifty-something-year-old lower-class Chinese man who had been disenfranchised by the predominance of English, who was alienated by his university graduate daughters, who wanted power and status but had no means of accessing it. He was angry, he felt he had been betrayed by the promises of the government. He was supposed to be powerful, but he wasn’t. I set him up so he was ripe for manipulation by an eldritch cult. And during the game we were asked to do things like sabotage a gay rights rally, or to sabotage a young feminist group in university who were working together to deal with a rise in sexual harassment cases on campus.
These games were challenging for me. The storylines were based on real-world antecedents; the sexual harassment cases that were referred to were what my cohort experienced, and I myself was at that exact university working in feminist groups to grapple with it. I had a lecturer who was eventually convicted for molestation. And in this weird mirror maze moment there I was again, now on the other side of the glass. I really admired what the studio was inviting us to do, the issues they were asking us to consider, the moral space they asked us to inhabit. It required a lot of mutual trust and vulnerability. I think it was, especially in an authoritarian state like Singapore, really creative and ambitious.
But it was very challenging. I’m not sure if it was fun. My character died after a couple of sessions, and I never returned to the game; the Game Master running it said that that was quite a common occurrence. People prefer to be heroes. Some of my fellow players at that table were more interested in exploring the possibilities of their cult-endowed supernatural powers, of flirting with the idea of villainy without necessarily grounding it in a structural exploration of sexism in Singaporean society or whatever, or were more interested in the challenge of pitting their wits against the game-master to manipulate a social situation. And that’s also a perfectly valid approach. When you’re, again, paying to play a game at a play studio, you want to relax, have fun, and that might not involve exploring the complexities of the patriarchy.
You know, in a lot of D&D games, I think people are actually there for the mock-heroic subversion. What’s really exciting and enjoyable is breaking the immersive fantasy. Not breaking it too badly, because you want to break it again five minutes later. The paladin talking about her mortgage, or the kobolds going on rent strike or whatever.
Yes, I can see the appeal! I mean, Dungeons & Dragons attempts to sell the idea of entering into an epic mode of fantasy. You’re a paladin with all that faithful devotion and pure sense of agency. In reality, there are definitely games that revolve around more everyday experiences. Maybe it’s hard to maintain that tone of epic fantasy. There was a game I played at a studio called Guild Hall where we constantly flattened the epic by bringing in relationships to completely different genres. It’s like, we had this whole story that was based on the Power Rangers. There’s always this little wink and nudge of, “Hey, this is actually a thing, right?” It wasn’t played very seriously, it was treated as a joke. And the joy comes from the multiple players of referentiality embedded in an ongoing game. There was a collective sense of nostalgia where you’d say, “Hey, I recognize this song!” or, “Let’s watch this part!”
Kellynn, thank you so much!
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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