Playing Games, Practicing Utopia: A Life in Tabletop Gaming
by Edmond Chang, Contributing Editor
Playing games, particularly tabletop role-playing games (RPG), has always been a lifeline. And in this current moment of ecological uncertainty, racial reckoning, and global pandemic, it is even more so.
Long before it was fashionable for celebrities, I played and still play RPGs. I played a range of games—to which my many shelves of rulebooks and supplements can attest—but high fantasy RPGs are my bread and butter. In high school, gaming was an escape, a chance to be someone else and to be somewhere else. A long weekend’s marathon full of dice rolls, smudged character sheets, and Jolt cola bought me respite from the pains of being a then shy, overweight, closeted young man of color; it brought me community, camaraderie, and the first thrill of falling in love with one’s game master (though not for the last time).
In college, gaming became less about escape and more about exploring, about self-expression. College is when I discovered live-action role-playing games, when I started tinkering with my own game designs, and when I started learning to be comfortable in my own skin. I designed two fantasy RPGs: a LARP called Archaea: Live-Action Role-Playing and Wargaming and a tabletop system called Tellings: Role-Playing and Storytelling. Graduate school is when everything crystallized, and gaming (now analog and digital) as an avocation became part of my vocation as an academic. As a professor of literature, media, and popular culture, I can fondly look back on my career as a gamer and now articulate its lasting importance like a thick and vibrant thread through my life.
At the start of the pandemic, as lockdowns put the screws to communities across the globe, I quickly realized that sheltering-in-place alone (with cat) in a six-hundred square foot apartment (far, far away from most of my friends and family) that my queer, brown, now-extroverted, and alas, recently bereaved self really needed to manifest and maintain some sense of connection, community, and creativity on the regular. So, I scheduled it. It had been some time since I had a steady gaming group—not since grad school—and going from playing almost every week for nearly twenty-five years to nothing at all was a crushing blow to my imagination, mental health, and overall well-being. While I was moving from academic job to academic job, I was not in one place long enough to constitute a table, and I was resistant to the idea of playing virtually, remotely. But as COVID-19 shifted my work and teaching life to online, so did my fun and friendships. I put the word out to my OG Tellings table, and thanks to the pandemic, the response was positive, nigh instantaneous, and resounding. We all wanted it. Needed it.
The logistics of playing online—like teaching—became a blacksmith’s puzzle of figuring out what worked and what didn’t. The limitations of screens, keyboards, flaky internet connections, and most of all, disembodied distance needed to be turned into advantages (or at least ameliorated). As a group, we decided on a suite of online solutions: Zoom for more stable videoconferencing, Roll20 for its map and archive capabilities, and Slack for individual and group chat and communication. The strengths of one would make up for the weaknesses of others. But the greatest remedy to all this technological mediation was that we already knew each other. We had played around a table together and could fill in the gaps and silences and nonverbal cues even through a mic and screen. (This is something I need to try to replicate in my own classes online: establishing some sort of embodied, gestural, four-dimensional baseline.) We also decided to keep play short—around three hours—in part to accommodate people’s busy schedules but also to prevent “Zoom fatigue.” But, after our first session, the magic was different but definitely there. I felt the same frisson and flow of being with friends in the game and in the collaborative fantasy.
Though I am no longer that shy, closeted, unsure young gamer of way back when, I honestly can say that gaming was one of the things that saved my life. Today, after rediscovering and reconvening my gaming group, I say no less. Gaming is living, loving, learning, and yes, especially now, grieving and coping and escaping. Gaming informs so much of who I am, what I do, and what I believe and fight for. Gaming, in a deep sense then, is practicing utopia and transforming dystopia. It is a longing for a world yet to come; it is a hoping for a world better than this one. Gaming allows us to inhabit the possible. In fact, as I wrote in the preface to the most recent edition of Tellings, published in 2017:
I sense and see a need in the world for new games, different players, and better worlds. Against fear, against despair, against violence, against injustice, against devastation, games can encourage hope, possibility, change, imagination, and curiosity…Nowadays, games and gamers must engage and design for radical diversity, thoughtful inclusion, and players and communities of many different stripes, colors, lifeways, and backgrounds. I challenge game players, masters, makers, artists, activists, conventions, and communities to game for good, to play for change.
