Dungeon Theory

  Like me, you may be part of a gaming group, but that’s not all you are. You’re part of a whole host of co-cultures. You’re part of a group of people who share a gender identity, an ethnic identity, perhaps a religious or spiritual identity. Crucially for understanding Social Identity Theory are the positive and negative feelings you have about those group memberships. Frequently, our social groups are great sources of our pride and self-esteem. They provide a sense of belonging and place in the larger social world. According to Henri Tajfel , most people have an inherent desire to identify as part of some group (e.g., an adventuring party, a sports team fan, a citizen of Borovia, a woman) and to distinguish oneself from other groups.  According to Social Identity Theory, I’m likely to think a few things about my adventuring party are true: 1) since we’re part of the same group, we’re all pretty similar.  2) other groups are fairly different from us. This makes our a...

  “This week, we have to move to roll20 .” Recently, due to an influx of Covid in my regular gaming group, this quotation made its way into our regular group chat. It brought to mind the months of 2020 and 2021 where vaccines were still far on the horizon, state and national dashboards of infected, hospitalized, and dying were seemingly omnipresent, and the only way to safely play RPGs was online, in my basement, alone.  Although, were we actually alone?  Social Presence Theory , first developed by Short, Williams, and Christie examines exactly how we come to use some social media and telecommunications technologies to experience a sense of being with one another while physically separated. The space between the persons and the computer interactions, as well as its implications for interpersonal communication, intimacy, and relationship formation, development, and dissolution are integral to understanding our (oftentimes) tech-connected communication. From the beginning...

If you were to describe your adventuring party’s members by name, lineage, backstory and class how likely is it that there would exist an identical party to yours? I contend that the distribution of party characteristics is more than likely unique to your party alone.  And while there might be some common archetypes the characters fall into: Tank, Sneak, Face, Caster, Healer, Skirmisher, thankfully parties often come out resembling that Rifleman's Creed from Full Metal Jacket : “This is my adventuring party. There are many like it, but this one is mine.” In trying to understand how groups function, the theory of Adaptive Structuration tries to address precisely how groups, like adventuring parties and rifles are the same and how they differ. Prior to Scott Poole ’s work adapting societal structuration to groups, many researchers operated under the paradigm that small groups followed a near-universal pattern for decision-making. This, so-called, single-sequence model asserted th...

You could be having a conversation in private. Or, you could be currently scryed upon. There might be invisible spies in your midst, listening to your every word. Even without the addition of magical means of surreptitious observation, letters can be intercepted, conversations overheard, and the private made public. Imagine a spell which has the power to turn the most intimate conversations and images shared between friends, families, and lovers into a public announcement. A confessional love letter, doused with perfume quietly placed beneath a paramour’s door is suddenly, non-consensually posted to the village’s notice board, and not just one village, but every village in the entire realm or the entire world. That spell is current media technology and this theory is all about how its capabilities all but eliminate different contexts when it comes to our communication with others. Alice E. Marwick and danah boyd describe the flattening and removal of these different contexts as a “c...