Symbolized Reality: Liturgy and Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 This discussion will focus exclusively on tabletop role-playing games as opposed to the myriad forms of role-playing video games. Tabletop role-playing games have particular communal and ritual characteristics that may not hold in the same way for role-playing video games, even when the “tabletop” of the game is online, facilitated by game conferencing platforms like Roll20, roll20.net, or Fantasy Grounds, fantasygrounds.com. For a more developed discussion of “tabletop” role-playing games in the online world, see David Feltmate, “‘You Wince in Agony as the Hot Metal Brands You’: Religious Behavior in an Online Role-Playing Game,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 25, no. 3 (Oct 2010): 363–77.

2 For brief discussions of the recent rise in the popularity of tabletop role-playing games, see Jordan Culver, “Dungeons & Dragons had Fallen on ‘Troubled Times’: The Role-Playing Game’s Fifth Edition Changed Everything,” USA Today, January 15, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/gaming/2020/01/14/dungeons-dragons-role-playing-game-popular-again-why/4427635002/; Casey Phillips, “After 40 Years, Popularity of Tabletop Gaming Rises Despite High-Tech Competition,” Chattanooga (TN) Times Free Press, July 29, 2013, https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/life/entertainment/story/2013/jul/29/after-40-years-popularity-tabletop-gaming-ri/114446/; Sarah Gibson, “Tables Turn on Table-Top Role-Playing Games,” The Point Park (Pittsburg, PA) Globe, April 16, 2019, https://ppuglobe.com/2019/04/tables-turn-on-table-top-role-playing-games/.

3 The titles for the facilitating role are many: gamemaster, dungeonmaster, storyteller, game moderator, referee, and others. For our purposes, we will mostly use the term “facilitator.”

4 For a more in-depth discussion of how role-playing games create meaning, see Joseph P. Laycock, Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds (Oakland: University of California, 2015), esp. chap. 6.

5 I do not mean to suggest that Divine Revelation is an organic component of tabletop role-playing games, or that such games provide an adequate substitute for real-world ethical formation. I mean instead, as I will explain further below, to gesture toward the experiences of uncovering and discovery that carry depth and meaning with them beyond the rubrics of the game. Such experiences of play are more than “simply” play; they bear with them shards of the real.

6 For a description and analysis of this phenomenon, see Laycock, Dangerous Games.

7 Others have moved forward beyond this in a number of ways, for example, using role-playing games in theological pedagogy. See Melanie A. Howard, “A Game of Faith: Role-Playing Games as an Active Learning Strategy for Value Formation and Faith Integration in the Theological Classroom,” Teaching Theology and Religion 21 (2018): 274–87); Adam L. Porter, “Role-Playing and Religion: Using Games to Educate Millennials,” Teaching Theology and Religion 11, no. 4 (2008): 230–235.

8 Such a discussion would easily run beyond the scope of this paper. This section is intentionally—though perhaps embarrassingly—truncated to the barest relevant essentials. For further discussion of symbol, see David Power, Unsearchable Riches: The Symbolic Nature of the Liturgy (New York: Pueblo, 1984). For a shorter treatment, see John McKenna, “Symbol and Reality: Some Anthropological Considerations,” Worship 65, no. 1 (Jan 1991): 2–27. Another useful overview is Henry Shea, “Reality in Symbol: Schmemann and Rahner in Dialogue,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2017): 61–90.

9 Louis-Marie Chauvet, The Sacraments: The Word of God at the Mercy of the Body (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 3–6; and Louise-Marie Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 33–4.

10 As Chauvet points out, sign and symbol are never fully separated from each other. They infuse each other in the experience of reality. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 111–20 and 124–6).

11 Chauvet, The Sacraments, 13–7; Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 84–8.

12 This is of course not intended to be exhaustive. The variety of approaches taken by role-playing games precludes such a thing. Still, this schematic should hold true enough to support the points I make here.

13 To be fair, many players also strive to make their in-game characters what might be better called anti-symbols of themselves. That is, they may aim to craft a character that is everything the player is not in real life, i.e., diametrically opposed in every way possible. Even in this situation however, the symbolization still takes place in relation to the real-world context and identity of the player.

14 Some have argued that this characteristic of tabletop role-playing games makes them ideal tools for practicing crossing cultural divisions. See, for example, Amina Inloes, “Muhammad Abd al-Rahman (Phillip) Barker: Bridging Cultural Divides through Fantasy/Science-Fiction Role-Playing Games and Fictional Religion,” The Muslim World 108 (July 2018): 387–418.

15 The role of humor is often essential in allowing for freedom of movement within the players’ identities in the symbolized reality of role-playing games, but such a discussion moves beyond the scope of this article. Liturgy may, nevertheless, benefit from following this example and taking more stock of good humor.

16 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 330.

17 Cauvet, Symbol and Sacrament, 331.

18 Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament.

19 Sacrosanctum Concilium, § 14.

20 A good deal of the work that has been done on Christian liturgy and consumerism moves beyond the scope of this discussion. See, for example, Timothy Brunk, The Sacraments and Consumer Culture (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2020), or Vincent Miller, Consuming Religion: Christian Faith and Practice in a Consumer Culture (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benjamin Durheim

Benjamin Durheim is a visiting assistant professor of theology at the College of Saint Benedict/Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, where he teaches liturgical and sacramental theology and theological approaches to social ethics.