Finding the self in role-playing games: Weaving myth, narrative, and identity

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the limitations of hero’s journey by Joseph Campbell with reference to traditional storytelling, offering examples from role-playing games (RPGs) as alternative modes of engagement with symbolism and archetypes. The hero’s journey represents the development of the individual to maturity as a result of confrontation with their unconscious shadow side. While this trajectory reflects the human experience, it centers an idealized young male hero who becomes singularly important to saving the world from a villainized monstrous other. Other characters in the story are marginalized and decentered, invalidating other important archetypal characters such as the Heroine, the Mother, the Witch, the Trickster, the Sage, and the Divine. This article will discuss the ways in which analog RPG narratives can offer the general benefits of active, mythic, and ironic imagination. Integrating ethnographic interviews with 4 experts in the field, the article outlines critiques of the hero’s journey and discusses the wide variety of archetypes explorable within these alternative story structures, even in traditional role-playing games (RPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons. The article will emphasize how players can use these experiences to shape their own narrative identity into more empowering structures of belief and life roadmaps regardless of the type of character they embody.

KEYWORDS:

• Role-playing games
• archetypes
• hero’s journey
• story structures
• individuation

1. Introduction

The hero’s journey as presented by Joseph Campbell (1973) represents the mythic journey of the awakening of human consciousness. While a potent metaphor, its emphasis on masculine individuality can marginalize and decenter other characters in the story. Thus, to call the hero’s journey the ‘monomyth’ invalidates many other important archetypal characters such as the Trickster (Turner 2021), the Witch (Rusch and Phelps 2020; Tanenbaum 2022), the Great Mother (Neumann 1974) and the Heroine (Frankel 2010; Murdock 2020). This practice relegates alternative forms of expression to characters that simply assist the hero or oppose him, eliminating much of the diversity and cooperation necessary for life. It also focuses on a specific type of heroic story: one that emphasizes individualism, violence, and domination of others. Understanding how these stories function, as well as the benefits offered by alternative story structures such as those accessible through role-playing games (RPGs), can help media educators expose students to more diverse representations and agentic states.

The focus on masculine individualism is unfortunate considering the depth of psychology underpinning Campbell’s work. The hero’s journey is best understood when contextualized within the larger philosophical trends from which it arose, including structural functionalism, comparative religion, and psychoanalysis. It represents the development of consciousness from undifferentiated or dependent on one’s parents to the autonomy of young adulthood. Therefore, the myth is less about the external world and more a symbolic structure to represent the process of individuation (Jung 1976). In individuation, a person’s ego comes into contact with external stimuli, such as the monstrous Other. These stimuli are filtered through the complexes within their personal unconscious, which includes archetypes from the collective unconscious made manifest through specific symbolic structures. They also confront their Shadow: facets of the personal or collective unconscious representing repressed traits the ego refuses to acknowledge or integrate. On a mythic level, this process looks like a hero facing his fears, embarking on a journey, and slaying a monster in order to ascend to a throne or even transcendental state, i.e. apotheosis. However, these external manifestations, for Campbell, are a metaphoric representation of the inward process of individuation: symbolic structures that help us make meaning of our journey through life.

Much modern storytelling reproduces the external process without also highlighting the internal transformation (see e.g. Vogler 2007), ignoring the deeper processes inherent to the monomyth. Some audiences still find these journeys inspirational, empowering, and sometimes life-changing (see, e.g. Walters 2021). However, for others, the reduction of other characters to helpers, objects of desire, or antagonists can feel minimizing at best and racist or colonialist at worst (Mendez Hodes 2019; Trammell 2022).

RPGs are co-created fictional narratives in which players enact characters and build stories together organically through spontaneous play (Bowman 2010). Similar to improvisation and simulation, RPGs allow players to spontaneously invent fiction together and embody it at the same time. They can be played in virtual environments, around a table in tabletop games, or fully embodied in live-action role-playing games (larp). This article will focus on analog role-playing games, which often allow players a large range of characters to play that represent alternative archetypes from the hero in various relationship configurations (Beltrán 2021). Historically, the hero’s journey has infused role-playing game narratives through the influence of fantasy fiction on game systems such as Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) (Bowman 2010), and thus such games can reproduce problematic tropes. Regardless, this article will discuss the ways in which any analog RPG system or narrative can offer the general benefits of active (Jung 1976; Bowman 2012, 2017), mythic (Larsen 1990; Beltrán 2012) and ironic imagination (Saler 2012), including D&D.

Integrating ethnographic interviews with four experts in the field, this chapter outlines critiques of the hero’s journey as played in RPGs. It discusses examples of story structures and archetypes beyond the hero explorable within RPGs, including archetypes such as the Great Mother, the Witch, the Trickster, the Sage, and the Divine. Finally, it will emphasize how players can use the enchantment of role-playing experiences to shape their own narrative identity (McAdams 2011) into more empowering structures of belief regardless of the character type they embody. Unlike the prescriptive nature of the hero’s journey in traditional storytelling, role-players can enact any archetype and use game narratives as roadmaps for understanding their own lives, whether as cautionary tales, aspirational narratives, or other meaningful forms of ritual symbolic enactment (Rusch and Phelps 2020).

1.1. Role-playing games as modern-day mythmaking

Unlike more passive forms of storytelling, role-playing games are a medium through which a plethora of stories can be told, limited only by the imagination and the game’s rules. Since their advent in 1974 with Dungeons & Dragons, RPGs have provided unprecedented agency for players to construct their narratives, which can become part of the personal and group mythmaking process (Beltrán 2012; Page 2014). In the psychological state of play, participants hold both fact and fiction at the same time; yet events that occur for the character in the fictional world are also experienced by the player. For all intents and purposes, they are experienced as real physiologically (Lankoski and Järvelä 2012; Järvelä 2019). Thus, these stories can be profoundly moving and even life-changing for players as a site for identity construction, skill training, meaning-making, exploration of intimacy, and community building with others (Bowman 2010).

1.2. Myth and imagination in modernity and role-playing game practice

As society becomes increasingly disenchanted, people seek fictional worlds into which to immerse themselves, adopting an ironic imagination (Saler 2012). Participants may engage in subcultural activities around texts they know are fictional, but pretend they are real as a means to re-enchant the world. Unlike myths that people believe to be true, like narratives connected to a person’s religion, players actively pretend to believe role-playing game stories happen to their characters (Pohjola 2004) – a step further than the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ adopted when viewing traditional media. These stories help players make meaning and create personal mythology in an increasingly secularized world (Beltrán 2012), i.e. engaging their mythic imagination (Larsen 1990; Page 2014),

Related to these ritualized mythic structures is the spontaneous expression of the contents of the imagination. Jung (1976) described active imagination, as a process of immersing into the inner images produced by the unconscious, bringing those images to consciousness through expression. This concept is particularly interesting when considering RPGs, as they are usually a group process rather than individual; instead of exploring one’s inner images through writing or art, players express and embody them together through play, responding to each other’s creativity. From this perspective, players can be said to engage in a sort of group individuation process (Beltrán 2012), which can fuel insights leading to personal development through reflection (Bowman 2017).

1.3. Mythmaking and heroism in role-playing games

Role-players create their mythos at multiple levels of engagement. Craig Page (2014) has theorized mythmaking in larp in long-running campaign games in which players enact the same characters over several sessions. These characters are usually created from the player’s imagination based on the setting and rule structures of the game.

Following Campbell (1973) and Stephen Larsen (1990), Page outlines three types of mythic imagination: the World Myth, the Heroic Myth, and the Player Myth. The World Myth refers to the setting as defined for the characters, often integrating archetypal or mythic material from other sources. In the Heroic Myth (Page 2014), every character is a hero in their own story whether or not their deeds are considered ‘heroic.’ Unlike in traditional myth, role-playing games are open-ended with rather chaotic, untidy narratives; characters cannot be so clearly defined as consistently ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ although arguably the same could be said for many traditional heroes, e.g. Achilles, Jason, and Odysseus in Greek mythology. In the Heroic Myth, players may embark on a quest of some sort, whether an external adventure or an internal journey of self-discovery; however, this theory can also extend to more socially realistic settings, where ‘heroism’ may look more mundane, e.g. standing up to a bully.

Finally, Page (2014) describes the Player Myth: the stories told by the players after the game about themselves, their characters, and each other. These stories can take many forms, such as serious post-game debriefs or more humorous war stories (Brown 2018). Embodied experiences with actions springing from one’s imagination are particularly powerful, especially when enacted as a group. Thus, regardless of whether or not the tenor or content of these stories is ‘mythic’ in nature, telling stories about characters and events that can feel larger than life can become a form of living mythic storytelling.

Page uses a common phrase in role-playing circles: every character is a ‘hero in their own story.’ However, unlike typical conceptualizations of heroism, players can choose to play a wide range of characters: ideal or aspirational; radically different; expressions of repressed parts of their psyche; or even characters who enact taboo behaviors (Bowman 2010). Unlike in Campbell’s hero’s journey, RPG characters do not simply face their fears projected onto an externalized Other – who is often of a different race (or more accurately, species), age, gender, or religion. These characters can actually embody representations of the player’s Shadow: suppressed contents of the personal and collective unconscious that players would normally find repugnant and disavow (Beltrán 2013). As such, to call RPG characters ‘heroes’ is a bit of a misnomer, as their personalities can become quite complex, nuanced, and even contradictory at times, just like ‘real’ humans. Nevertheless, the notion of being the hero of one’s own story is experienced as liberating by some, e.g. people from marginalized backgrounds, (Kemper 2017, 2020). However, it can also be viewed as problematically intoxicating, e.g. individuals enacting non-consensual, antisocial (Nephew 2006), and/or colonialist power fantasies through play (Trammell 2022).

As the first popular role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons (1974) offered a modern take on mythic fiction and conceptualizations of heroism. While a typical myth has an ending point, role-playing characters in games like D&D and its video game counterparts such as World of Warcraft often continue to complete quest after quest, leveling up and gaining more power. Thus, the end of an adventure is merely the starting point for the next one rather than a symbol of maturation or apotheosis, as in the hero’s journey. That being said, in D&D, players of a sufficient level can essentially become gods and are no longer playable characters, which can be considered a form of apotheosis, although this evolution is often less about spiritual enlightenment more about attaining the ultimate power.

Heroes in D&D are primarily defined by their deeds, which often involve embarking on a quest. While these quests are sometimes predicating on helping people who are disempowered, i.e. playing the Rescuer to a Victim in the Drama Triangle (Karpman 1968), they often also involve killing and looting for personal gain, i.e. playing the Persecutor. Often a thin veneer of righteousness justifies character behaviors within the game through alibi: the social permission to behave in play in ways that might be unacceptable or embarrassing in daily life (Montola 2010; Deterding 2017). This alibi often lumps suspect behaviors under heroism when enacted by player-characters, who are highlighted as more special than everyone else – especially when these deeds are enacted against non-player characters, who serve a function in the fiction but are often considered less important and even disposable (Stenros 2013; Torner 2015). From this perspective, wish fulfillment and power fantasies are often enacted under the guise of heroism (Nephew 2006), similar to issues with some versions of the traditional hero’s journey. Characters in D&D are often assigned an alignment, which is supposed to correlate with the degree of goodness, neutrality, or evil in their moral choices, as well as the degree of lawfulness or chaos of their behavior. Whether or not players behave in accordance with their alignment or the game master facilitator enacts consequences for behaving inappropriately varies from group to group.

Some characters might be ‘good’ on paper, but engage in acts that others might deem quite evil. Although players can technically take the game wherever their imagination desires, D&D emphasizes violent conquest and looting to the degree that it is difficult to untangle the game from these themes. The language of the game, including the verbs, or actions the game system invites the character to take, is imbued with suggested violence (Albom 2021; Torner 2015), and playing a peaceful character may go against the plans of the group and cause disharmony.

The remainder of this article will explore the problematic nature of the hero’s journey as embedded in RPGs from the perspective of experts in the field, while also demonstrating how players can find empowerment in RPG narratives by enacting alternative archetypes.

2. Materials and methods

This article contains data from four game designers and academics: Allen Turner, Doris C. Rusch, Whitney Beltrán, and James Mendez Hodes. The limitations of the hero’s journey were isolated as a subtheme from a larger participant-ethnographic work on transformative RPG With ethical approval from Austin Community College and completed consent forms for all participants, this article arises from a larger study with semi-structured interviews from 57 therapists, educators, camp counselors, psychologists, and neuroscientists on RPGs as tools for personal and social change. The data was coded through Atlas.ti using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006).

3. Results and discussion

3.1. Negotiating traditional storytelling structures through RPGs

The linear nature of the hero’s journeys emphasizes a particularly Western structure in which all components of the story feed into a central plot centered around a young male figure usually coded as White. Game design and professor Allen Turner described this mentality manifesting in RPGs characters who desire:

Being seen, being important, being heroic, having the capacity to have a persistent change on my environment … to bring positive change to my environment. It’s being in control of my own path. I'm being rewarded for the things that I was doing [and having] agency … [these characters are like] business people who are at the top of the food chain, because they are in this heroic space of making these changes and doing all this stuff for other people, when they're actually in a lot of ways creating these destructive colonized spaces. (Allen Turner, pers. comm., Aug. 9, 2020)

The stories of others – or counternarratives – are often removed completely from the hero’s journey or are overly simplified, only including the parts that uphold the dominant narrative.

Centering this type of story marginalizes different structures from other cultures that might be equally interesting. I interviewed cultural consultant James Mendez Hodes, who has an educational background in religious studies. Notably, Wizards of the Coast has recently made changes Dungeons & Dragons based on Mendez Hodes’ recommendations to be more inclusive and less racist. Mendez Hodes remarked to me, ‘I almost feel like the monomyth is this gravity – that here in the West, we're being pulled towards at all times, but we don't have to walk towards it on purpose’ (pers. comm., Aug. 22, 2020). He explained that non-linear storylines can be equally interesting, such as Kishōtenketsu, a four-act Japanese story structure within which characters meander from the ‘main’ storyline, but the narrative comes together in the end, (e.g. Anatone 2023). He also mentioned the repetition in 12-bar blues and the multitude of short stories within magical realism fiction, such as Gabriel Márquez's (2006) 100 Years of Solitude.

In actuality, such stories more faithfully represent what actually occurs in many RPGs. As Mendez Hodes explained, players are able to pursue their own goals and the overarching narrative encompasses their plural stories. While role-players may narrativize a linear storyline after the fact through retelling (Brown 2018), they often play out a chaotic and even random story that meanders from interaction to interaction. Games that extend beyond one session are more reminiscent of serial soap operas than episodic one-shot storytelling. Since role-playing takes place in the minds of every player through subjective diegesis (Montola 2012), it defies a single story-type narrative (Adichie 2009) and can only really be understood by piecing together the various stories each player-character experienced.

3.2. Redefining heroism in RPGs

Despite the hero’s journey’s potency as a metaphoric tool for growth and self-reflection (Walters 2021), many critics reject it altogether. While representation certainly matters, simply swapping out the traditional hero for characters of different genders, races, ethnicities, ages, and other cultural backgrounds does not solve these issues. Other strategies include integrating common storytelling structures from other cultures, understanding world myth through the lens of heroines (Murdock 2020; Frankel 2010), or expanding the cast of characters to include multiple perspectives and storylines. RPGs are potential sites for more empowering forms of storytelling, even if popular RPG genres are still hampered by the more problematic tropes of the hero’s journey.

Beltrán, founder of the Indian game company Dawon Entertainment, explained to me that D&D’s design places limitations on the verbs encoded in the game system, offering few options outside of violent conquest evoking White male colonialist fantasies. In Game Studies, scholars often evaluate a game’s affordances – what it gives players agency to do – in terms of the verbs that it permits. In video games, these verbs are often hardcoded and limited. In analog role-playing games, while characters theoretically can perform any action, players are heavily influenced by the rhetoric of the game materials and rewards given, e.g. for violent behavior (Albom 2021). The social contract of the game often focuses on combat, trespassing, and looting as the central verbs afforded by the system. Beltrán posed the question, ‘What if we replaced those default action verbs? Like what if our default verb is tended or restored or any number of decolonized verbs? How does that change games?’

While other games have been designed that strip away many of these unsavory elements – or call attention to them in uncomfortable ways – they remain less popular. Instead, many groups create their homebrew systems and storylines for D&D, allowing for a greater range of emotional and relational experiences. Beltrán explained:

I see a lot of people really pull D&D into pretzels to get the emotional experiences that they want. And it makes me sad. Because there are games that are actually specifically structured to do that for you. So a lot of people who play D&D end up having like ludonarrative dissonance [where the gameplay and narrative are at odds], and they don't even know it, as opposed to ludonarrative harmony, which is something that will help them get what they want easier and faster and more efficiently. (Whitney Beltrán, pers. comm., July 29, 2020)

While Turner also critiqued the colonialist bent of these traditional story structures, he also acknowledged that tabletop role-playing games in particular allow for greater freedom in the range of verbs compared to video games. Furthermore, RPGs offer far more verbs than traditional media, which usually only allow an audience to listen or to watch.

RPGs are also far more expansive than D&D, in terms of themes, scope, playstyles, genres, and group norms. White Wolf’s World of Darkness games, exemplified by Vampire: the Masquerade (1991), are intended to provide the experience of ‘a game of personal horror’: the struggle between one’s humanity, the monster within, and the monsters outside of the character. These monsters are explicitly designed to represent the personal and collective Shadow, which in turn is present within both players and their characters (Beltrán 2013). In spite of its stated goal of exploring a greater range of storytelling based upon tragedy and horror, Vampire is often referred to as ‘superheroes with fangs’ due to their mechanical emphasis on combat, domination, and leveling.

In our interview, Turner described such rules as incentivizing verticality rather than the more horizontal emphasis of the inter-relational. He explained verticality’s impact on gameplay play the following way:

Me gaining levels; that gives me more power. It gives me more things, gives me much more control over the world around me, and God forbid that you should take one of my things from me. God forbid that you should tell me I can't go somewhere or limit my character. That's a terrible thing. Or even worse that somebody else should do something similar to what I can do, because I'm the specialist. (Allen Turner, pers. comm., Aug. 9, 2020)

Thus, story structures like the hero’s journey can affect play, but so can rule structures that encourage a certain degree of competition and verticality, such as combat resolution mechanics and leveling.

3.3. An alternative to the hero’s journey in RPG design

Alternatives to the hero’s journey abound, especially within indie tabletop RPG and experimental larp. While even traditional RPGs defy the hero’s journey simply by including multiple ‘main’ characters with their accompanying storylines, some games are designed in opposition to the monomyth tropes. For example, the Story Game Dream Askew (Alder 2014) features a post-apocalyptic setting in which players co-create and maintain a queer enclave of people marginalized from the Society Intact. Characters are mostly genderqueer and represent a neo-archetypal contemporary skin, e.g. The Iris, the Hawker, the Stitcher, the Tiger, the Torch, and the Arrival. The game lacks a central facilitator and is fundamentally interrelational; the players have equal authority in representing parts of the fiction, redistributing the power and the responsibility for a rewarding shared experience (Bisogno 2022). Unlike epic storytelling with a central plotline, Dream Askew centers alternative narratives through the lens of marginalized people trying to build community, mechanically rewarding acts of emotional vulnerability: an example of horizontally focused design.

3.4. Common archetypes in role-playing games

Stepping beyond hero and villain, role-playing games offer a full range of possibilities for character enactment: from the whimsical to the profound to the uncanny to the divine to the strange. For the purposes of this article, I will focus on a few archetypes; in practice, characters often represent a mixture of several archetypes, as well as personality complexes specific to the player's own lives and their characters’ backstories. Of particular interest here are the Mother, the Witch, the Trickster, the Sage, and the Divine.

Importantly, a person never fully embodies an archetype as no character can contain the totality of it, nor can any cultural reference. Whenever we evoke an archetype, we are viewing it through the lens of particular sociocultural conditions and the limitations of our perception, like facets on a gem that can never be perceived as a whole. Jung believed that we interact with archetypes as filtered through our own cultures, mental schema, and the complexes we have developed. For example, a person will embody the Mother archetype filtered through their perception, just as they would with the Hero. The facet we see might look very different from player to player. If the person undergoes a process of individuation, this interaction with an archetypal essence, limited though it might be, will inform their perspective of themselves and the Other moving forward.

3.3.1. Archetypes of the feminine

One example is the Mother archetype, which can take many forms. Erich Neumann (1974) described the totality of the Great Mother, as represented by facets with specific qualities: Positive, Negative, Elementary, and Transformative. In the Positive Elementary corner of his model, he places Mother Mary, Demeter, and Isis: icons of devoted maternal love who become a Vessel for the Self to find comfort and gestate. In the Negative Transformative corner, we find Circe, Lilith, and Astarte, the dark sorceresses who will seduce and beguile. In the Negative Elementary corner, we find Kali, Hecate, the Gorgons, and the traditional witch from fairy tales, whose very presence represents death: the polar opposite of the nurturing mother. In the Positive Transformative corner, we find the Virgin Mary, the Muses, and Sophia – embodiments of spiritual seeking and insight.

Theorists like Jean Bolen (2014) consider Demeter, the Mother in Greek mythology, part of the same archetype as Persephone, the Kore or Maiden, even though they are famously and painfully split apart in traditional tales. Similarly, the Virgin/Whore dichotomy in Christianity exemplified by the two Marys is viewed in depth psychology as different facets of one archetype. The Witch as part of the Great Mother is often coded as the Dark or Monstrous Feminine (Stang and Trammell 2020). These various feminine archetypes can be experienced as empowering by role-players when accessed.

Beltrán studied depth psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, which investigates myth through Jungian psychology with a Campbellian interpretation that Beltrán has critiqued. Her work (2021) emphasizes the interaction between different archetypal characters as important to inviting catharsis in players, similar to the horizontal design discussed by Turner.

Foregrounding a particular counter-narrative centering on the experience of women, Beltrán described to me the tabletop role-playing game that she co-wrote with Marissa Kelly and Sarah Doom Richardson, Bluebeard’s Bride (2017). Far from the typical hero’s journey or even heroine’s tale, in which the heroine either becomes more whole herself in a patriarchal world (Murdock 2020) or makes her family whole again (Frankel 2010), this game draws upon the dark fairy tale and invites players to enact a story of macabre systemic disempowerment. The ‘heroine’ of this story is not able to save herself from traumatic abuse, just as many women cannot. Instead, players enact the fragments of the abused Bride’s consciousness, which correspond with aspects of the archetypal feminine, who in the fiction are her ‘Sisters’: the Virgin, similar to the Maiden; the Fatale, or sexualized feminine; the Mother, representing the protective feminine; the Witch, or empowered feminine; and the Animus, or internalized masculine.

Despite this fatalistically disempowering story, many people socialized as women report having strong experiences playing Bluebeard’s Bride. I interviewed Doris C. Rusch, a video game scholar who studies deep games (Rusch 2017) as a process through which players and designers are able to derive existential meaning (Rusch and Phelps 2020). When I asked her about her transformational game experiences, she mentioned in Bluebeard’s Bride, she was able to access her inner Witch, an archetype that has become empowering and liberating for her (Rusch and Phelps 2022). She became:

… less nice and people pleasing; more clearly connected to my own feelings and wishes than the ones of others; being able to better choose now which ones to follow without immediately merging with the needs of others and responding to them more strongly than my own; giving permission to my own emotions, e.g. anger, as important guardians of my boundaries rather than dismissing them for being unpleasant and socially less acceptable. (Doris Rusch, pers. comm., July 22, 2020)

Rusch stated this experience made her feel more empowered in her interactions, a trait that has helped her in job situations. Similarly, game scholar Theresa Tanenbaum (2022) has used RPGs to evoke the Witch as an empowering archetype in her identity exploration process, especially through Mage: the Ascension (1993), a World of Darkness game about personal power.

3.3.2. Archetypes of divinity, shapeshifting and wisdom-bearing

Another fascinating archetype is the embodiment of the Divine, whether as God, Goddess, or another spiritual entity. Characters can connect with the ‘Divine’ through playing these figures themselves or characters devoted to them. While players themselves may self-identify as agnostic or atheist, the alibi of play affords them the means to access faith, wisdom, or power that feels beyond their capabilities in daily life.

Another common archetype that players embody in role-playing games is the Sage. In the hero’s journey (Campbell 1973) and structuralist models of folktales (Propp 1998), the Sage is often an aging Helper character who gives the hero a magical offering to help him on his quest. While the Sage is not Divine, they still possess knowledge, wisdom, and lore that likely far exceed a player’s own. From a psychotherapeutic perspective, these players are able to access myriad different configurations of self within themselves previously underexplored (Diakolambrianou and Bowman 2023).

Finally, another important archetype is the Trickster, a shapeshifter who is often misunderstood, but can be empowering to play (Turner 2021). Tricksters are able to straddle the lines between humor and seriousness; binary gender; creation and destruction; and many other dichotomies that their very existence defies (Hyde 1999). As such, Tricksters are often compelling archetypes for people pushed into the margins of society, including queer people, aging individuals, and people of color; indeed, many indigenous ways of knowing call forth the Trickster, including through play (Turner 2021).

4. Conclusion

This article barely scratches the surface of the potential for players in RPGs to experience narrative agency, tell stories beyond the monomyth, and embody archetypes beyond the hero. Role-playing games can be a space to:

1. enact the hero’s journey, as well as subvert it;

2. enact traditional story structures, while also deviating from them by embodying alternative myths;

3. create a personal mythos emerging from the player’s consciousness filtered through the game design; and 1 and

4. explore personal and social identity through archetypal enactments of many kinds.

These games are significant because of their co-creative, spontaneous nature; while certain RPG genres such as fantasy feature familiar tropes from the hero’s journey, RPGs often defy common notions of linear storytelling with a central character.

This article does not deny the narrative power of the hero’s journey, which is clearly meaningful for people (Walters 2021) and has resonated throughout time (Vogler 2007), but rather expands notions of storytelling to include a plurality of voices, cultures, and experiences. As a maturing medium, RPGs are experiencing a cultural Renaissance, with D&D more popular than ever (Pesce 2022) and thus is of interest to media educators. As Beltrán explained to me, RPGs are evolving:

I have seen naturally the force of the culture pull D&D away from its original wargaming roots into something that is more about human experience. And there is [a] zeitgeist drive, I think, to do that. And I think we should pay attention to that and pay attention to ourselves and why we want that, so that we can design more smartly going forward, not just for D&D, but for all mediums of games.

RPGs have only begun to scratch the surface in terms of exploring the human experience, even within avant-garde traditions like the Nordic larp scene (Stenros and Montola 2010). As the saying goes, ‘the sky’s the limit,’ but in truth, with the power of the imagination, no real limits exist in terms of the stories players can co-create.

This limitless potential is significant not only in expanding the repertoire of stories to inspire us, but in offering the potential for the transmutation – and transformation – of self. Our very identities are composed of the stories we tell about ourselves and, through role-playing, participants can learn to embody new narratives. While these stories are bounded by play, sometimes players can integrate takeaways, transforming their narrative identity (McAdams 2011) through reflection on the fictional journey of the character (Bowman and Hugaas 2021; Diakolambrianou and Bowman 2023). Thus, the plethora of different ways to tell stories and different character types to embody within RPGs hold infinite potential for the transformation of identities far beyond the experience of play.

Acknowledgements

This work is part of a larger ethnographic research project on the therapeutic and educational potential of role-playing games. This project was approved by the Austin Community College Institutional Research Review Committee in June 2020 under the supervision of Dr. Jean Lauer. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Austin Community College. Sarah would like to thank from the bottom of her heart all of her participants in this study, who have helped her refine her thoughts on these topics by offering their own expertise.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

These data are protected by confidentiality according to ethical review. The data are not open access.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Lynne Bowman

Sarah Lynne Bowman is a scholar, game designer, and event organizer. She received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Texas at Austin in Radio-TV-Film. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in Arts and Humanities. Bowman teaches in the Humanities, English, and Communication. Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer for the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University Campus Gotland. She also teaches in the Humanities department, as well as in Peace & Conflict Studies and Global Studies for the Interdisciplinary Studies department, at Austin Community College. Bowman publishes regularly in scholarly and popular media about the transformative power of role-playing. McFarland Press published her dissertation in 2010 as The Functions of Role-playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems, and Explore Identity. She has edited for The Wyrd Con Companion Book (2012–2015), the International Journal of Role-Playing (2016-), and the magazine Nordiclarp.org (2015-). Bowman has co-organized the Living Games Conference (2014, 2016, 2018), the Role-playing and Simulation in Education Conference (2016, 2018), and the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar (2022).