RPGs, Identity, & Community
RPGs, Identity & Ritual
Identity Exploration Within RPG Communities
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About
RPGs, especially D&D, is a place for players to explore often sensitive topics, including racial injustice, class wars, and gender identity. Gender identity comes into play when creating a character. Good Dungeon Masters (DMs) will allow their players to create a unique character with a backstory and visage determined solely by the player with little influence from the DM themselves. People identifying as one gender may choose to play a character of another gender. This plays a role in the game in many ways, the least of which is how characters are treated by others. This website will explore all of this.
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RPGs, Identity, & Community
How do they intersect?
Identity
Gender Identity in Dungeons & Dragons
According to Antero Garcia, "considering their creation by individuals, biases and inherent inequalities are both consciously and unconsciously embedded within systems," which can affect the creation of characters (2017). Cisgender males are more likely to stay within their assigned gender, for instance.
Identity
Sexual Identity in Dragon Age
Ciaran Devlin and Anne Holohan have researched sexual identity in RPGs, specifically the 'Dragon Age' series, a video game series created by BioWare. Specifically how BioWare has introduced sexual identities into the story lines of their major series, as video games tend to "focus on heteronormative (male) content (2016)."
