Leveling Up to a Ph.D.: Scholar Examines Racial and Gender Roles in, Get This, Dungeons & Dragons

The abstract doesn't say too much:

Privilege, Power, and Dungeons & Dragons: How Systems Shape Racial and Gender Identities in Tabletop Role-Playing Games

Antero Garcia

This article takes a cultural-historical approach to analyzing how systems shape the assumptions, identities, and experiences of their users. Focusing on how the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons is built on a system of play that has grown and shifted over the course of 40 years, this study emphasizes the central role that systems play in mediating the experiences of participants. By focusing on depictions of gender, race, and power in Dungeons & Dragons--as a singular cultural practice--this study highlights how researchers must attend to cultural production both around and within systems.

I like how #FakeNews academics suggest a level of depth and technical rigor by randomly italicizing common words, suggesting that these common words have been transmuted into fractally-complex terms of art, subtly-faceted jargon which is otherwise incomprehensible without seven years of fuckin' college in a Gender Studies program.

We all paid for this drivel -- yet it's something like $25 to have access to this invaluable research for just 24 hours. (Which sucks, because I'd like to read and review this "scholarship." I hear doing so gets you a 500 Experience Point Skill-based bonus.)

Open thread.

(I just put a bunch of stories from all my open tabs in the sidebar.)

posted by Ace of Spades at 07:52 PM

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