Player Negotiation & Mediation in the modern Metascape of Dungeons & Dragons

Sammanfattning

Games and play have long remained minor subjects of study within anthropology. This thesis calls attention to this potentially rich area of study through a focus on the Tabletop Role-Playing Game (TTRPG) hobby and its flagship game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this project explores the D&D community in and beyond Stockholm, Sweden and discusses several concepts with rich histories in anthropology in tandem with this novel, underexplored fieldsite. Drawing on classic texts from the likes of Pierre Clastres and Marshall Sahlins, this thesis explores the unique leadership qualities and tasks of the role of the Dungeon Master (DM) as they negotiate and mediate with players at their table to cultivate a healthy and satisfying gaming environment. Players' relationships with their dice and practices carried out to attempt to control them enable discussions of luck and superstition in play in dialogue with previous literature on indeterminacy from anthropologists like Thomas Malaby and Roberte Hamayon. Finally, the unique entity which comprises the D&D community of the twenty-first century is such that previous approaches to understanding modern cultural flows prove inadequate, leading to the development of a new concept, the metascape, which expands our understanding of today’s intricate and complex sociocultural forms in an ever-increasingly digital world.