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Symbolized Reality: Liturgy and Tabletop Role-Playing Games

In recent years, tabletop role-playing games have surged in popularity. The reasons for this may vary, but a central feature of what tends to make tabletop role-playing games compelling for many players is the ability the games afford to connect with a character, party, or storyline in a way that moves significantly beyond participation as an observer or consumer of content. Creative agency is involved—sometimes significantly so—on the part of the players, the narrator/ game facilitator, and the group as a whole. The experience itself becomes crafted beyond the simple adding-up of story, game mechanics, and player participation. The fantasy worlds that the participants inhabit become something more than simulation; they often symbolize aspects of players’ lives. By this I do not mean that they exhibit some surface-level one-to-one representation of things or concepts that echo the realities from which participants come. I mean instead that the work of symbolization—of mediation of meaning, presence, and identity—can take place in the context of the game by a multitude of ways that vacillate in both intensity and relevance depending upon the game’s context, the context of the group playing it, and the contexts that individual participants bring to it. The symbolization that unfolds in a tabletop role-playing game is in some significant respects quite similar to symbolism at play in liturgical celebration (in kind if not in content). The central aim of this discussion, after briefly explaining what I mean by symbol and symbolization, is to unpack two main ways that tabletop role-playing games symbolize reality: in the communal experience of revelation, and in the practice of forming and reforming (and, often enough, malforming) approaches to ethics. Following this, I will conclude by arguing that liturgy itself can learn from these tendencies of tabletop role-playing games, most especially in the richness that necessarily depends upon a certain level of letting-go or stepping away from attempting to control the ritual, its particular contents, and its results. A word of clarification (or perhaps caution) before continuing: I do not mean to maintain that tabletop role-playing games are liturgies, nor that they are liturgical in all the ways that Christian rituals are liturgical. Indeed, role-playing games have known a significant amount of suspicion (and even “moral panic”) specifically from religious communities, and while this is no longer as potent, it is also not completely absent. In this light I wish to tread carefully and keep my claims modest; tabletop role-playing games may be thought of as pseudo-liturgical in particular ways that are illustrative for liturgy itself (e.g., symbolizing reality, being predicated upon a communal experience of revelation, forging and clarifying approaches to ethics). This is where my claims stop.