Role-Playing Reality: Queer Theory, New Materialisms, and Digital Role-Play

Warren, Jack (2023) Role-Playing Reality: Queer Theory, New Materialisms, and Digital Role-Play. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

Preview

Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (3MB) | Preview

Abstract

This thesis works to reconfigure who or what the situated agencies in digital role-play are to realise the more-than-human dimensions and embodiments of play. In doing so, it finds that all the collaborators in digital role-play [players, avatars, interfaces, networks, software, media content, art, performances, gestics, imaginings, alongside other games] disclose the emergent and latent relations and sensations that characterise play. In recognising all these elements as vital and active companions in role-play, this work addresses the question of what the realities of digital role-play are: where realities signify the actualities of what happens when human and nonhuman bodies entangle during play as well as the substances of reality – performance and affect, matter and meaning, space and time – all of which determine role-play. World of Warcraft (Blizzard 2004-) is taken as the primary example in this thesis, though the affordances of its role-players are irradiated alongside other games, art, literature, performances, and materials that likewise ‘play’ with fiction. Alongside these modalities, the Argent Archives, a massive collection of content posted by role-players who play World of Warcraft, evidences the lifeworlds of digital role-play. Since digital role-play is rarely studied, and the Argent Archives never so, this thesis explores foundational questions regarding the realities of play: what they comprise and how players actively create emergent gameworlds with their arts and acts. This thesis employs a methodology of promiscuity, that is, promiscuity as method in order to reckon with the entanglements of play. Inspired by the works of queer theorists and new materialists, which centre bodies, affects, and entanglements, a correspondingly promiscuous methodology follows the labyrinthine folds of encounter that define play while emphasising its intimate, sensual, troubling, and perverse aspects.