Tabletop Roleplaying Games and the Social-Political Imaginary

Introduction

Tabletop Roleplaying Games (TTRPGs) offer unique opportunities for social and political imagination grounded in collective storytelling that exercises player’s agentic capacity to narrate themselves and their relations. While this potential is easily collapsed into game or uncritical entertainment, the social spaces and media generated surrounding TTRPGs provide a radical, accessible and engaging potential seldom found in the contemporary cultural conjuncture of North America in 2026.

In Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Mark Fisher explores how capitalism embeds its selfish and exploitative logic into every aspect of the current cultural moment. More than propaganda or the manipulation of advertising, he says “it is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”[1] Almost as if one cannot imagine an alternative to capitalism, even post-apocalyptic narratives associate the end of the world with the end of capitalism, since there is no imaginable alternative. Supporting this capitalist realism are what Henry Giroux calls “disimagination machines” which distribute subject-positions, teach people to consider themselves fundamentally separate from each other, and kill any latent sense of social responsibility or conscience.

These tools of indoctrination relentlessly churn out manufactured ignorance and a shallow notion of self-interest, promoting a depoliticized notion of individualism. Additionally, these machineries of misinformation undermine the moral imagination’s power to empathize with the claims of others while undercutting the courage of individuals to see beyond the socially induced fog of a culture of immediacy.[2]

In this short paper I offer a perspective on TTRPGs that figure the medium against these disimagination machines and their capitalist realism. Through an analysis of their fundamental form and the potential social-political imagination its features offer I position TTRPGs with a latent “emancipatory politics” that reinvigorates hope for a better future through practices of freedom.[3] If a future beyond neoliberal exploitation, climate catastrophe and resurgent fascism is to be thinkable, social spaces are needed that afford youth the opportunity to exercise agency, political imagination and collective self-narration. I start with an explanation of what a TTRPG is, then I use the theory of the ludic space from game studies to articulate the medium’s political potential. I conclude with some limitations of the argument.

What is a TTRPG?

RPGs, or role-playing games have a long history rooted in—perhaps unexpectedly for those unfamiliar with what the activity entails—theater from as early as the 18^th century.[4] At a basic level, what one does when one plays an RPG is a taking on of roles; One pretends to be something one is not and responds to the circumstances of the game, script or rules as if one where a particular character with particular traits, from a particular time in a particular place. RPGs can be flexible or rather constrained. Digital role-playing games (video games) are the most constrained by virtue of the technology and computer interface. Whereas something like LARP (live action role-playing) involves often outdoor, costumed, and grand settings where the limits are often only one’s imagination and the cooperation of your peers. Somewhere in the middle between these extremes are TTRPGs. TTRPGs are defined by their ability to played at a kitchen table. Some have complex rules, most have a dice-rolling mechanic that adds chance and game around probabilities, and many differ in their player structure (who has power to set the rules of the game). Most TTRPGs could be called boardgames but most boardgames are not TTRPGs. The imaginative dimension of the genre distinguishes itself from the likes of Monopoly and Snakes and Ladders.

When I refer to TTRPGs, I use Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as a template. In D&D, 3-6 players play their own characters in a world set and populated by a game master (GM), also called a dungeon master (DM). The GM typically builds a world or uses a preset from a book to establish the setting in great detail. This setting typically includes histories, a diversity of cultures and peoples, factions, power structures, politics and conflicts. The players are thrust into this world and must respond to the NPCs (non-player characters played by the GM), the dangers, challenges and intrigue presented to them by the GM. Players work together sometimes imperfectly (on purpose, in character) to unfold a multilayered, often character-driven narrative. While the GM has typically charted out major story “beats”, challenges and events, they do not know the result of each encounter or how their players will respond. An additional layer of uncertainty core to D&D is dice. Every action a player or NPC takes based in skill (from persuasion, memory recall, or swinging a sword at a monster) relies on rolling a 20-sided die. The GM decides what number(s) set the threshold for success, failure or somewhere in between. A particular character’s traits, profession, motivation or background affect the result of the die with numerical values (+3 to physical challenges if the character was a muscular barbarian from the mountains, for example). The ultimate result of this game is a meeting of a world-referee who plays the roles of the natural and social-political realities of the setting (and interprets the rules) and individual players who respond to each other and said world to affect it. D&D has proved a fertile ground for generating captivating and entertaining narratives.

In the last two decades a new media form has arisen based in playing TTRPGs in front of a camera. These shows, sometimes audio-only and released as podcasts, often involve improvisors, comedians or voice-actors actually playing D&D or another system. These non-scripted recorded and only lightly edited shows are called “actual-play” or “live-play.” With an episode runtime anywhere between 1.5 to 6 hours each, these shows span a wide range of settings, and genres each offering their own appeal. Some are largely comedic, like Dimension 20 (made by improv comedians), and others are largely dramatic like Critical Role (made by voice-actors). Both of these shows have amassed massive fanbases. Critical Role, to illustrate, amassed 11.3 million USD in audience donations to fund the creation of an animated series based in the narrative that naturally emerged through their actual-play web series. The series, following an intrepid band of unlikely heroes discovering and ultimately responding to injustice, was later picked up by Amazon has since received critical acclaim for its entertaining-yet serious tone. Far from apolitical, the series, along with its sequel, has been praised for its representation of Queer identities.[5] Dimension 20, for its part, sold out a live show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden.[6] While more comedic in tone, Dimension 20’s games often take place in diverse genre-bending settings and more directly engage in political satire and critique. Actual play and TTRPGs in general are currently culturally significant.

While actual play media holds its own potential for social-political commentary it is not significantly different from other media. Although, I should note, the fact that one could watch these actual play shows and subsequently play the same game oneself potentially in the same setting does place these media apart from a movie or television series. The radical potential of TTRPGs lie in their lived social dimension. In what follows I introduce a theoretical framework from game studies to discuss the way TTRPGs make meaning. Four overarching opportunities for politics exist in TTRPGs by virtue of their formal structures. These are worldbuilding, mechanics, player-space, and collective storytelling.

How are TTRPGs Political?

The theory of “Ludic space” within broad game studies scholarship refers to the multilayered experiences that take place within the game environment. Craig Lindley uses this term to build a theoretical basis for analysis which separates the ludic space along semiotic lines (meaning making patterns). They argue that in games meaning is made at the generation level (mechanics), simulation level (worldbuilding), performance level (player choices) and finally a discourse level (narrative).[7] At each of these levels a particular game works differently and may draw more on one pattern of meaning-making than another. Tetris, for example, operates almost entirely on generation. There is no narrative, world or meaningful performance or imagination taking place in a traditional Tetris game. Where another video game like Morrowind, a computer based RPG built off of traditional TTRPGs, operates on all levels of play. Extending this language to TTRPGs, what are the ludic spaces or levels that offer political potential?

Worldbuilding is the process of writing and imagining the fictional setting of a TTRPG. Similar to the process of writing fiction in novel or short story forms, worldbuilding in a TTRPG must account for the vast freedom of player agency to explore every possible corner of the setting. Speaking from experience as a GM, this task is often approached first by establishing basic laws, themes and society problems that allow one deduce realities of the setting in real time while playing. This flexible and contingent quality to worldbuilding in TTRPGs is dramatically different to worldbuilding in a novel. While one still imagines political factions, histories and conflicts, one must populate these fictions with a living quality open to player choice and agency. Often what this means in practice is some ambiguity that is only determined through player interaction. A GM and their imagination must respond to the players’ interest, actions and questions—Sometimes rewriting their world(s) in between game sessions in response to a question or action from a player they did not anticipate. This dynamic and living quality to a world built for a TTRPG gives it a fundamentally believable quality that can dwarf traditional novels. Brennan Lee Mulligan, a prominent figure in TTRPGs and widely respected as a GM, educator and improviser, once called the world Exandria of Critical Role “the greatest fantasy world of all time.”[8]

After hundreds of hours of playtime, themes instantiate themselves in small, believable details. For example, the party (what a group of player characters is referred to as in D&D) encounters a traumatized doctor devastated by a war and the GM must perform or describe what trauma looks like, sounds like and feels like when simulating the character of the doctor. The players decide to bring him along with them and now the GM must flesh out his character, history and possible future. Where does a war refugee’s heart go? What will he want to do now that is practice is destroyed? Where is his family? The GM makes these decisions and next session the player’s have to respond to this man, console him, help him or otherwise reckon with the personal impacts of broad social-political forces. This is one of the ways TTRPGs operate to reproduce politics at the ludic level of simulation (the conditions of a war, for instance), performance (how the GM depicts a traumatized doctor and the player’s response), and discourse (what narrative is drawn over the course of multiple game sessions). Politically, worldbuilding can also imagine the world in radical ways. What if society was governed by worker collectives? What would that look like? By imagining a setting and living it over the course of game sessions, worldbuilding can question (and make players question) the difficulties of living in an imperfect world together. At the intersection of worldbuilding and player choices is an additional ludic space of player experience and agency mediated by game mechanics.

On the level of ludic generation, game mechanics offer political opportunities around how players and GMs view and solve problems. If your game system’s rules does not allow combat to take place, then the players will need to solve problems non-violently. Dimension 20 has employed one such system in an actual play web series entitled Glad Lands. In Glad Lands, players solve problems in a post-apocalyptic setting with nonviolence where negative outcomes are measured with stress and a “bummer meter” and positive outcomes in positive social outcomes and a “good goo” meter. Ironically coloured by the rough aesthetic of Mad Max, the series offered an alternative to future beyond the end of the world where cooperation reigns. Thus, TTRPGs seem to able to escape a world where there is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”[9] In contrast to a cultural moment that finds it difficult to imagine a future beyond the end of unfettered capitalism, this simple game mechanic shift away from the combat-focused D&D allowed players and audiences to imagine a world otherwise. What could have been a simple spectacle of fun and entertainment ended up planting seeds of a radical hope at the confluence of worldbuilding (writing the setting) and mechanics (nonviolent problem solving).

The ludic space of the player experience is the most promising of political sites in TTRPGs. Not because players are faced with representations of real-world problems or even due to the radical imagination required to hope for a better, more just future. Rather, at a more profound level, TTRPGs require players to practice their own agency, narrate themselves and be present in their identities while responding to the conditions that govern themselves and their relations. Together with worldbuilding and mechanics, the player response and the space they inhabit in responding both work together to offer something seldom found today: a platform to play with one’s own capacity to affect change and learn from other people. Inherently democratic, the TTRPG table allows each player to create scenes, explore sites, ask questions and move the narrative. Players develop smaller character driven narratives, conflicts and emotional stakes between each other freely. The player’s relationship to the party also provides a site of contact between the imagined character and the identity of the collective in a safe environment supportive of experimentation.

Player agency can turn a simple vampire story into a democratic policy laboratory. In a somewhat extreme example, a player in one of my home games (long running TTRPG sessions often spanning years—7 years and counting in my case) decided they wanted to help an NPC revolutionize the constitution of a fascist vampire-ridden city-state the party was visiting. This player was from the United States and one can imagine why they might be interested in pursuing such a task in 2026. While still fun and engaging, over the course of multiple sessions of difficult legal and political challenges all acted out in character, the player and party managed to affect real change in this fictional world. This player is now a public broadcaster and community organizer using their voice to fight for justice in their local environment. With low stakes and the right people, TTRPGs can be fertile ground to practice speaking out and responding to resistance thoughtfully and constructively.

Agency of the player character is experienced by the player, even when it is all pretend. The concept of “Character Bleed” has been introduced to help explain the phenomenon of affects experienced by the character one is playing and the player themselves.[10] While typically used to refer to affects of vulnerability and emotional pain, the concept also extends to positive or ephemeral emotions like the sense of accomplishment and competence. For these reasons medical professionals, psychologists and educators are looking to TTRPGs for therapeutic and pedagogical applications.[11] Few, if any, have spoken to the potential of TTRPGs to practice the agency required to engage in democratic political life. In a world of neoliberal universities, corporately owned social media and underfunded schools and social services, TTRPGs offer a low cost imaginative space to practice making decisions and advocating for change. As a “practice of freedom” a la Maggie Nelson, TTRPGs also offer spaces for players to explore facets of their identities they would otherwise not be able to.[12]

The ludic space of player experience and response allows players to make choices about the identities they inhabit through the character they play. This means someone who is curious about life as a woman can play a woman and inhabit that identity in their role-playing. While one can certainly choose to play a diverse range of character identities for many reasons, Queer folk have expressed how powerful TTRPGs are in helping people feel comfortable with who they are.[13] TTRPGs thus help resist what Fisher calls the “constant symbolic self-denigration” inherent in living in the capitalist realism that marks our daily life.[14] Players are free to experiment, and through the phenomenon of character bleed, are afforded the acceptance they might have feared would be absent in the real world. The TTRPG space is an embodied one that creates a space of safe imaginative play where everyone is accepted for who they are and choose to be. The ludic space of performance as player choice expands at the meeting place of agency, world, and mechanics.

Outside of the game, the real social space of TTRPGs can also provide political opportunities. Game sessions can last 3 to 6 hours or more depending on player availability. During breaks players check in, catch up and chat. News is shared, and opportunities to get together are explored. These sessions form nodes within the social network of friends and associates who game together that can quickly form political communities. In the group messaging platform my players use, they often share resources for community events and organizing together. Some based in the US often share news about protests or resources for letter writing or how to participate in town halls. Beyond the sharing of information (which is already political) the game space forms bonds between players that resist the neoliberal reduction of relations to commercial relations within Western culture. As Monbiont and Hutchinson argue “…when human life is conceived as a series of transactions, when relationships are recast in purely functional terms, when personal gain counts for everything and pro-social values for nothing, the sense of meaning and purpose is sucked from our lives.”[15] Even if one session is not political, the very act of holding space for one another to speak radically resists the this reduction.

At each ludic level of generation, simulation, performance and discourse, TTRPGs hold the radical potential of imagining a world otherwise. A world where problems can be solved with nonviolence, where identities are accepted and where the world will persist beyond the end of capital. While I have personally seen the political potential of TTRPGs materialize, there are many limitations and challenges to TTRPGs working this way for everyone.

Concluding with Limitations and Future Directions

            As a game, there are risks that something like D&D can fall back into pure entertainment or even propaganda at each ludic level. As some studies of “war games” like Warhammer have argued, mechanics can omit important political notions like accountability, remorse or even simple consequences.[16] In the ludic space of player response, one can commit fictional acts of genocide or a myriad of other war crimes without a second thought. While still “pretend,” some have argued that war games contribute to the militarized culture of the United States, pointing to how war games shape the identities, beliefs and values of US soldiers.[17] While the ludic spaces of TTRPGs can legitimately generate opportunities to exercise radical political imaginations, for the most part, games are at best pure entertainment. Popular games like Call of Duty, Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto function to depoliticize, desensitize and distract. Returning to Fisher, these games serve as internalized playgrounds for capital. Fisher reminds us how “we are integrated into a control circuit that has our desires and preferences as its only mandate.”[18] Even in the world of TTRPGs, most tables likely do not engage political topics in depth. However, this is changing. Actual play like Dimension 20 and Critical role are influencing how people play D&D.[19] More creative, improvisational, emotional and political, TTRPGs are poised to grow as sites of democratic spaces where players practice freedom and narrate themselves.

            Future research should take this medium of game seriously as an intimately political space whose ludic dimensions off multiple opportunities for collective storytelling that presents players and GMs alike with reflections of real social and political issues in believable worlds. Players should embrace the safe space to take risks to experiment with identities and engage with the political realities of the fictional setting. Above the table and outside the game, connect with your peers and extend the same courage you demonstrated fighting the dragon to reaching out in solidarity to those facing injustice or loneliness. To conclude, even in the most conservative of analyses, TTRPGs provide opportunities for collective imagination that helps people connect, share space and practice speaking up in their own voice. Ultimately, TTRPGs are one of many social and imaginative activities needed to combat what Fisher calls “reflexive impotence,” or, the deadening of creativity that plagues perception, divorces people from each other and precludes any democratic or just future.[20]

References

Alonge, Giaime. “Playing the Nazis: Political Implications in Analog War Games.” Analog Game Studies, 2019, 1–16.

Bean, Anthony, and Megan Connell. “The Rise of the Use of TTRPGs and RPGs in Therapeutic Endeavors.” Journal of Psychology and Psychotherapy Research 10 (2023): 1–12.

Brogan, K., A. Scicchitano, D. Diletti, and V. McGrath. “EMPOWERMENT OF STUDENTS BY ROLE-PLAY GAMING.” EDULEARN25 Proceedings, 2025, 5550–56. https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2025.1371.

Cox, Jenna. “Impact Of TTRPGs On Mental Well-Being And Social Self-Efficacy.” Honors College, 2025. https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/honors/931/.

Denny, Matt, and Nick Webber. “Not Actual Play: Examples of Play and Expectations of Experience in TTRPGs.” PAIDIA, 2024. http://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/15884/.

FactsDigger. “Game Masters of Exandria Roundtable/Transcript.” Wiki. Critical Role Wiki, Fandom.com, 2022. https://criticalrole.fandom.com/wiki/Game_Masters_of_Exandria_Roundtable/Transcript.

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? 1st ed. With Stuart Davies. Zero Books, 2009.

Giroux, Henry A. Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure. Bloomsbury Academic, 2026.

Hartyándi, Mátyás. “From ‘Playing a Role’ to ‘Role-Playing Games’: The Genealogy and History of the Term ‘Role-Playing.’” International Journal of Role-Playing, no. 18 (April 2026): 37–50. https://doi.org/10.33063/ijrp.vi18.1190.

Hirst, Aggie. Politics of Play: Wargaming with the US Military. Oxford University Press, 2024.

Hugaas, Hugaas, Kjell Hedgard. “Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-out from Role-Playing Games Can Affect a Player’s Sense of Self.” International Journal of Role-Playing, no. 14 (2024). https://mcmaster.primo.exlibrisgroup.com.

Lindley, Craig A. “The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design.” Game Studies 5, no. 1 (2005).

Monbiot, George, and Peter Hutchison. Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism. Allen Lane, 2024.

Mullinax, Hope. “The Legend of Vox Machina Review by Someone Who Knows Nothing About Critical Role.” The Geeky Waffle, February 5, 2022. https://thegeekywaffle.com/home/legend-vox-machina-review-critical-role.

Nelson, Maggie. On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint. McClelland & Stewart, 2022.

Sottile, Emry. “‘It Might Have a Little to Do with Wish Fulfillment’: The Life-Giving Force of Queer Performance in TTRPG Spaces.” International Journal of Role-Playing, no. 15 (2024): 61–73.

Teh, Cheryl. “Dimension 20 Just Played a Sold-out Gig at Madison Square Garden. Here’s What Is next for One of the Nerdworld Business’ Biggest Names.” Business Insider, February 4, 2025. https://www.businessinsider.com/dimension-20-plans-comic-us-tour-madison-square-garden-2025-2.

[1] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 22.

[2] Giroux, Assassins of Memory, 89.

[3] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 28.

[4] Hartyándi, “From ‘Playing a Role’ to ‘Role-Playing Games.’”

[5] Mullinax, “The Legend of Vox Machina Review by Someone Who Knows Nothing About Critical Role.”

[6] Teh, “Dimension 20 Just Played a Sold-out Gig at Madison Square Garden. Here’s What Is next for One of the Nerdworld Business’ Biggest Names.”

[7] Lindley, “The Semiotics of Time Structure in Ludic Space As a Foundation for Analysis and Design.”

[8] FactsDigger, “Game Masters of Exandria Roundtable/Transcript.”

[9] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 8.

[10] Hugaas, “Bleed and Identity.”

[11] Brogan et al., “EMPOWERMENT OF STUDENTS BY ROLE-PLAY GAMING”; Bean and Connell, “The Rise of the Use of TTRPGs and RPGs in Therapeutic Endeavors”; Cox, “Impact Of TTRPGs On Mental Well-Being And Social Self-Efficacy.”

[12] Nelson, On Freedom.

[13] Sottile, “‘It Might Have a Little to Do with Wish Fulfillment.’”

[14] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 52.

[15] Monbiot and Hutchison, Invisible Doctrine, 60.

[16] Alonge, “Playing the Nazis.”

[17] Hirst, Politics of Play.

[18] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 49.

[19] Denny and Webber, “Not Actual Play.”

[20] Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 21.

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