Dungeons for Science: Mapping Belief Places and Spaces Aaron Dant Philip Feldman Wayne Lutters ASRC Federal University of Maryland, University of Maryland Columbia, USA Baltimore County College Park, USA aaron.dant@asrcfederal Catonsville, USA [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT • it encourages complex problem-solving and provides par- Tabletop fantasy role-playing games (TFRPGs) have existed in ticipants with the opportunity to learn an extensive array of offline and online contexts for many decades, yet are rarely fea- skills through the enactment of scenarios tured in scientific literature. This paper presents a case study • it offers participants a safe space to enact alternate personas where TFRPGs were used to generate and collect data for through a process known as identity alteration maps of belief environments using fiction co-created by multi- ple small groups of online tabletop gamers. The affordances of TFRPGs allowed us to collect repeatable, targeted data in online field conditions. These data not only included terms Finding value in an overlooked genre that allowed us to build our maps, but also to explore nuanced Role-playing has been shown to be a valuable method for re- ethical problems from a situated, collaborative perspective. searching human behavior in combination with agent-based simulation [15] however the forms of role-playing used tend CCS Concepts to be specific to the subject matter. Only a few sociological studies exist which examine human behavior through the lens •Human-centered computing ! Collaborative and social of tabletop fantasy role-playing games such as Dungeons & computing theory, concepts and paradigms; •Computing Dragons [12]. Pat Harrigan sums this up nicely in the intro- methodologies ! Agent / discrete models; duction to Second Person: “in the last few years there has been much academic discussion of video games and other forms Author Keywords of digital media. but little that acknowledges in any depth Belief space; cartography; role playing games, CSCW the debt many of these forms owe to tabletop role-playing games. Further, it is not too much to say that where academic INTRODUCTION discussion of tabletop RPGs exists. it is largely cursory - and Games can function in social research as probes to reveal be- not infrequently wrong.” [17] havior, both individual and collective. They provide a bounded, From a CSCW perspective, TFRPGs have a compelling set of manageable, “safe” environment to tease out beliefs and their affordances for research, including: ramifications. Considerable research has been done in this field, particularly with regard to “serious games”, where, for • They present agreed upon and verifiable features example, a surgical team can rehearse minimally-invasive • They are a “subset” of reality, with fewer dimensions to surgery risk-free on a simulated patient [33], or users can learn explore, but with infinite choices within those dimensions to overcome their phobias [6]. • Multiple groups can experience the same environment, mak- ing experiments easily repeatable For group interactions, role-playing games (RPGs) provide considerable benefits as well. They have been shown to be This paper describes a process that uses the culture, struc- arXiv:1904.05216v4 [cs.CY] 9 Jul 2019 effective in areas ranging from military training, to health care, ture and affordances of fantasy tabletop role-playing games and leisure. (TFRPGs) to probe two related but distinct concepts: Role-playing has three fundamental characteristics [7]: The first is the belief place, a cognitive structure shared be- tween multiple groups about salient features in non-physical • it enhances a group’s sense of communal cohesiveness by environments. In TFRPGs, these places could be rooms in a providing narrative enactment dungeon, or the country from which an imaginary character hails. Paste the appropriate copyright statement here. ACM now supports three different The second, related concept is that of belief spaces. These copyright statements: • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the historical ap- are the regions of choices associated with the place. What proach. should I do in this room? Do I trust the ambassador from this • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an exclusive publication imaginary kingdom? These are contextual choices that vary license. • Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open access. The addi- on the circumstance in the place at a particular time. These tional fee must be paid to ACM. choices are constrained - their space is affected by the place This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement assuming it is single spaced. that enables them. Every submission will be assigned their own unique DOI string to be included here. 1 The ability to portray and discriminate between the “ground level of diversity needs to be included to provoke meaningful truth” of belief places and the surrounding contextual belief discussion. A party constructed of characters with identical spaces makes TFRPGs ideal for our research in creating maps abilities, will have less need for discussion or different per- that embody these concepts. In the next sections of this paper, spectives. we will walk through the background and culture of TFRPGs, Greyhawk the dungeon that was constructed to optimize our data gath- By the time of its first expansion [16], Dungeons ering, some highlights from the data, and the resultant maps and Dragons had created four archetypal characters: built from that data. We will conclude with a more general • Fighter: offers direct combat strength and durability. discussion about the utility of these special instruments. • Thief (Rogue): offers cunning and stealth. • Cleric: provides support in both combat and magic. WHAT IS A TFRPG? • Magic-User (Mage): has a variety of magical powers The essence of role-playing is to take on the role of a character in an imaginary setting. This is something most of us have To this day, official pre-generated characters for the Starter Set been doing in one form or another since we were children are implementations of these same archetypes [1]. By using playing “make believe”. Role-playing has elements of im- these well understood characters, we were able to limit the provisational acting, storytelling, and deductive reasoning. A range of solutions for encounters to one manageable with a player’s character can be similar to their own personality, or small number of participants. Groups were allowed to select embody everything that they are not. multiple of the same archetype if desired, and to encourage an emotional connection with the characters, each player was tabletop fantasy role playing game, one player takes on the role allowed to assign the name, gender, and alignment for the of the Dungeon Master (DM or Game Master, Storyteller etc.) pre-generated character they selected. Alignment is a D&D with the responsibility of describing the world the characters convention for grounding a characters’ moral beliefs. It is a inhabit and telling the players what they can see, hear, feel, two axis system that ranges from “lawful” to “chaotic” on one touch, and taste. The DM is also responsible for coming up axis, and “evil” to “good” on the other, creating characters that with a story to set the players in. This story is not complete, can range from “chaotic evil” to “lawful good”[19][28] but a framework that is collaboratively explored during the course of the game. The other players are the main characters in the story, and the DM adapts to the players’ choices. CASE STUDY: THE TRIALS OF TYMORA We chose TFRPGs because they are systems that take a latent Dungeons & Dragons structure (created by the DM), and, through the process of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is the first and best known fan- game-play, build a sequence of specific actions based on the tasy tabletop role-playing game in the world. Open source interactions of the players and their evolving consensus of how copies of the basic rules are freely available [2]. Players con- to proceed through the current scenario [5]. This provides a trol an individual character who can cast spells or wield magic framework whereby multiple groups can come to consensus swords against fantastic, mythical creatures such as dragons about many different kinds of problems, ranging from the and hobgoblins [24]. Fellow wargamers Gary Gygax and practical (how do we get across the pit) to moral (do we kill Dave Arneson released D&D to the public in 1977, where the guard?). These vast narratives are capable of supporting it has thrived in a wide variety of demographics and venues, intimate, honest discussion between the players, both in and ranging from tabletop play to online systems. The open source out of character [17]. The terrain that these narrative structures nature and broad availability of D&D make it ideal for our represent become Foucault’s other spaces [13], and exist as research. alternate realities in the player’s minds. Randomness: The Role of Rolls Why should we expect that small groups interacting in these A core characteristic of D&D is the inclusion of randomness spaces should produce the kind of data that we need to produce in the form of dice rolls which allow chance to influence in the maps? The answer lies in the dimension-reducing process success or failure of player actions. A player character’s skills that groups achieve consensus. Moscovici showed that the may improve their chances of success at a particular action, process of consensus has several steps. First, the group has but it is always possible to fail simply from chance. Tradi- to implicitly agree on what they are going to discuss. All the tionally when played in person rolls are managed by a variety individuals with their own, unique perspectives have to create a of different sided dice which allows for a finer granularity of common, shared reality that they can then debate.