‘If it’s held dear, it’ll get pushed through’: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs)

‘If it’s held dear, it’ll get pushed through’: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs)

‘If it’s held dear, it’ll get pushed through’: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs)

Kellynn Wee

Abstract

"Transmedia storytelling is a strategy adopted by media franchises and brands to create participa-tory story-worlds for their consumers; it incorporates a range of forms, actors, and texts, all of which have varying degrees of narrative authority in determining the events that occur. This article focuses on tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons to show how play cultures in Singapore are shaped by transmedia storytelling techniques. In doing so, it makes two contributions to exist- ing research: first, it shifts scholarly focus from game texts to player practice, showing how com-munities of play are created through players’ emergent usage of transmedia storytelling techniques. Second, it describes a player practice of soft canon, which I theorise as an approach to shared world-making that prioritises the emotional resonance of narrative details over a posi-tivist accounting of narrative events. The concept of soft canon reveals a new perspective on how communities create and sustain intersubjectively imagined worlds."

Reference

Wee, K. (2024). ‘If it’s held dear, it’ll get pushed through’: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs). International Journal of Cultural Studies, 27(5), 675–693.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13678779241244407

Keywords

Canon, Dungeons & Dragons, Fandom