I’m a PhD student at University College London’s Department of Anthropology. My research focuses on play cultures in tabletop roleplaying games in Singapore, with a focus on how it allows us to navigate the uncertainty of human existence through the pursuit of consequences.
I’m currently writing up. Come chat with me on Twitter or drop me an email at kellynn.wee.20@ucl.ac.uk.
Recent Blog Posts
‘If it’s held dear, it’ll get pushed through’: Transmedia narratives, play cultures, and soft canon in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs)
How a play community in Singapore used a Discord channel to transform the way TTRPG authorships are imagined and canons stabilised. Open-access article published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons
In Singapore, our fantastical worlds carry the imprint of our realities. My chapter in “Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons” explores how these realities are mirrored in Singapore’s play cultures.
Mind Games Podcast: Impermanence and impact
In this podcast episode, the wonderful Dr. Rohan Kapitany draws out some of my reflections on the orality and aurality of TTRPGs, and how these qualities help make meaning in our lives.
Rewrite & Reroll
A short documentary put together by final-year students from NTU about Dungeons and Dragons, Eurocentrism and the fantasy genre in Singapore, which I’m honoured to be a part of.
Defamiliarising D&D: Playing out Western fantasy in Singapore
RPGs–as fleeting, unwitnessed forms of creative authorship–form everyday sites of emergent narrative-making. Snippets from an upcoming book chapter.
“I like the dragon to be there”: Role-playing studio spaces and the delivery of the paid game experience in Singapore
In this conference paper, I explore material elements of the TTRPG that are fuzzier, more permeable, and more atmospheric in nature: light and sound.
Lateral Ethnographies: Hopeful Tabletop Roleplaying Games as Tools of Collaborative Speculation
At this year’s RAI conference, I talked about how roleplaying games enable not just action but also makes the framing of action visible and changeable: people do things AND negotiate what can and cannot be done.
Migrant Workers in Singapore: Lives and Labour in a Transient Migration Regime
A co-edited book focusing on how the processes of unequal global development, precarious work, and welfare exclusion have rendered low-waged labour migrants especially vulnerable to the pandemic.
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Kellynn Wee 