I’m a PhD student at University College London’s Department of Anthropology. My research focuses on how tabletop roleplaying games in Singapore allow humans to navigate the uncertainty of human existence through the co-construction of narrative and fate.
I’m currently in the middle of my fieldwork. Come chat with me on Twitter or drop me an email at kellynn.wee.20@ucl.ac.uk.
Recent Blog Posts
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.
Waystations to Utopia: Writing a Hopeful Game
I was recently honoured to win a grant from the Association of Southeast Asian Studies (UK) to work on a project titled Waystations to Utopia: Tabletop Roleplaying Games as a Method of Hopeful Speculation.
Homebrewing Asia: How D&D in Singapore is remaking Western fantasy
Monks, nunchucks, and kungfu? The Orientalist image of Asia in D&D is being overturned by Singaporeans intent on expanding what it means to tell an Asian story.
The rise of the professional Dungeon Master in Singapore
Dungeon Masters for hire in Singapore.
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Kellynn Wee 