Category Archives: dungeons and dragons

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

Transmedia storytelling is a strategy adopted by media franchises and brands to create participatory 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 existing research: first, it shifts scholarly focus from game texts to player practice, showing how communities 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 positivist accounting of narrative events. The concept of soft canon reveals a new perspective on how communities create and sustain intersubjectively imagined worlds.

Published open-access in the International Journal of Cultural Studies. This is an ethnographic exploration particularly dear to my heart as a long-time dweller in fandom and transformative works!

Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons

Beyond the material constitutions of play spaces and the social compositions of the play community, how do D&D games in Singapore deal with Western fantasy? Racial histories are interconnected, but not identical, and race as reflected in the mirror of Western fantasy does not map neatly onto Singapore or to other parts of Southeast Asia. Even within Southeast Asia, Singapore itself occupies an uneasy position in relation to its geographical neighbors. As a Chinese majority country, Singapore’s policies and everyday politics, as mentioned earlier, racialize and disenfranchise poorer brown bodies, whether its own citizens or the million migrant laborers from India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and the Philippines who work in the construction or domestic work sector.

With this in mind, answering the question of how D&D is localized or transformed through an Asian context is difficult. To work through the questions in turn, one first asks: What constitutes Singaporean fantasy? What is considered canonical and influential in the way that we think about Singaporean imaginings of the nonmimetic, a world of otherwise? How, and should we, excerpt Anglophone Singapore from its position within the Southeast Asian region, keeping in mind the constructed nature of the nation-state—and even the region—as a project of imagined community?

I have a chapter included in a wonderful collection of works edited by Premeet Sidhu, Marcus Carter and Jose P. Zagal that deals with this topic, published by MIT. Very happy to have been included, of course, and to discuss D&D play cultures in Singapore!

Rewrite & Reroll

A group of Singapore-based students from NTU’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communications have been busy these past months putting together a short documentary focusing on D&D in Singapore. It’s finally out! The documentary is truly a labour of love on a topic that’s clearly compelling to many. (It’s a pleasure seeing so many familiar faces in it, too!)

In their words:

This documentary follows our filmmaking journey into the local scene of the hit tabletop roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D). From understanding its origins and significance for Singaporean D&D players, we explore if such a euro-centric medium could be modelled into something familiar for Asian players. Through special interviews with professional dungeon masters and renowned writers in the creative gaming scene, we learn about the efforts taken and the obstacles faced to challenge a euro-centric genre and establish a new foundation for new Dungeons & Dragons’ stories ahead, and maybe even, the genre of fantasy as a whole.

Dop, Written, Directed, Edited by: Nur Sarah Jumari
Produced by: Ngor Cheng En
Assistant DoP: Lim Mei Pei

Homebrewing Asia: How D&D in Singapore is remaking Western fantasy

I talked to two DMs of homebrewed worlds in Singapore about how they’re remaking D&D from its Tolkien/American midwest origins. I thought I’d get answers about how we make D&D Asian, but I was spellbound instead as we stalled on questions of what being Asian even means. This article was published on both The Homeground Asia and The Anthropolitan.

“D&D isn’t a history lecture. There’s something magical when things are mundane. Like, it’s not special that there are temples or shrines: it’s just another thing between you and where you’re going. Or it’s not special that everyone in this world is a mongrel, and that very few characters are ‘pure-blooded’. It’s reflective of our world, where we are defined by generation upon generation of migration.”

Ramji Venkateswaran, DM of The 4th Culture

The rise of the professional Dungeon Master in Singapore

Getting paid to run Dungeons & Dragons games! It is a thing, and it is growing fast in Singapore. I love that storytellers and community organisers are being valued in this way, but I also wonder about this shift from hobby to business, and about the understanding of what a Dungeon Master’s skills are (as rule-enforcer, shared-space-maker, world-builder, keeper-of-secrets, and softcore mathematician).

In case you missed the first link above, I talked to professional DMs from Tinker Tales Studios and TableMinis, as well as Melvyn Sin, a freelance DM, here. We discussed safe spaces, the terrors of improv, and D&D for kids, among a thousand other things I wasn’t able to put into the piece but which I hope to transcribe and publish on the internet sometime soon.

Come talk to me on Twitter @KellynnWee or Instagram @braided or email me (kellynn.wee [at] gmail [dot] com) if you have any interest in collaborating or also if you want to discuss favourite D&D classes or recommend good one-shots to run as a DM.

Narrativity, contingency and play in Dungeons and Dragons

I presented on my PhD project for University College London’s Material Culture Presentation Day on June 10. My supervisor thought there was not enough theory, but I felt there were not enough dragons (I am kidding, Danny!).

Slides as follows. There were lots of things I wanted to talk about (like solarpunk and wuxia D&D universes set in Singapore! Folks in New Zealand who take a ferry out to an island to play D&D in a lighthouse DM’d by a teenager!) but I was unable to do so, so it will just have to come out elsewhere.