This thesis investigates how collaborative tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), shaped by the Fantastic Genres and queer theory, can facilitate radical queer world-making. It asks how TTRPGs enable players to imagine, negotiate, and temporarily inhabit alternatives to dominant socio-political norms of time, space, embodiment, and agency. By situating collaborative roleplay at the intersection of queer theory, game studies, utopian studies, and creative practice, the thesis argues that imaginative play can function not only as representation, but as an active method for generating other ways of being together, and, after Augusto Boal, as "rehearsal for revolution".
Methodologically, the project is practice-led and interdisciplinary. It combines theoretical analysis with the design and development of an original GMless TTRPG, Otherwards, using creative practice as both research method and critical intervention. The thesis draws on queer and trans theories of temporality, spatiality, and embodiment, alongside scholarship on games, performance, utopia, posthumanism, and the Fantastic Genres. These frameworks inform its critique of existing roleplaying forms and its development of mechanics oriented towards shared authority, anti-hierarchical storytelling, and non-normative modes of identity and relation.
As the central creative practice component of the thesis, Otherwards explores these concerns through collaborative world-building, open-ended character creation, and the possibility of playing as non-human, non-animal, abstract, or distributed entities. Its design challenges anthropocentric and individualist assumptions within play, inviting players to construct speculative worlds through relation, uncertainty, transformation, and collective narrative agency.
