In fantasy role-playing games, participants collectively create and play fantasy personas in an imaginary universe by using a vast system of rules that function as guidelines for make-believe action and interaction. Consequently, role-playing games obligate participants to occupy a liminal role located in the boundaries of persona, player, and person. This study, based on approximately ninety hours of participant observation and forty interviews with thirty role-players, explores how role-players actively negotiate these symbolic boundaries: how role-players carve out distinct spheres of meaning between themselves, their fantasy personas, and status as players of these games. It also illustrates how these distinctions fail. Boundaries erupt and role-players prove unable to compartmentalize themselves so discretely. Through the lens of these games, we can examine simplified and exaggerated dynamics and entertain the possibility that we are all players located at the liminal margins between the people we believe ourselves to be and the personas we perform in situated social encounters. Roles may not only be played but also played at , as when children, stage actors, and other kinds of cutups mimic a role for the avowed purpose of make-believe; here, surely, doing is not being. But this is easy to deal with. A movie star who plays at being a doctor is not in the role of doctor but in the role of actor; and this latter role, we are told, he is likely to take quite seriously. The work of his role is to portray a doctor, but the work is only incidental; his actual role is no more make-believe than that of a real doctor—merely better paid. . . . These desperate performers are caught exactly between illusion and reality, and must lead one audience to accept the role portrait as real, even while assuring another audience that the actor in no way is convincing himself. —Erving Goffman, Encounters
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