Playing House in a World of Night: Discursive Trajectories of Masculinity in a Tabletop Role-Playing Game

William J. White's study examines how male players enact and negotiate masculine identities during a session of Ganakagok, a small-press indie tabletop role-playing game he designed, set on a starlit island of ice at the approach of dawn. Drawing on a transcript from a 2009 play session, the paper argues that role-playing games can function as aesthetic and expressive performance rather than merely as play, and that the arcs of the male characters trace movement among distinct masculine identity models. The work situates itself within prior scholarship on gender in tabletop gaming and on shifting gender ideologies among younger generations.

The analysis identifies three normative ideal types of masculinity that players orient their characters toward: the traditional or respectable, the rough or virile, and the sensitive or liberated. Through close attention to character creation and play, the study shows how players modulate these positions using free indirect style, irony, and self-parody, and how narratives of masculinity are renegotiated across the course of a session. Play is shown to be driven as much by the negotiation of diegetic and ludic frames as by role-taking itself, with the character serving both as a medium and as an instrument through which gender ideologies are enacted.

A central finding concerns the dynamic nature of gender ideology in play. Rather than being fixed in advance, masculine identities were negotiated in response to the unfolding fiction and to interactions between male and female players. Notably, the player of the character Kibaka ultimately retreats from a macho persona, revealing it as hollow, which the author reads as evidence of reflective engagement with gendered scripts.

Ultimately, the study argues that role-playing games are best understood as reflective, text-like play that can be examined discursively rather than only expressively. The paper contributes to the study of gender and identity in gaming communities by treating the tabletop session as a rich site for analyzing how masculinity is constructed, contested, and revised in real time.