Why Do You Play Dungeons & Dragons [D&D]?: Investigating Motivations for Play in Non-Digital Games

This DiGRA 2022 presentation abstract examines why people play Dungeons & Dragons today, arguing that creativity is a key motivator that existing play-motivation models tend to overlook or minimise. Academic work on motivation has centred heavily on digital games, and the author contends that non-digital games, which are growing in prominence and popularity, deserve equivalent attention. The findings are preliminary and come from an ongoing project on contemporary D&D play and players.

The review situates the study within existing D&D scholarship, including Gary Alan Fine's 1983 ethnography and more recent work on immersion, media representation, inclusivity, rulesets, and educational potential. It also engages Nick Yee's widely used 2007 model, which groups ten motivations into achievement, social, and immersion categories but does not explicitly name creativity. Later work by Yee and Ducheneaut acknowledges creativity more directly, yet its focus on digital games limits the resulting account.

Data came from three sources: interviews and gameplay observations (n=20, aged 18-34), focus groups (n=14, aged 24-55), and an online survey (n=354, aged 18-63, including 23 non-binary respondents). All participants answered the open-ended question "Why do you play D&D?", and responses were analysed through open and axial coding. Creativity emerged as a core motivation for 70% of interview and observation participants, 71.4% of focus group participants, and 34.5% of survey respondents (n=122).

Participants distinguished D&D's creativity from that of other media. One described it as scratching an itch "no digital game can even come close to," another valued being spontaneous without needing to be perfect, and a third saw it as a safe adult social space for trying out ways of being with minimal repercussions. The author attributes this to D&D's flexible ruleset, which gives players more agency than the predetermined systems of many digital games.

The conclusion calls for closer study of how creativity is conceptualised and experienced differently across digital and non-digital play, arguing this would enrich future player motivation research.