It's Dangerous to Go Alone: An Ethnography of Friendship Through Tabletop Gaming Communities of Practice

As the world continues to move online in the 21st century, in-person communities of practice continue to thrive in game stores, libraries, campuses, and in personal homes.In these spaces, and many others that are too varied to name, people engage with tabletop roleplaying games as members of groups of adventurers.Individuals come together to create identities, craft narratives, and build connections with one another that continue even after the game ends.This paper examines the ways that these communities of practice are constructed and maintained by the diverse group of individuals who inhabit them, and how they come to construct identities and meaning through their engagement.Over the period of 18 months between 2017 and 2019, participant observation fieldwork was conducted with various tabletop roleplaying game groups across the Ottawa, Ontario area.This took place at game stores, campuses, libraries, people's homes, and restaurants to understand the ways in which people come together in-person to play games such as Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder.Interviews were simultaneously conducted with individuals from these groups to develop life-histories of some of those involved in these communities.with gambling meant that families tended to shy away from them as games for their children however, and instead looked for other games that they could play that would help to reinforce strong Christian morals.14 Parents therefore began to look for board games that provided fun ways for children to learn about morality and modes of being a good member of society.One example of these morality-based games was Mansion of Happiness, which saw players attempting to achieve the highest level of happiness through their performance of morally good deeds.Other games of this era included those focused on education, those that reinforced patriotism, and historical games that helped to teach people of certain important historical events.These were all traditional board games, but rather than using dice as we understand most board games to do now, these games used teetotums (spinning tops with numbers on their sides).At this time dice, similar to playing cards, were associated with gambling, and were therefore examples of immoral behavior that should not be included.It was later in the 19th century that two publishing groups -The Mcgloughlin Publishers and Milton Bradley -moved away from morally oriented games and instead focused on producing games of pure enjoyment.15 This era of game development/publishing began the mass adoption of board games in North America, which continues to be popular to this day.Games such as Candyland, Snakes and Ladders, Life, and Monopoly are among the most popular family board games in North America, and one would be hard pressed to find an adult who has not played, or at least seen, one of these games.These games were all born out of the tradition of familial board games and introduced many generations to tabletop board gaming.This style of gaming, in conjunction with the war and strategy gaming discussed above, creates a history of gaming that we can see to have 14 Whitehill, B., Games of America in the Nineteenth Century.

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