Beyond the Table: How Social Environments Shape Players and Characters in Role-Playing Games.
By Dr. Cristo León July 12, 2025.
Introduction
Role-playing games (RPGs) create a layered social reality in which players and their characters simultaneously inhabit distinct yet interrelated environments. As Bowman and Schrier (2014, p. 406) observe, players exist within a community of play, and characters exist within a community of fiction. This distinction is crucial: while players negotiate their identities and behaviors in the context of an embodied, situated social group, their characters operate within a shared narrative space, subject to the norms, limitations, and affordances of the fictional system. Understanding the player–character relationship therefore requires analyzing how these two environments interact, overlap, and at times conflict.
Social Environments of Players and Characters in Role-Playing Games
The player’s social environment is shaped by the norms, rituals, and dynamics of the play culture, including unspoken codes of conduct, collaborative expectations, and the material context of play (e.g., table rituals, online platforms, or larp settings). Players perform roles not only through their characters but also within the social group—balancing competitiveness, cooperation, leadership, and support according to group norms. This environment often governs what behaviors are acceptable or expected in the context of the session, as well as how players perceive and manage phenomena such as ego-bleed, individuation, or shadow play. Yet as noted, Bowman and Schrier touch only briefly on these performative and cultural aspects, leaving underdeveloped the rich ethnographic and ritual dimensions that undergird RPG practices.
In contrast, the characters inhabit a fictional social environment defined by the internal logic and affordances of the narrative system. Here, as Beltrán (2013) suggests, players can explore repressed or socially unacceptable aspects of self by enacting the Shadow, engaging with morally ambiguous or taboo content. This space allows for individuation (Jung, 1976), as players integrate archetypal material and construct more complex senses of self through fictional experience. Players may also discover that their characters acquire degrees of autonomy and evolve within the narrative according to the dynamics of the community of fiction, as described in Banks’s (2015) avatar-as-other category.
Critically, these two environments do not remain neatly separated. Players routinely carry aspects of the fictional environment into their mundane social world, and vice versa, through processes such as ego-bleed and alibi. Shadow play, for instance, can reinforce players’ ethical boundaries by externalizing undesirable traits in a safe space; yet, as Bowman (2012) cautions, prolonged immersion in destructive character behaviors may erode social cohesion and foster conflict in the play group. Similarly, the player’s social context—its inclusivity, its ritual structure, its handling of identity categories like gender, race, and sexuality—shapes how characters can be conceived, enacted, and developed.
A new approach
A more comprehensive understanding of the social environments of RPGs thus requires moving beyond individual psychology to attend to the performative, cultural, and ritual dimensions of play. Research and design frameworks would benefit from explicitly analyzing how table rituals, cultural expectations, narrative affordances, and collective imagination jointly construct the dual realities of play and fiction. By situating players and characters within their respective environments—and exploring how these intersect—designers and scholars alike can foster more inclusive, reflexive, and meaningful RPG experiences.
Conclusion
In light of these insights, designers and researchers should prioritize approaches that foreground the interplay between players’ social environments and their characters’ fictional worlds. For game design, this entails creating systems that explicitly accommodate and guide players through processes such as individuation, shadow play, and ego-bleed while reinforcing positive group dynamics through inclusive rituals and cultural sensitivity. Mechanics that surface the player’s relationship to their character—such as the six-stage evolution model proposed here—can support intentional engagement with both personal and collective narrative arcs. For research, moving beyond traditional ethnographic observation is essential to fully capture the reflexive and performative dimensions of RPGs. Methodologies such as action research can embed the researcher as an active participant-collaborator, fostering iterative improvements in design and practice through cycles of reflection and intervention. Similarly, actor–network theory (ANT) offers a lens for mapping the complex networks of human and non-human actors—players, characters, dice, rules, digital platforms—that co-construct RPG experiences, revealing power dynamics and material influences often overlooked. Finally, autoethnography provides a rigorous yet personal approach to examining the researcher’s own experiences as both player and observer, offering rich insight into the subjective and situated dimensions of play. Together, these methodologies and design principles support a more nuanced, ethically grounded understanding of how social environments and fictional worlds intertwine in role-playing games, advancing both theory and practice.