Heather Shay, "Identity Building Among Role-Playing Gamers: Slaying Goblins in the Real World" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

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Head to quints.com/newbooks for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's QU-IN-CE.com/newbooks for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com/newbooks Welcome to the new books network. Hello and welcome. My name is Michael Johnston and this is another episode of new books network and today I have Heather Shea from a assistant professor of sociology south Carolina State University to discuss identity building among role-playing gamers slaying goblins in the real world published with Bloomsbury in 2025. Welcome Heather. Hi. And yeah thank you for being here today. I wanted to start off with saying this is a very interesting book. I am very much into identity and self and learning more about how people navigate through everyday social spaces. So I was glad to have the opportunity to read this book and I'm glad that you're willing to join me today to talk more about it. But I mean first tell me how did you decide to research role-playing and how did you get into games role-playing games? Yeah I decided to study gaming because I'm a table-stop role-playing gamer myself. My partner introduced me to table-stop role-playing in college and my sort of immediate reaction was like where is this been my whole life? This is amazing. When it came time to think about my dissertation as a social psychologist and some of the studies social inequality I thought that gaming was a perfect place to see the intersection of those two areas of expertise. And so I saw that I wanted to study gaming and how people understand their identities when they are gamers so I wanted to focus on identity work. Initially I thought I would actually study more things that relate to inequality in gaming but as I did my research I felt like there was a different story there which is the one I told in the book instead. Yeah and you know I know the things that tell my undergraduate students here at Williamson University is that sociology isn't complicated it's complex and one of the things that you wrote about in your book is the concept of being a good gamer and what does that mean to you? What did that come to mean in the research that you conducted for this book? Yeah so I found that to be a good gamer meant you had to display sort of six different characteristics in no particular order they were dedication authenticity cooperation selflessness creativity and intelligence. And to be a good gamer you really had to do at least occasionally it's not frequently all of them you couldn't just be one of them even though they don't necessarily always go together as we'll probably discuss later. But my gamers didn't talk about being good gaming as being just like good gaming. All they saw that as being something that made the game enjoyable for everyone. They thought good gamers were like good people actually. In the interview as my gamers talked about how those were the kinds of things that if you could make a game good you could also make life good. That you were the kind of person they wanted to hang out with not just in a game but outside of a game because they saw good people as being the same thing as good gamers. So were those the people who who's interest were given privilege or were there certain where there are other parties who were also given privilege within the within the larger circle of yeah circle I think that might be a good way of conceptualizing it. Give a privilege within that circle. Yeah good gamers definitely got privileged because good gamers had opportunities to play the other people didn't. They would often get to make decisions about what we were being played or what happened in the game. Really good gamers sometimes got opportunities to make decisions about what games people even played. They had chances to play in lots of different scenarios with lots of different people. But I wouldn't say everyone was equally positioned to show they're a good gamer and not just because some people are actually more creative than others right. But also because they're sort of stereotyped about gamers look like. When I initially went into my project I thought I would focus more on how the sort of stereotype of gamer is a sort of geeky white male right. This sort of typical table talk to the indie player is supposed to be some geeky guy with glasses or you know not socially awkward but he's a white man front. And so I anticipated doing more with that although I have some analysis of that in the book and in my dissertation I just been doing more with that was I really thought that would be the story because that's the stereotype of the gamers. And I definitely found that there were cases where those kinds of people were more able to present themselves as good gamers that they fit the image and that they could do things that people who were not the geeky white male could do. But I would say that there was less of that that I anticipated some prior research on gaming such as carry on fine's work found that there was really a very strong emphasis on that that like people who weren't male in particular were often highly mistreated in the games. And that was less the case in my experience with this gaming group and the interviews that there were definitely cases of inequality and discrimination on those stereotypes and people who are invoking those stereotypes throughout my pretty small observation and in the interviews. But there was less of that than expected so it really did seem that like if you could present yourself as a good gamer you were going to get your interest in the game presented although you would have a harder time if you weren't a certain kind of person than some other people. Yeah it's interesting because those are the characters that are created are actually something that are negotiated with the roles that are associated with the character but then also being able to perform that role maybe more or less depending on who they are outside of the game. Yeah absolutely. Yeah and so some people actually even some of my interviews talked about how they played characters that were more or less like themselves because they realized that did or didn't help them in the game effectively. Interesting. And I think the way that I organized our talk today is around those six characteristics I think in running through them because I think those are significant as a framework to help a person who picks this book up and and understands understands the research that you have conducted by using that framework of six characteristics associated with identities and role playing games. So the first off is what are three ways that players use to show their selflessness and maybe what is selflessness to begin with. Yeah so first of all a cooperative or being cooperative and being selfless sound like this should be the same thing but I distinguish them by pointing out that being cooperative is about like prioritizing the group or not being competitive where selflessness here is about doing things that make the group go better or the game go better that you don't really want to do or that you recognize other people are unwilling to do and so you should like taking on burdens or challenges. So one way which is probably the biggest way that gamers point out was all role playing games require some of the servers which is called a game master or GM. This person is the one that sort of takes on the bulk of work. They have to create the world. They have to figure out what villains or enemies you're fighting. They have to portray or create other characters like villagers or people who do rescuing or merchants you can buy things from or buy standards. They often have to know the rules better than the other participants in the game because of the one that's sort of a Judy-A-K did this action happen or not. And so although a good game master doesn't necessarily spend tons of time on a game because there are pre-created modules you're definitely putting in more time and effort than the other players. And so one way to show you where selfless was to be willing to serve the GM as the GM period. Gamers generally position GMs as selfless even if they didn't act like they didn't want to do it. But if you particularly acted like you know you knew you were stepping up so like you know my participant observation group we were originally formed to play a particular game and eventually the GM could no longer participate. So if we were to continue somebody else I'd just step up and take over right so that person looks selfless because of that. Another possibility was to serve as the party leader. So in most table top role playing games you have what can you easily call a party leader. It's the person whose character is sort of more in charge than the other characters. In practice what that means is one of two things either the player has to make decisions for the group if it comes down to someone has to make a decision for a group rather than a group decision or they get stuck talking to all the people that no one else wants to talk to. Like they're often considered the social character. And while plenty of gamers are competent doing social interaction quite a few express to me that they didn't enjoy that part of the game as much. The one where they had to participate in that part. So if you served as party leader you often see as being selfless because you realize you were going to get stuck talking to the villagers talking to the merchants negotiating the fee if your characters are being paid. It's all all of people and so you were often not worried about any of those things. And then the third way was to play a character archetype that's not really your preference. So in real playing games characters play different kinds of characters. So some people play healers, some people play warriors, some people play sort of like robes. or thieves, the list goes on, all right. But most gamers, at least after they played for a while, develop a preference for one or two of those types. So if you, for instance, like one interview you told me, he doesn't really like to play the healer, the character that takes care of magical or religious or medical healing depending on the game. But he played in a game where there wasn't going to be a healer. No one wanted to play it. So we stepped up and he played it. And everyone saw him as selfless because he agreed to play what he doesn't actually enjoy as much to make sure the group would have what they needed. Because gamers usually think if a group of players is being well-rounded, if they have a variety of different kinds of care, you don't want all warriors, you don't buy saying, hey, this is not what I would like to play, but I know we need it, so I'll play it. Excellent. And within all of these roles, one of the things that is essential for players is to create an impression of themselves being intelligent. Part of that game is part of the-- I mean, in some ways, it's essential to use the Gopminian term, saving face and trying to create an impression that is intelligent. And what were some of the strategies that you found players to use in order to accomplish this mission? Yeah. So one strategy was trying to think of a way to solve a problem that didn't require them to resort to violence. So violence faced metaphorical or imaginary violence essential to many tabletop role-playing games. Although there are ones where that never happens. The most famous one, Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, for instance, like some players literally play by doing almost all metaphorical or imaginary violence, right? Like the opportunity to be in combat takes up most of the game session. Other games have less of it, other games have none, but a lot of games have at least some of it. But gamers often talk to me about or in the sessions, which I'll show, that they didn't have to just resort to killing the imaginary enemy or villain, right? So they could think of some other way to get past the challenge, solve the problem, save the people, rescue the day, other than just being like, we're going to kill it, because I can't think of anything more impressive to do. Another possibility was to emphasize that there are decisions or actions made sense given the logic or rationale in the game world. Because the game world sometimes have very different logic or rationales than exist in our real world, trying to show that whatever decision you're making that might on the surfacing stupid or unreasonable or odd is actually perfectly reasonable. I think about one time I met pretty soon on observation where our characters were alone in a lot of tabletop-related game or groups talk about how you shouldn't quote-unquote split the party, meaning separate the characters away from each other. And we had done that for what we thought was good reasons. And then our two characters ended up in a situation where they could get in a lot of trouble. And I was like, oh, I don't want my character to get caught. I want to leave. But that doesn't make sense. But then my fellow player came up with a reason why his dwarf character would absolutely not have accepted being arrested and would have ran. And so then he was able to justify, looks like a very strange decision to run from local guards by himself. And then I was able to justify my decision to be like, well, I'm going to go with him. That'll make both of us better. And then we're not pretty even further. And so we need to eventually cause problems for a character. The game master GM later told us that he was like, I absolutely let your characters get away because I was so impressed with how intelligently he explained why he was doing what he was doing. He's lashing out was so good that I just couldn't ring myself to cause any problems. And so you could show that you really could think through and made sense, given a entirely different set of logics than the one we live every day in on the last. - Start now. So what's interesting there is it is Heather, is that you talked about the intelligence and how players try to create this impression of being intelligent. But one of the things that also seems to be doing what they tend to be doing is not only being intelligent, but also showing intelligence in ways that are creative. And I guess, yeah, what did you find to be maybe the reason behind this? Or did you see the same kind of negotiation that I'm seeing here between being intelligent but also being creative in the intelligence and being impressed upon other people? - Yeah, so a lot of gamers, I think saw intelligence and creativity is not the same thing, but it's connected characteristics for people. So some things you could do could show your intelligence, but wouldn't really see creative. And other things you could do could seem creative, but not really intelligent. But then some behaviors or actions would seem both creative and intelligent. So for instance, some of the ways you would show creativity was by inventing something new or using something in a new way that it wasn't meant to be. Like in my producer and observation group members, for instance, invented new weapons in the game, we're playing, which requires creativity because you have to be innovative and think things through. But in order to do that, you also have to be capable of thinking about what would logically or rationally work in the game, like what would fit with the game mechanics, the game world, et cetera. Likewise, we had a gamer who several times or seen as being particularly creative for using a magical spell is character new. In a way that didn't fit with how the game creators, the designers that you wrote the book, suggest that he was using it in a completely unusual way. And that's being, again, innovative and creative and original and unique. But it also required him to think through, like intellectually and logically and rationally, would that work? Would this actually do what it's saying, given what the description of the spell entails, can this actually work in this way? And so I think there were definite connections between creativity and intelligence. But I think there were cases where people thought something was like creative, like for say, not intelligent. Some players would get into their characters in ways that were very much really trying to show they could imagine themselves as someone else. And yet that would not be seen as being particularly impressive, intelligent-wise, because they would do something that was creative, but also obviously stupid for their character or didn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, so that's navigating multiple spheres. I mean, lucky, we are reflexive beings and we have the ability to move in and out of character at any given point. But that's an additional layer, right? You have to be intelligent and creative, either collectively or intelligent at times, and not creative, creative, and not intelligent at times. But you also have to do that while being in character. Uh-huh. Yeah. And getting into character was obviously easier for some people than others. But if you really got into your character well, then you would be seen as being creative, because getting into character was seen as really being able to demonstrate that you could imagine an alternative for spaces that you weren't sort of just like stuck in the world you lived in, and that you were not literally just playing yourself in a different world, right? That you weren't just pretending you were used sitting in a fantasy environment, that you were pretending to be someone else entirely. And some gamers thought that that was particularly impressive, because unlike, although there's some similarities to actors and actresses doing that in plays or movies or TV shows, those actors and actresses have directors and scripts and writers, and gamers are just sitting around the table, and they have none of that. So they have to do it all by themselves, they think, right, like in their own head, all those completely cooperative and interactive. There's no one telling you, you know, what is the creative thing to do here to get into your character? And so some gamers thought that was particularly impressive if you were a really creative gamer, although some people weren't on as creative. It was probably the characteristic, I think, gamers seem to value the most when they talked. In practice, I think the most important characteristic was dedication, because that's the one that says I show up all the time. Yeah. Bowen gave me a talk about, sorry, what? Oh, I was gonna say, and if a person doesn't show up, the game can't be played. I guess if there's not a, you know, a collective mass enough to people to play, and that would be disappointing, and it would kill the game altogether. Hello, can you still hear me? Yes, I can. Okay, sorry, my thing says that my internet connection is unstable, so I'm sorry about that. But I think that gamers often valued creativity, particularly strongly. They saw getting into your characters being a particularly clear sign, you were a good gamer. Yeah, and I guess from game to game, right? Getting into character could mean a variety of different things. It could be a very deep performance of actually wearing costume and getting into the game, or it could just be changing your script, and having a strong understanding of game is that right in terms of what it means to get into character? Gamers didn't all have the same idea of what it meant to get into character, but obviously I cannot generalize to all gamers right with my sample, but my participants actually strongly disliked for the most part, getting dressed up to get into character. There were a couple who were really in favor of that, but the majority of my participants thought that getting into character was a verbal thing mostly, that you did it by the way you talked about your character, rather than anything about how you looked, that they were, in fact, actually some of them arguing that dressing up tried the borders poorly, the order of talking about later probably, because it really just sort of didn't, it was going too far, that they thought that that was like taking it to a level they did not prefer. Obviously my participants are tabletop role players. There's such a thing called larping live action role players, live action role players usually do get into character by dressing up, although they don't absolutely have to, most of the time they do, but my participants were actually unwilling to engage in larping, partially because they thought that was taking it too far, that they like getting into character to mean. I think like my character, I talk like my character, but that otherwise I'm not really portraying my character very much like in the sort of more physical manifestation. - And are there a cost associated with getting into character? - Yeah, I think that's first cost associated with getting into character was that sometimes people got into character, did it so well that they sort of hindered their ability to her. show their other characteristics were good, to positive in other guards. So I think of one character, one player. He was really known to be particularly creative and very good at getting into his characters. But on multiple occasions during my participant observation, that particular individual did things that other players thought harmed them, didn't make sense given how games tend to work, weren't good for them, that they didn't fit with what good gamers knew about how to play, like good lemurs knew certain things about how to play and that he would prioritize playing his character to the hill over everything else. And so one cross he often faced was that people thought he was uncooperated because he would do things that made sense for his character because his character would act that way and he was sure of it. Even though those things then made him seem somewhat isolated from or competitive or antagonistic to the other players. Another cross of getting into character would be that sometimes people who got into character would take actions that would be dangerous for their characters because they thought it made sense. He, for instance, that same gamer eventually took actions that he thought made sense for his character. They were what his character would have done if they'd been put in that situation. But such actions ended up getting his character killed because he was doing things that didn't work out. But he's like, this is what my character would have done. I guess this was a real person. This is what they would do. So sometimes players who were got into character would end up having costs for their character. Things would bad things would happen to their character because they'd do things that seemed really into their character. But that someone, whether the game master intentionally or whatever happened, other players wouldn't like and so they'd end up having suffering going to their character. Their character would be hurt or killed because they were like, well, this doesn't fit with what everyone else thinks should happen in this scenario. You just played your character as if it was a real person who didn't have consequences for other people. Yeah, so I see this dual relationship between identity and character role playing by the individual. But then I also see there being a continual reflection of personal identity on the rest of the team or the rest of the group who is playing the game. So it's this ongoing renegotiation of identity by looking at the responses that the rest of the group has. So I think that the group is equally as valuable. And maybe I wanted to spend a bit of time on that as well and trying to understand a bit of what you found in terms of the significance of the group members experiencing fun or having an enjoyable time during the game. How important was that in the process of identity development? It was very important for two reasons. The first reason is that gamers who are all having fun collectively would often talk later about how the games seemed more real or more meaningful or more important than some of their actual non-game or real life. Both in observation sessions after playing or in cases, a couple of cases before playing. And then interviews, gamers talked about how when the game was going really well, when everyone was clearly enjoying themselves, that things would happen that almost seemed to them to be either actually more real than their so-called boring real life. Or even if they knew it was clear, it's still seen more meaningful than the sort of everyday and one day, and things of getting up and going to work. And so if they were having lots of fun, then they would actually create experiences that meant a lot to them. They would think about them in the past. They would tell stories about them, remember them, or call them for years. The other thing I think it did was if everybody's having fun, then the game is going to have a better odds of continuing. It's entirely voluntary leisure, right? So people can leave at any point. And particularly amongst adult players, gamers often talked about how groups could be highly unstable because adult life can be complicated. You have jobs and families and responsibilities. And unlike when there were tea-daters in playing, they often had things get in the way. But if everyone was having fun, then the group would keep going on, which gave them a chance to do the edge work and the fictive heroism that I talk about as other things in the book that really made them feel like their lives were more meaningful, because they actually did have fun. And so everyone would keep coming back to the table every week or the virtual online thing. If you were thinking about some people, participation group was all people around a literal table. And so they gave them more opportunities to do those other things, to gain those other benefits from their playing that they wouldn't have gotten if people weren't having fun. And if somebody didn't have fun, what would happen? Would they stop playing the game or be kicked from the game? Or I guess what would happen? Yeah, if somebody-- Yeah, usually if one player wasn't having fun, they would just withdraw. They would usually-- I think people might not have fun at one particular session that you would usually not end the game, although I heard a couple stories of people where the one session was so bad that someone left after one session. But generally, one session not being fun, you just sort of took them next week and hoped their next time he met and it was fine. But if it kept happening, usually what happened was that individual would withdraw from the group. They usually didn't continue coming. Sometimes that really mattered for the whole group and sometimes it didn't. If the person wasn't particularly central to the group, that might not mean much. But if they were central to the group, that could be highly disruptive. If they were the game master, if the game was being hosted or held at their house, or if they're playing a character that the group really needed, a particular type of character that was central to the game for some reason, then that could disrupt the entire group because we don't have this player anymore or we don't know if they're in a comfort ball. And it was my own with them. And so in some cases, one person not having fun didn't seem to do much to the group. And other cases, it was like the end of the entire group. Are there any sanctions that are imposed on gamers who might perform poorly or anything there in order to maintain the enjoyable ability of the game? And the sanctity of the game itself. Yeah, so the biggest-- Yeah, so the biggest sanction was goss-up. They basically talked bad about you if you didn't play well. Most of the time, the gamers did this behind people's back. When they weren't there, so if you hadn't arrived yet, you'd already left, you'd miss the session, you weren't in a particular group, they were doing it. They would talk about you behind your back. So for instance, an opposition observation group, at one point, we were debating whether a member could be admitted. And people were talking about their prior bad gaming experiences with him and why they didn't wanted to be involved. But there were moments when they would like deride players who would make fun of them in front of each other that was ungrilfully uncommon in my observation. Just an observation. And my interviewee said that was uncommon for them to see, but it did occasionally happen. And the group I participated and observed, we had one player who was a new to real playing, who did not seem to be picking it up very quickly in terms of how well to do it. And one of the sort of running jokes after a week was that he was so bad at that he made a comment that made no sense. It was like, ridiculous statement. And Zeta was like, OK, he's such a bad gamer. We just sort of joke continually about how bad he was at getting into his character, how uncreative he was, how much he couldn't pretend to be somebody else. But that was pretty uncommon. More frequently, people just gossiped. If it got bad enough, what they did was they just wouldn't let you play anymore. They would either not let you into new groups. They would come up with reasons to kick you out of groups. Rarely, the gamers identified-- nobody knew of any cases where anyone was identified as being kicked out. Because they were a bad gamer, it was more like they'd come up with reasons to exclude the person. They'd say they didn't have more players, that the gym was overwhelmed. People would say the game was going to part in some cases. They'd move things or not talk to the person anymore. It was uncommon for gamers to think that they or someone they knew had been told they were a poor gamer, as well as why they were being excluded. But they were excluded, in many cases, if they were known as particularly bad gamers. The other possibility was actually the game master or the GM could sanction people on their own. So what they would do, if they felt like there was poor gaming, particularly among newer or inexperienced players, is they would do something to the character to sort of make a point. So gamers talked about-- one gamer talked about how he used to just charge to end to try to take the dragon out on his own. He never cooperated with anyone. And so the game master just kept killing his character over and over again, until he got the message that actually, if you want to take down the dragon, you have to cooperate with your fellow players. You don't work together with the same. The game master is what sometimes heard or injure a character to try to make a point that a player had done something that was uncooperative or unintelligent or uncreative and if they should be different than that. Again, I cannot generalize to all gaming experiences. But from my study, it seemed that gossip and exclusion didn't do much to make poor gamers better gamers. It just meant they got talked about a lot and played badly still or got excluded from even more games. Whereas every gamer who talked about having a GM hurt or kill someone's character was able to identify that the player learned their lesson. And they actually can be better gamer from that. So it seems that when the game master sanctioned people, that actually made a difference in how good gamers were. Whereas the other select sanctions imposed either didn't make a difference or just meant that poor gamers got excluded and lost opportunities to play. - In some way, in order to keep order within the gaming, I think I can't seem to think other than like social structures that are being made in order to maintain the group and to maintain the game. - Yeah, absolutely. Basically, they prioritize maintaining the game because a lot of gamers saw gaming as supposed to be. It's welcoming experience because as we discussed earlier, there's a stereotype that they're geeky. A lot of them are like, well, we don't want to be these unwelcoming or these like clicky or these really like difficult people who act like you need to fit in this really specific mold. And a lot of geeks who are assumed to be very bad at social interaction. So even though some gamers are absolutely good at it, even the third key. and some gamers aren't even really geeky in the classic or traditional sense of that word. A lot of gamers thought that this was supposed to be a very welcoming support space. So people did not feel like it was appropriate in a lot of cases to actually call people out. And so a lot of it was sort of like we do things that we hope they figure out. This is a sanction. And if they do, awesome. If not, we're just gonna leave them out. And we're gonna preserve the game and not have to have the conflict that could come from us having too strong of an actual conversation or interaction or conflict about how do people actually play? What does it mean to be a good gamer? - Yeah, but even in this performance, it's interesting that we've talked about the complexity of the different strategies that are played by the gamers. And you talk about this boundary maintenance and boundary worth this taking place among the players and this concept of edgework. First off, what is edgework? - Yeah, edgework as Ling 1990 defined it is voluntary risk taking that a person does because if they succeed at it, if they do it well, that they will basically be able to get some kind of psychological reward. So the idea is you take a risk that you chose to take, not when you're obligated or expected or required to take because if you can walk up to the metaphorical or literal edge of the situation, hence why it's called edgework, and not fall over even though other people would fall over and face negative consequences, that you would get positive psychological rewards, things like feeling really sub-actualized, feeling exhilarated, feeling lily alive, powerful, omnipotent. And so it's basically intentionally trying to prove you can do what other people couldn't to make yourself feel these positive psychological rewards. - And are there four different boundaries that edgeworkers oftentimes negotiate? - Yeah, Ling argued there were four boundaries. So the first one is life or death. So the idea being, are you able to not kill yourself because your edgework could kill yourself, kill you? The second one is consciousness versus unconsciousness, which is, are you able to stay conscious, stay up, say cognitively functioning when your edgework, if it failed, could result in unconsciousness, you would pass out or be not cognitively confident or useful anymore. Sanity versus insanity, which is essentially can you manage to maintain, you know, being a sane, you know, not crazy person, or would you like lose control of yourself if you went over the edge. And then order versus disorder, which is, can you handle mental challenges? Are you mentally tough enough to handle like quick decision making, pressure-filled situations, where you don't have all the information, where you're asked to mentally make decisions about what to do when you have some constraints that would make that tough for other people to do? Traditional edgeworkers usually traverse the birds of wife and death, they were like skydivers, lean study originally, and I mean, who if they fell that their edgework died? My gamers don't do anything like that, the action is imaginary and verbal. So my gamers tread the boundary of sanity and insanity, trying to prove they are not insane by getting into their characters. And order and disorder, trying to prove they can handle mental challenges, think quickly, make decisions under pressure without information. And in some ways, preventing character death, right? I mean, is that part of the process? Yeah. Yeah, so preventing character death was essentially training the border of order in disorder, I argue. If you can think clearly, effectively, quickly enough with limited information to make sure that your character doesn't die, it's not training the border of life and death because you don't die, nothing even happens to you if your character dies. So you have no physical consequences. But your character could die if you fail to make the right decision. If you're not able to mentally and intellectually handle the challenges, and so you attempt to prevent character death by having your character do as much as possible, they could kill it, but it survives anyway, you don't get for character kill. I'm just thinking of the cuff here that may not even be related to what you're thinking when writing, but what about valorous deaths and at least strategic death? Would that be a form of edgework too? So gamers, normally speaking, valorous death was a way to become more heroic. They didn't phrase it as, I passed the pass if my death was a valorous death. They framed it as more like thatment that I had become the hero when I'm becoming a legend by 'cause my character died in some particularly important way. They could potentially see that as like failing their edgework or see the succeeding in their edgework, but the way they framed it was usually, if your character died, you'd like to kill the task, essentially, unless your character died in some heroic way that makes it become a legend. So even though you couldn't keep your character alive, you were able to say that, well, my character couldn't stay alive. They did something so important, so heroic, so epic, that they were able to become a legend despite me failing and keeping them alive. Very few characters, very few of my interviewees or participants actually had much experience with character death because gamers were pretty low to have their characters die with a few exceptions. And so most were not actually able to speak to like what it was like to have a character die because they hadn't ever actually experienced it in most cases. Interesting. So more on character death, you told me a bit about what they think about character death and really trying to prevent it at all costs. But what about those characters and applals that remain in the game? How do players manage those balls of the character? Yeah, so in most role playing games, characters are only flawed if the player chooses to take flaws. So the way you construct characters is your required to identify specific abilities, skills, traits, et cetera. And while you won't be necessarily great at everything or even good at everything, something that is actually seen as like a meaningful flaw, you usually get to choose either what to put that in or to even take it in a lot of games, whether we would have it. So the first thing about flaws is that players really speaking picked them, unlike in real life, where our flaws are often, if not completely out of our control, at least not something we can entirely decide on, gamers would often have the choice. They would either, in many games, either not have to take flaws or could it literally just pick from the list of here the things that could be flawed about your character just decide which one you want. So gamers generally speaking chose which flaws they wanted so they didn't choose flaws they weren't okay with. So they would choose flaws that they thought either made sense for some reason or they thought were worthwhile or they thought they could portray or that they didn't mind play or that they didn't think mattered. On the other hand, there were gamers who did, sort of the opposite. And there were no such gamers in my study because all of the people in my study were very much against this practice, but they all talked about knowing other gamers who did what was called min-maxing or power gaming, which is where in some games you have the capacity to take flaws that you intend to basically ignore to not play in your portrayal of your character that would rarely matter for your character that don't have much consequences, but that you take those flaws because it will give you like a power boost or extra benefits that you can gain something more to become a more impressive character because some flaw as one guy put it, players take crippling psychological difficulties so they can then have characters that can beat people up or kill people almost on the run without needing anyone else that then they don't pretend to actually have these flaws. And all of my participants, both the observation group and the interviews all thought that was problematic that players should not do that, that flaws were supposed to make your character more realistic. That the point of taking a flaw was to give yourself a character that was not so unrealistic, it was unbelievable or that would give you something else as a way to get into your character because you could pretend to focus on that flaw or you could address that flaw as a way of imagining yourself as a character, to make it not seem like your character was this like completely unreasonable, completely impossible, perfect hero that like didn't ever have any problems or that you couldn't pretend to be because it was so far from you. So they saw flaws from my participants as being like a way of making sure that things were more realistic. But they did it on the flaws to be things that would actually make it likely that their characters would die. For the most part, they tried to pick flaws that they were like, okay, my character can survive this flaw, it's not like I'd get them killed. They did not want to have their flaw be their downfall to the end of their character in most cases, they usually picked flaws that were something that would have less consequences so that the flaw was not like you to make them unable to actually keep their character alive. Interesting. Yeah, this book is jam-packed full of impression management and just every day interactions with the sphere of gaming. I found it particularly interesting in the midst of writing about while a manuscript that I currently have under review looking at escape rooms. As a form of emotion management, and I see a lot of emotional management taking place within these interactions that are taking place as gamers play the roles that they're associated with and the role-playing game that they're interacting in. And I just find this very curious and thank you. Yeah, I definitely agree about the emotion management stuff. There was a lot of trying to manage whether you're, like if things bad, things happen to your character trying to find a way to not be too upset about it and yet move on because it's not a real person so no one's really been dying, but it could be challenging for gamers except that their characters did or almost died. I almost see it as being what I call an emotional lab. That's what I call the escape rooms. I see it as being a controlled environment to learn how to display emotions correctly properly and to have successful performance of them. That may be then carried into everyday life. I could see that as being a strategy for your team building exercises and things like that at businesses or even among my students here at William Penn to do problem solving and a controlled environment. Yeah, my gamers talked about how they felt like for participating in the game gave them a chance to act like a hero a lot of times. And to think about what does it mean to actually take a moral action to do the right thing, to save the day to be a hero. And although I obviously cannot show that anyone actually became more heroic in real life with the data I have, I argue that this was practice for being a hero in real life. For taking the right thing, for focusing on that, for practicing how to interact cooperatively with other people because role playing games where people are really competitive, tend to fall apart, pretty quickly and very few people enjoy them. And so it really was practice for being things that are sometimes not valued in our society. That much society is highly competitive. We have a lot of ideas in our, in the United States, that people should be very individualistic. And yet a really good gamer was one who prioritized the group. They could think about how to do what was best for the group. They didn't just make decisions on their own. They didn't do what was necessarily best for their character. They did what was best for the group. And so gamers, like outright said that this was practice for being interactions. Some of them even talked about how they weren't good at social interaction at all in any way, shape or form. Or found it difficult or challenging until they started playing. And then it gave them a chance to play safely because the worst thing that happened, if they screwed up, was that the game wasn't any fun. And while that was lousy, it was nowhere near the consequences that happened if you screw up interactions in other places where you're like in school or work, where very major things can happen if you screw up those interactions. And so it served as yes, absolutely, like an emotion lab and a social interaction lab to see how the world worked and to allow them to build these skills like it then hopefully take back and use elsewhere. Well, unfortunately we're out of time. There's still plenty of book to cover, though. So I hope this is incentive for people to pick up your book and to make their way through it. But it does give a little bit of a glimpse inside the book that, well, the main reason I came to new books network and became a host is it's a chance for people to see more about the book than what they're able to prove it's at a library or a bookstore and or turn to the back of the book and read and know it actually get to see it from the lens of the author. So thank you for your time today. And I have, but I do have time for one more question. What is it that you're working on these days? Which is the next project? Yeah, so my next research is actually a little different direction, but it's still about sort of the interaction of social psychology and inequality and how that relates to culture. I'm actually doing a quantitative content analysis of hallmark Christmas movies, where I'm examining how hallmark Christmas movies depict gender and sexual orientation and relationships to see how that matters for viewers and what they're kind of showing about people since hallmark Christmas movies are another sort of big cultural phenomenon that isn't often thought about as being like normal, but is actually quite popular. Yeah, it's confined to a particular season, right? Like right around Christmas time, but it's a lot to unload and as I tell my students when they're doing media analysis, I say, look at the movies. It's a great place to understand sociology with having to lock out your door and into the downtown. Although that's fun too, but the people who, while they may not be sociologists producing the movies, they have to have an understanding of what's happening in society to be able to create a movie that you as a viewer can even make sense of. Exactly. And I think they are virtually interesting case because more recently they've tried to do better about being more inclusive, particularly with regards to sexual orientation, even though they've gotten some backlash over it. And so I think it's really interesting to see what they're, what they're doing that likes. What kind of message does that send about how those things work? Well, I look forward to the manuscripts either in book form or article form, and I hope they will stay in touch and that I'll be able to keep up with this work as well. Oh, absolutely. Excellent. Well, again, this has been another episode of new books in sociology and it was great having, on the show Heather and I look forward to talking to you in the future and have a great day, everyone.