Role Playing Materials - Rafael Bienia

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actors in social processes has been a significant contribution of actor-network theory to studies of the social (Sayes, 2014). The task is to avoid reductionism that words like materials or matter might carry. “To make this possible, we have to free the matters of fact from their reduction by ‘Nature’, exactly as much as we should liberate objects and things from their ‘explanation’ by society” (Latour, 2005, p. 109). To mark that I go beyond the dichotomy between physical matters of fact and socially explicable objects or things, I use the word materials instead of physical actors or objects. Thus, I do not understand actor-network theory “as a sociology ‘extended to non-humans,’” (Latour, 2005, p. 109) because I keep material actors open on a symmetric level until field work shows what clothes, rain, computer hardware, and light account for. Thinking about social processes beyond solely human actions, expands the understanding of role playing as a social process between players to a social process between actors.

      The question remains, why actors act in the way they act, when they do not need or “have” an intrinsic essence or a human consciousness. An actor effects social change, but the point is that this capacity to change is not rooted always in a conscious human decision, but emerges from a relation to other actors, which can be other elements that do something. Therefore, I name elements as actors when they do something, when they make a difference in a network.

      Actor-network theory points out a capacity of non-human actors that highlights a spatial and temporal capacity of action. Callon (1991) ascribes the capacity of gathering actors over time and space to non-human actors, better known in the formula “acting at a distance” (Latour, 1987, p. 222). Stability in a network is gained when non-human actors, such as role-playing materials, repeat an action of a temporary gathering. For example, I want to say the word “network.” I do not want to repeat the word myself, so I write the word with a pencil on a piece of paper. The paper bears the graphite marks that show the word “network.” I do not have to say “network” anymore, because the paper repeats the action, saying the word network, of the temporary gathering of me, pencil, and paper.

      Thus, materials can “allow an actor that is no longer present to exert a palpable influence” (Sayes, 2014, p. 140). A palpable influence is what makes a difference, although the word “influence” can be misleading when influence is not understood as a process emerging from inter-relational actions. However, the preserving of a relation over space and time is one of the actions that humans desire of non-human actors. What I aim to examine is what happens when materials transport desired actions, or to reformulate the guiding question in this context, how does role playing change over space and time when materials become part of the process?

      Actor-network theory as a constructivist paradigm within science, technology, and society studies allows multiple truths instead of one, multiple truths that are constructed by and between actors. Thus, what is studied and how, is a responsibility of the actor-network analyst. It is relevant that an actor-network refers to what is studied, in this case role playing, but it is also a tool to study role playing.

      Ontology and epistemology. Network has two meanings according to Latour (2011):

      You see that I take the word network not simply to designate things in the world that have the shape of a net […] but mainly to designate a mode of inquiry that learns to list, at the occasion of a trial, the unexpected beings necessary for any entity to exist. A network, in this second meaning of the word, is more like what you record through a Geiger counter that clicks every time a new element, invisible before, has been made visible to the inquirer. (p. 799)

      The ontological meaning of network is the network as a collaboration of heterogeneous actors. Until now, I have referred to this meaning when I talked about actors. The epistemological meaning of network is the network of relational processes that become visible when the inquirer recognizes, thinks, and writes them down. The network helps to reveal material actors, because it is an epistemological tool that helps to grow a sense of what is involved in a process. In this sense, researchers like Mol (2010) refuse to apply actor-network theory as a theory, and treat it more like a sensibility to approach a phenomenon while increasing one’s understanding. This twofold understanding of a network is the reason why actor-network theory is apt to answer the two levels of this dissertation’s problem: the ontological, what is role playing, and the epistemological, how to know about role playing.

      It is not enough to re-think role playing as a phenomenon that includes narrative, ludic, and material actors. Tracing relational work between these actors, actor-network theory aims to change how a researcher learns to know and justify this knowledge about collaborating actors. Instead of referring phenomena back to concepts, I use words that have emerged from inside field work. The vocabulary at the end of this chapter is the result of my field work. It has changed in the past years when I refined it to keep my preconceived notions at bay. When I observed and analyzed what happened during game sessions, my understanding changed from role-playing games that some define as games with, for example, the mindset of role playing, to role-playing games as processes, as actor-networks that gather diverse actors and make them work together at specific sites. Using network as a mode of inquiry provides the researcher with a methodological toolbox that at the same time changes the theoretical framework. Thus, a theoretical framework is less a context than a toolbox. With the tool mode of inquiry I localized role playing in the process between actors. In this regard, the theory adds itself as an actor to the researcher’s work, and as an actor, it changes its own work of constructing ontological meaning. Having explained the two meanings of network, I now return to the process, the “making a difference,” because it also explains the how actors gather, or organize, other actors to form networks that last over time.

      “Making a difference” is conceptualized as agency, which is a much contested concept in social theory, but in game studies is defined as a human capacity (Wardrip-Fruin et al., 2009). While this different definition shares the understanding of agency as ability, it differs in explaining how this ability comes into action, whether it is possible to think of agency as ability, and whether the ability is an inward power, or rather a relational effect. Actor-network theory diverges from these definitions by viewing agency not as a concept that the researcher has to trace, but again as a word for a difference making process that only exists when the researcher observes an empirical trace. Agency is a source for inquiry or uncertainty about what is part of what happens. Thus, agency aims at an observable capacity to act and matter and make a difference in the world, a capacity that comes into action when actors relate with each other. Instead of an inward power in game studies’ sense of agency, agency in actor-network theory refers to streamlining actions to one action. When I refer to role playing as agency, role playing is the “streamlining” action that emerges from and constitutes the inter-relational actions of heterogeneous actors. These actors’ actions form connections and when enough connections flow together, they create the role-playing game network and role playing works.

      When “[a]ctors fill the world with agencies” (Latour, 2005, p. 52), how can a researcher understand the process of creating agency in the world? As there is no causal agency, “there might exist many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence: things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on” (Latour, 2004, p. 226). Agency that refers to the level of a network

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