Dreams of Time, Times of Dreams: Stories of creation from roleplaying game sessions

Roleplaying games (RPGs) are an activity in which a group of people (called the players) creates and roleplays characters in a world devised by one other participant, called the Game Master, who describes the results of their actions as well as the actions themselves of everything and everybody else in this created world. The malleability of this world, coupled with the RPGs’ social aspect, parallels the socially constructed reality which usually surrounds us. In this paper I collect a series of impressions from a few roleplaying sessions during which different groups of players attempted to construct new realities. In this sense, I examine the shared creation of reality out of empty space, exploring the potential inherent in roleplaying as a metaphor for organizing. I look for non-standard view-points on organizing which emerge from these sessions, and examine the process itself, not trying to pinpoint any regularities, but rather seeking the unusual and the sublime.