Role-Playing, Reader Response, and Play-Therapy in Fantasy Fiction: “You could hear the dice rolling” in Novels About Abuse and Recovery

Abstract

R ole-playing games (rpgs) have an established use in play-therapy, particularly psychotherapy with children and teens as well as in social work with these groups. Likewise, reader response studies have long established the self-reflective and transformative nature of literary reading, as well as the therapeutic uses of writing. While these four areas are typically approached as distinct from each other—rpgs, therapy, reading, and writing—they find common ground in responses to and concerns with trauma and abuse. We know that rpg players may use their persona in gaming sessions as an avatar to work through issues of concern in their real lives. Similarly, readers consuming fiction may process and reflect on their own real-life experiences through the imaginary worlds inside. Authors, as a third group, also may use their writing as a way of processing their experiences in a sense akin to how a patient works with a therapist through dialogue, play-therapy, and journaling. There is, however, an overlapping point not yet recognized among these quasi-therapeutic possibilities. The crux of this article is a niche literary genre in which all four of these distinct areas coincide: fantasy fiction, and in particular popular fantasy of 1977 to 1990, in which “you could hear the dice rolling” (Lindskold, n.p.). This article considers where these topics overlap in the therapeutic components Role-Playing, Reader Response, and PlayTherapy in Fantasy Fiction: “You could hear the dice rolling” in Novels About Abuse and Recovery