Becoming-Fantastic: Deleuze and Fantasy RPG Performance

Abstract

I begin with a consideration of The Fantasy Role-Playing Game: A New Performing Art, by theorist Daniel McKay, which explores how these games evolved from games used to train Prussian military officers in war tactics, to recreational games without winners and losers in which players controlled imaginary groups of soldiers, to, most importantly, the construction of multilevel identities out of “fictive blocks” of popular culture.  Having thus laid the foundation for this critical linkage of role-playing and Deleuze, I then turn to a close reading of Thousand Plateaus.  In addition to exploring functions in the text of classic fantasy characters (including vampires, sorcerers and zombies), I will also consider how other concepts in the text (including maps, bodies with organs, and weapons) can be linked to fantasy role-playing gaming in a politically productive way, opening up new lines of flight for the reader toward both Deleuze’s politics and creative fantasy.