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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses a study of Dungeons & Dragons to examine a world made by players in Singapore that recuperates an experience of attending school. Through practices that traverse online and offline modalities, players recover an unwell world through play by collectively deciding what should be real.

Paper long abstract:

Everyday realities are made and remade through constant effortful practices of relation and creativity. A study of virtual worlds created online through play allow for a meta-examination of how we make things "real"—a topic that has interested anthropologists for many years. This paper uses a study of tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons to examine a world made by players in Singapore that recuperates an experience of attending school as a teenager and young adult. Created in part through embodied role-playing practices such as narrating, speaking, and witnessing each other play, but also in part through a shared Discord server where realities are elaborated upon, proposed, or denied, the world made collectively is a complicated assemblage of online and offline modalities. Objects can be conjured in speech, elevated by music, transported to virtuality by art, and then made material and relational by gifts. While Singaporean schools have come under fire for the intense pressures they place on students to excel, the discriminatory treatment of queer and transgender students and recurrent cases of sexual harassment and assault, magical school in Dungeons & Dragons is one where queerness is accepted, the giddiness of romantic and platonic relationships amplified, and rites of passage made triumphant. This recovery of an unwell world is made possible by a mixture of creative labour, multiple scales of canonicity and fan practices created on- and offline, and shape a collective decision of what should be real.