Abstract

Tabletop roleplaying games (or TRPGs in short form) have often been objects of analytical confusion. Scholars such as Andrew Ross have made conclusions about them on the basis of the same methodological techniques typically used to analyze prose media. These conclusions fail to account for the content of what Noah Wardrip-Fruin has called expressive processes. Ludologists following the discipline first developed by Espen J. Aarseth have created a series of tools that can be used to avoid the pitfalls of analysing such objects as if they were identical to other forms of prose media, but in the process, that discipline has often willfully discounted ludic objects as having any form of narrativity. As a result, the full breadth of philosophical context that accompanies a literary genres migration from prose media to the medium of the TRPG has often been rendered analytically invisible. This dissertation addresses the question of exactly what content migrates from prose media to the medium of the TRPG by applying multidisciplinary approaches developed across English literature programs and the discipline of ludology to a close analysis of a specific case study: the migration of the cyberpunk genre into the medium of Cyberpunk, the tabletop roleplaying game. I conclude that, on the basis of this case study, what migrates is not merely a surface aesthetic, but a selection of philosophical and ethical assemblages that must be rendered visible if a meaningful form of media literacy involving such objects is to exist.