Creative Accounting: Role-Playing Games, Possible-World Theory, and the Agency of Imagination

Role-playing games have many qualities of narrative (character, plot, setting), yet they have received virtually no attention from narratologists. This essay discusses the way that role-playing games construct narrative worlds and compares that to recent theories of fiction based on possible-world models. In both, emphasis is placed on the objects that make up this world. In role-playing games and recent theories of fictional world, this essay argues, emphasis on objects makes possible intertextual comparisons, which in turn help to define and rejuvenate the agency of readers and critics against the backdrop of challenges to that agency by market culture and structuralist literary theory.