‘You Walk into a Tavern’: Shared Imaginative Spaces in Dungeons and Dragons

In this paper, we analyse the experienced, imaginative processes that can characterise a game of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) - a tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) in which a group of people, playing imagined characters, set out on joint adventures in a collectively imagined world. Our analysis of D&D, in contrast to traditional solipsistic conceptions of imagination as individualistic internal representations, proceeds from classical and contemporary phenomenological descriptions of imagination. Phenomenological accounts are notably characterised by a rigorous pursuit in delineating imagination from perception, whilst still acknowledging the possibility for shared imagination. However, unlike recent phenomenological attempts at accounting for shared imagination primarily with reference to normativity, we here argue that what especially makes shared imagination feel shared in the case of D&D is the game’s ability to impose quasi-perceptual structures on the participants’ imagined engagement. In the case of D&D, the participants not only experience playing together (thus undergoing a we-experience); they experience partaking in an intersubjective, imagined world beyond the scope of any one player’s imaginative powers. Serving as a paradigmatic case of shared imagination, we thus focus on three distinct dimensions of D&D: the quasi-objective, explorable space constituted during the game, the embodied and embedded structure of player- and character agency within the imagined space, and finally the intersubjective and distributed imaginative dynamics at play in a typical D&D session. Our results are significant not only to studies into D&D, TTRPGs, and possibly other kinds of games, they also matter to the growing philosophical discussion on what makes shared imagination possible in the first place.