| In 1974 the world's first Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TRPG) was published, Dungeons and Dragons. Since that time hundreds of TRPGs have been published in multiple genres. In this thesis I explore the rhetoric of two of the most popular horror-themed TRPGs: Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: the Masquerade. I focus on explaining how these games came to be, how they serve their players as equipment for living, how they rhetorically (re)construct real-world places and spaces, and finally, how they encourage transcendence and jamming through ritual play and participation. This thesis hopefully helps to show the complex multi-layered rhetoric taking place in a relatively ignored form of media. Additionally, I introduce the concept of textual invocation as a complimentary theoretical construct to that of textual poaching as an explanation for how players and designers engage in a give and take of authorship. |
