How Deep Realism in Games Supports Personal Catharsis

Bell, Olivia

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How Deep Realism in Games Supports Personal Catharsis

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This paper explores how deep realism in Tabletop Roleplaying Games can facilitate emotional introspection, community-building, a reclamation of agency, and a reaffirmation of the players’ own positive traits as reflected in their character roleplay. Deep realism is the practice of building the details of a real environment into a game world to make the world recognizable to the players. This idea was investigated using the TTRPG system Outbreak:UNDEAD, a zombie apocalypse and survival simulation game where players have the option to take a personality test to create characters of themselves in the game. I designed a module for the system using the principles of deep realism and the setting of a real college in Massachusetts as its location. I ran this module for players from the school, who portrayed themselves as characters navigating an apocalyptic scenario set in a fictionalized version of their college campus and home. The goal of this study was to better understand how deep realism can be used to encourage agency when it is limited in the real world, how it affects locational and character bleed (Hugaas, 2022), and how it can support personal and community growth. During this “positive-negative experience" (Montola, 2010), I observed and recorded participant actions, which were subsequently analyzed alongside responses provided during reflective post-game interviews. Emphasizing deep realism allowed me to facilitate an experience of heightened bleed, encouraging players to actively explore their identities outside of and within the game world. Creating a safe and familiar gameplay environment empowers players to retain agency amidst adversity, experience “perezhivanie” (Schmit, 2016) which carries outside of the game space, and forge deeper connections within a supportive community setting.

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