Monsters, magic, mediality: Tabletop role–playing games as mediatization processes

Tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) are often thought of as an analog medium. But their recent renaissance (fueled by the emergence of actual plays and the subsequent increase of online game sessions due to the COVID-19 pandemic) shows how entangled TTRPGs are and have been with the process of digitalization – and that they are better understood as a hybrid medium in general. Understanding TTRPGs this way leads, in turn, to the understanding of role-playing as a cluster of mediatization processes between its different parts, be it players and game masters, narrative and rules, or even reality and fiction. This paper thus analyzes TTRPGs’ mediality and its relationship to other media (computer (games), boardgames, actual plays and the role of the players) to bring various academic disciplines and different branches of game studies into dialogue with one another through the focus on TTRPGs.