The New Laboratory of Dreams:

Role-playing Games as Resistance

Katherine Angel Cross

“The virtual world” can be said to encompass a great many things: the
Internet as a whole, specific spaces therein, the simulacra of media imag-
ery in general, or video gaming specifically. The emancipatory potential
of the whole enterprise has long arrested feminist theorists (Haraway
1990; Stone 1995; Turkle 1995), and some reflect on the history of femi-
nist interventions into the virtual as evincing a dichotomy between “uto-
pian” and “dystopian” thinking (Boyd 2001; Magnet 2007). However, I
would challenge the idea that the distinction is so clean. This dichoto-
mous abstraction obscures the complex perspective often sketched by
so-called dystopian cyberfeminist theorists. Lisa Nakamura (1995), for
instance, was an early theorist who suggested that there was a profound
continuity between the physical world and the virtual one. She showed,
with sobering ethnographic examples from the online roleplaying game
LambdaMOO, that the balance of power in the world seeped into the
World Wide Web; what disrupts the “dystopia” narrative, however, is that
this complex understanding of power was not intended to be pessimistic.
Toward the end of her paper, Nakamura offered her hope that the play-
ers themselves would push back against the boundaries being constructed
in the virtual world. Eagerly seizing on the rich stable of metaphors that
technology offered, Nakamura said each act of roleplay that countered the
“Orientalized theatricality” of racist/sexist play was a “bug” that would
“[jam] the ideology machine.”
What is roleplaying and how can it do this? Roleplaying is something
that instantiates what “utopian” cyberfeminists dreamed of: creating a
character of your own design that you then perform and embody in virtual

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2012) © 2012 by Katherine Angel Cross.
70 All rights reserved.

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 71

social space. But to understand its emancipatory potential, and the pos-
sibilities it raises as a “third way” between the false dichotomy of u/dys-
topia, we have to rediscover Hilary Rose’s Laboratory of Dreams—a vivid
workshop where feminist science fiction became enchanting feminist
theory. We must also survey pen-and-paper roleplaying games (an excel-
lent summary thereof can be found in Dormans 2006). Such games render
social construction richly visible through their heavy emphasis on charac-
ter, imagination, and story, which all work together as part of a process of
constant enactment and engagement; a perpetual process of ‘becoming.’
I will begin by elaborating on the history of the Laboratory of Dreams
concept and its roots in feminist science fiction, then move into a brief auto-
ethnographic discussion that illustrates a defiant becoming in the midst of
oppressive virtual space, finally moving into an analysis of the roleplaying
game (RPG) Eclipse Phase as something that builds on “becoming” and
institutionalizes it in a way many other RPGs simply do not. Like liter-
ary science fiction, roleplaying is always moving toward something new,
iterating through never ending phases that progress one’s character toward
an infinite horizon. The enchantingly creative art that inheres to creating a
new world and fully human characters within it fires the imagination anew
as regards this world. The warnings of earlier cyberfeminist theorists are
vital to keep in mind—the whole purpose of this essay is to combine an
emancipatory project with their nuanced understanding of the pitfalls and
continuity of power, not to fall into the trap of Utopia. But in the process
I hope to show how Nakamura’s “ghost in the machine” is rising in virtual
space and that instituting feminist roleplaying games as a new laboratory
of dreams can build on this hopeful trend.

The Laboratory of Dreams

In many ways, feminist science fiction is the historical antecedent to the

avowedly feminist roleplaying games I hope to see created. For feminist
scholar Hilary Rose, science fiction was an important issue to take on in
her book Love, Power, and Knowledge (1994) precisely because it spoke to
a passionate urgency and the need to imagine the world for which femi-
nists were fighting. Toward the end of her book, she situates feminist sci-
ence fiction as essential to transforming science-in-fact. In a chapter titled
“Dreaming the Future” she quickly lays out why something as seemingly
frivolous as the pulp genre of sci-fi, repurposed as a creator of “feminist

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 72  Katherine Angel Cross

myth-making,” could have such great sociopolitical import: “Feminist sci-

ence fiction has created a privileged space—a sort of dream laboratory—
where feminisms may try out different wonderful and/or terrifying social
projects. In these vivid u/dystopias the reader is invited to play safely
and seriously with social possibilities that are otherwise excluded by the
immediacy of daily life, by the conventions of the dominant culture and by
fear” (Rose 1994, 228).
The great project of social justice has been the changing of the world,
ostensibly for the better. There is, percolating in the minds of many an
activist, a vision of the new world they would like to create, a world where
some idea of justice would prevail. For Rose and other proponents of the
“laboratory” thesis, science fiction creates a space where we can dream
these ideas and in some ways even try them out (Merrick 1998, 2009).
Donna Haraway put the matter succinctly when she said that “the best SF
. . . redid what counts as—what is—real” (2011, 6). I would not limit this
merely to visions of utopia or dystopia either, however. These genres allow
for a complex and thoughtful sketching out of social dynamics that stub-
bornly refuse to fall on either side of that dichotomy—in this way, very
much like our own world.
Activism is always grounded in a challenging present that demands
immediate, short-term solutions merely to get us all to the next day of
resistance; what can be lost in that struggle for scraps of earth is a vision of
a better world. Rose argues that “more thinkable and sustainable futures
are nurtured by these dreams and myths of other wor(l)ds; and feminists,
whether working inside or outside the laboratories, have need of the labo-
ratory of dreams” (1994, 229).
Confronting a grotesque reality, paradoxically, necessitates a robust
charge into the realm of fantasy. In order to be what we see, we must
first create those visions and archetypes—fantasy is an ideal place to do
this. Imagination is not just a prerequisite of praxis here: it is praxis itself.
Dreaming, far from being inimical to and opposite of action, is folded back
into the urgent doing of political activism and restored to a position of
prominence and respect.
In the landmark anthology Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat: New
Perspectives on Gender and Gaming, the authors say in their preface that
“gaming activities are not neutral or isolated acts, but involve a person’s
becoming and acting in the world as part of the construction of a complex
identity” (Sun et al. 2008, xx). Gaming, and roleplaying in particular, is an

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 73

act of constant “becoming” that allows for self-conscious (or at least semi-
conscious) social reconstruction. Feminist transformation—the constitu-
tion of new gendered possibilities and new arrangements of power—can
be and often is one of those things.

Interactive Becoming

Recent research into how people interact with games—giving more heft
to just what the concept of “interactivity” can mean—demonstrates how
these possibilities may exist in the real world. Caroline Pelletier’s 2008
“Gaming in Context” examines the phenomenon of gender identity con-
struction through gameplay by speaking with young children in British
primary schools and having them make video games using a prearranged
set of tools that are easy to use but admit a good deal of customization.
She found that both boys and girls used their game designs to constitute a
gender identity in the real world that did not always line up with their per-
sonal interests in gaming. This arose from the complex ways the students
engaged with gender norms:

The reason their games re-enact game-based gender norms is that it

is precisely in relation to such norms (either for or against them) that
games are intelligible. However, norms are never simply maintained
but always remade—or made anew—in new games and new situations.
So making a game means designing in conventional ways in order to
be understood, but also appropriating such conventions and adapting
them to one’s particular situation—and therefore, in effect, changing
such conventions (Pelletier 2008, 156).

She uses this framing to emphasize the dialectical processes that char-
acterize identity formation. “Norms,” she says, “are therefore not simply
imposed on people but used actively to construct identity” (157), echoing
Barrie Thorne’s conception of “play” in her study of children around the
same age. For Thorne (1993), “play” is an active engagement with the sig-
nifiers that suffuse childhood and constitute proactive self-construction
in a way mediated but not obviated by power. Pelletier, in recognizing
the agency such construction may afford, argues that allowing youth to
design their own games gives them more power to use the norms that sur-
round them, rearrange them, transcend them, and potentially create some-
thing new.

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 74  Katherine Angel Cross

Elizabeth Hayes made somewhat similar observations in her 2007

analysis of how two women made the most of Elder Scrolls: Morrowind,
a roleplaying video game set in a fairly open world where identity and
goals were more self-directed than in other titles. “Gendered Identities
at Play” detailed an ethnography of these two women and Hayes situated
this analysis in an idea that blurred the distinction between self and other:
“An intersection between the player’s real life identities and the identity of
the virtual character can be the source of new ways of viewing the world
and the self, at least in theory” (Hayes 2007, 27–28). Each woman felt the
constraints of societal sexism, but seemed to only begin from those lim-
its. Over the course of their adventure in Morrowind they began a process
of change, becoming something that combined dimensions of their old
selves with new, experimental pursuits. There is an arc that can be found
between their selves and the others they ended up pursuing and becom-
ing, similar to how this process works in roleplaying more generally.
All these people find ways of using the limited tools they are given and
using them in ways that were not intended by the developers and writers of
a given game. This transcendence occurs through not only through enact-
ing the role of the Other, but also through finding (constructing) yourself.
This double helix of growth, a beautiful dialectic of becoming, first made
itself known to me through personal experience.

Roleplaying as Transition

Despite World of Warcraft’s occasionally intense prejudice, locker room

environment, and antiqueer public atmosphere, it was where I discovered
myself as a woman through gameplay that offered me a social experience
that real life had denied me. This online roleplaying game, a fantasy world
of Elves and Orcs inhabited by millions of players, was the staging area
for a virtual experience that, in retrospect, was my bridge to a new under-
standing of myself. To be quite sure, this was not a possibility that was
bullet-pointed as a selling point on the back of World of Warcraft’s packag-
ing. “Uncover your transgender identity!” is scarcely marketed as a feature
of online games of any stripe; yet it happened. I was not alone in this. After
my coming out and identifying myself as a transsexual woman with a par-
ticular history, other trans people would tell me that they had also done a
good deal of “exploring” on the Internet, particularly through roleplaying
games that gave them the opportunity to play as the gender of their choice.

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 75

Roleplaying offered people a means of safely and comprehensively explor-

ing a subjectivity from which they were otherwise restricted.
Gaming, in this profound sense, becomes an expression of historian
Susan Stryker’s vision of trans-formation: “As we rise up from the operat-
ing tables of our rebirth, we transsexuals are something more, and something
other, than the creatures our makers intended us to be” (Stryker 2006b, 248;
emphasis mine). With characteristically stirring prose Stryker contests
the idea that transgender surgeries are somehow innately reinforcing of
a patriarchal gender order. She reminds us that people do something with
what is imposed upon them or given to them. Surgeons and psychiatrists,
she says, may have a certain end in mind when they allow trans people
access to hormone replacement therapy or surgery, but we are not nec-
essarily shackled to that vision. We can transcend their edicts and their
intentions. Similarly, Blizzard Entertainment’s envisaged ends in creating
World of Warcraft did not entail a transgender revolution or conceive even
of a transgender becoming. Yet I am here.
Sociologist Raewyn Connell observes that gender is very much a pro-
cess, “a structure of social practice.” She sees gender as both reacting to
and initiating social changes in perpetual dialectical interaction, forever
in motion much as it was during my time in World of Warcraft (Connell
1987; 2000, 71–76). It would, thus, be too simple to say that I was trying
to become something else or be something I was not. I was becoming.
Ontology bled into epistemology here and revealed to me the contingency
of my gendered situation. What was once passive certitude in the inflex-
ibility of my gender was revealed as a flexible point of view (gender-as-
epistemology), largely thanks to roleplaying.
Self and other dissolved, and I became aware of a process of becoming in
my gendered life, a horizon that I might never reach but one worth pursu-
ing. It was this cascade of realizations that led me to draw strength from my
fictional characters in World of Warcraft and Neverwinter Nights and realize
that what was true in the virtual world may be true in the physical one. It
allowed me to direct my own process of becoming and continuity between
myself and my roleplayed characters became apparent. Just as in the game,
I first began from what I knew; it then metamorphosed into something
beyond that and finally fed back into me.
In this lies the essence of resistance: the permanent recognition of
social contingency, of one’s agency in the midst of oppression’s crucible,
and the ability to find one’s self enchanted with the possibilities that can

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 76  Katherine Angel Cross

spread before one. In seizing on the preceding one feels compelled to

recognize one’s motion and perhaps move faster. Seeing the future and
allowing yourself to be enchanted by the fantasy is what facilitates this
so well. What sets Eclipse Phase apart from many of its contemporaries is
that unlike many games, it consciously seizes on this, so much so that it
becomes especially good for transformative thinking.

“As if ‘Biological’ Means a Damn Thing Anymore”:

Eclipse Phase and Theory from an RPG Sourcebook

In her analysis of gendered play in Morrowind, Hayes discussed that game’s

limitations and speculated that “one of the most powerful ways that games
might be used to explore new ways of doing gender is by challenging some
fundamental assumptions about the nature of identity itself ” (2007, 45).
Enter Eclipse Phase. The game—originally conceived by Rob Boyle and
Brian Cross—arrests you with possibilities for change from the start. Its
tagline is “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change
it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it” (Posthu-
man Studios 2012). To turn an old metaphor, in Eclipse Phase changing
identities is a feature, not a bug.
At the end of her paper Hayes noted that it was difficult to find “games
that offer players the opportunity to move in and out of different identities
or that reward atypical combinations of attributes and skills” (2007, 46).
Eclipse Phase is that game, one that may be fairly described as Nakamura’s
“ghost in the machine”—flawed, as any ghost might be, but still incredibly
interesting. My own gendered play in World of Warcraft was an act of semi-
conscious creative resistance within the terms of a game that was never
designed to accommodate it. Eclipse Phase, on the other hand, is built from
the very premise that calling the very nature of identity into question can
constitute a fun evening.
As is implied by the game’s slogan, changing one’s mind and body are
essential components of gameplay here. “My body, my choice” seems to
undergird gameplay here in a way few other games in any medium can
match. Where it qualifies this is not for the sake of enforcing any number
of norms regarding, say, gender, but rather for elaborate commentary on
class relations in the world of Eclipse Phase.
The RPG takes place in a future version of our own solar system, ten
years out from the Fall, a nuclear apocalypse on Earth sired by American

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 77

military hardware. Lush, culturally rich and advanced colonies exist else-
where in the system, however, and “transhumanity”—the human race as
augmented by now-routine bodily modification, literal cyborgs—lives
on. The rich campaign setting gives players a tremendous amount to think
about: gender and sex are extremely fluid, sexuality is normatively poly-
morphous, and the class politics of the game invite much critical reflec-
tion. The campaign sourcebook—the “rulebook” of any pen-and-paper
RPG—lends players a thorough education in the differences between
liberalism and radicalism, as well as multiple phases and wings of resis-
tance politics. Artwork adorns otherwise text-choked pages, bringing the
setting’s manifold distinctions to life in vivid renderings that immerse you
in this brave new solar system. Women of color abound as thinkers and
doers, not passive pornographic objects (see Fernández 1999; Nakamura
2000; Langer 2008, 97). They are also portrayed as being comfortable
with technology, using it with facility in a variety of ways. These images,
produced on a budget by an independent developer with a political mes-
sage—the promotion of transhumanism as well as a generally leftist class
and gender politics—are Nakamura’s “ghosts,” pushing back against hege-
monic images of women, particularly women of color.1 All this is part of
the default setting of a game routinely praised on RPG review websites as
being fun.2
Before going further it is worth exploring how this world will be laid
out and what the nature of its virtual space actually is. This is a pen-and-
paper roleplaying game; perhaps the most famous example of this genre/
medium is Dungeons & Dragons (Cook 2003). While such games share
many features with video games, it is an experience that becomes fully
visualized in one’s imagination rather than on a computer or television
screen. It is also one that is very likely to be shared in physical, rather than
virtual, company.
Another nontrivial distinction this creates is the fact that pen-and-
paper roleplaying games do not necessarily allow players to “hide” their
“true” selves from the people they interact with. If “no one knows you’re
a dog” on the Internet, everyone will around a roleplaying table. Pen-and-
paper roleplaying games are sourced from books that are used as guides for
gameplay that usually takes place between the participants seated around
a table (hence another name for the genre, “tabletop roleplaying”).3 The
impact of this requires more research and would bear directly on my the-
ory; the immediate presence of other, physical players could limit a per-

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 78  Katherine Angel Cross

son’s freedom to play with things like identity in a challenging manner. But
as I will argue, Eclipse Phase’s value is that it heavily legitimizes precisely
the kind of transgressive play that could make trouble for a player of a dif-
ferent game.
Pen-and-paper roleplaying games also offer two layers of customiza-
tion that constitute a kind of proactive game design that occurs during
live play. For instance, players may find themselves acting as mediators
between two rival anarchist factions. The first layer of customization (that
of narrative) is built into the nature of the challenge: it can have several
outcomes based on the players’ actions. Do they succeed and help the col-
lectives reconcile? Merely set tempers flaring and initiate an altogether less
pleasant challenge? Start a whole new political movement? This evolving
and polymorphous story is worked out between the gamemaster and play-
ers, each playing his or her part in weaving/designing the narrative. The
story is made moment to moment. This free form overcomes the struc-
tural limitations of online RPGs like World of Warcraft, which often inhibit
roleplay (MacCallum-Stewart and Parsler 2008).
The second layer is made up of the statistics and dice rolls that help
mediate play.4 Most roleplaying games’ sourcebooks encourage players
to develop “house rules” and otherwise modify what they are given. To
return to my example, the sourcebook may dictate one set of rules for
handling diplomacy with dice rolls, but our gamemaster may elect to use
house rules unique to this story, or something more streamlined. 5 Or per-
haps our hypothetical gamemaster will do what I do: use a well-told story
in lieu of a successful dice roll. If I were the gamemaster setting this chal-
lenge, I would encourage my players to tell me a good story about their
negotiations, rather than simply roll dice to see whether or not they suc-
ceeded. This would be impossible in most video games, even multiplayer
ones. In the latter, players are pitted against an unchanging rule set carved
in digital marble; here rules flow as freely as story and are manipulated as
part of the player’s initiative. It is a social process.
What Pelletier’s research confirmed to her was that game development
is an act of power that could indeed change social relations; her goal is to
see “that game design can become an everyday domestic leisure activity”
(Pelletier 2008, 158). She did not see this occurring on a pure “transgres-
sive/oppressive” dyad, but instead saw it as a powerful means of engaging
with social norms and giving youth the power to begin modifying them.
I would add something more to this, however: pen-and-paper roleplay-

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 79

ing games are game design as an everyday domestic leisure activity. Eclipse
Phase, like most pen-and-paper games, recruits the players themselves in
changing the game to suit their tastes (creating “house rules,” for instance)
and to change the setting as they see fit to tell the stories they want to tell.
It excels in comparison with other pen-and-paper RPGs, however, in its
beginning this encouragement from a baseline that is already very politi-
cally charged and deeply thoughtful about its social space, one where vari-
able identity and gender-as-process are already built into the game prior
to player input.
Despite the malleability, sourcebooks exist for a reason. They pro-
vide an authoritative voice that allows players to start from a profession-
ally designed setting and rule set, sparing one the trouble of having to
start from a blank slate (for a useful discussion on the merits of rules in
games, see Nardi 2010, 76–80). This authoritative voice can encourage or
discourage certain kinds of play—even if players are free to ignore such
suggestions in theory. It is what makes Eclipse Phase’s “voice” all the more
noteworthy. The game writers use that power to articulate controversial
and politically charged ideas. Players are asked to consider “What does it
mean when you are born female but you are occupying a male body?” and
are informed about how the writers use gender pronouns: “When refer-
ring to specific characters, we use the gendered pronoun appropriate to
the character’s personal gender identity, no matter the sex of the morph
[body] they are in” (Snead et al. 2009, 114).
The last sentence situates the individual’s identity as the final arbiter of
his or her “true” gender, taking a page out of transgender rights discourse.
The authors also establish that the “singular they” will be the default pro-
noun used throughout the text, instead of the pseudogeneric pronouns of
“he/him.” The players, sitting around a table or at their computer screens,
become immersed in a world where the developers are telling them a new
story about gender. One even lacks the comfortable distance afforded
by the usual science fiction realms (“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far
away . . .”). Eclipse Phase is set in our own neighborhood; the humans here
are not distant but are our own great-grandchildren. The setting makes
statements about gender and about inequality in terms that are starkly
familiar.
Consider another “authoritative” statement that the developers write
about their setting: “Gender has become an outdated social construct
with no basis in biology. After all, it’s hard to give credence to gender roles

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 80  Katherine Angel Cross

when an ego can easily modify their sex, switch skins. .  .  . Many others
switch gender identities as soon as they reach adulthood or avidly pursue
repeated transgender switching. Still others examine and adopt untradi-
tional sex-gender identities such as neuters .  .  . or dual gender” (45). It
almost seems painfully obvious to say that the game has brought Donna
Haraway’s “cyborgs” to life vividly. This echoes Stryker’s formulation of
the sexed body: “‘Sex’ is a mash-up, a story we mix about how the body
means, which parts matter most, and how they register in our conscious-
ness or field of vision” (Stryker 2006a, 9).
Bodies are part of ever evolving identity here, both personal and
instrumental, always subject to change. You may choose a body designed
for zero gravity, for instance, or one that can fly in Venus’s atmosphere.
Haraway’s conception of a cyborg involved the rich social context that
Eclipse Phase provides, going beyond a mere grafting of technology onto a
human being (Haraway 2011, 6), while also ensuring a grounding in lived
reality that some feminists feared might be lost in virtual space (Magnet
2007, 585). Thus trans people are not only represented; the concept of
changing bodies/identities/genders is normalized well beyond anything
imaginable at present (and this is indeed the point: it makes the player
imagine it). In Eclipse Phase the name for the human race as a collective
had shifted to “transhumanity”; whether or not it was intended as a pun on
“transgender” is immaterial. It captures the varied meanings of “trans” all
in one: transsexual, transgender, transgressive, transcendent. Movement
and becoming.
It is worth remembering that Haraway’s storied cyborg was mes-
tizaje, who knew, lived, and thrived upon the multiple consciousnesses
that women of color inhabit (Haraway 1990, 218; Fernandez 1999, 62).
This conciencia de la mestiza (see Anzaldúa 1999) allowed her cyborg to
embody our complex and uneasy lives as feminists of color, and the lib-
erating potential therein. It may be too much to liken Eclipse Phase to the
work of Cherríe Moraga, say, but it nevertheless presents the player with
women in living color who travel between worlds of identity, speaking in
many tongues; it also shows them empowering themselves, inviting the
player to know such mestizaje women in a productive gaming space that is
precisely predicated on identity reformation in a politicized context. This
is a laboratory of dreams that we as women of color can easily see ourselves
in, a stark contrast to many video games where we instead find narratives
of resistance filtered through a much thicker haze of problematic racialized

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 81

portrayals (Langer 2008). We are too often uncounted, but Eclipse Phase
is that rarest of imaginative projects that encourages fruitful and creative
exploration of a complex, political identity as a woman of color.
This sort of volatility is a hallmark of the game. By even broaching the
possibility of “repeated sex/gender” switching the developers are positing
an especially radical formulation of the game’s base principle: that change
is a constant and all character in transhuman space is a highly conscious
and ongoing act of becoming. Further, it goes beyond the traditional M/F
dyad in choosing gender in a game, which, as Danah Boyd points out, is a
“slippage . . . between gender and sex—between the body and the perfor-
mance of identities. The question might be framed as one of gender, but
the answer is all about sex” (2001, 110). By contrast Eclipse Phase lets you
build your own gender and sex.
The website tells players that “the ability to switch your body at will,
from genetically-modified transhumans to synthetic robotic shells, opti-
mizing your character for specific missions” is a central part of the game,
and also touts the fact that “characters are skill-based, with no classes,
so players can customize their team roles and specialize in fields of their
choosing”—the latter is important to consider in light of Hayes’s arguing
that “not all choices were as functional as others” in Morrowind (Hayes
2007, 46). Through enabling truly free-form gameplay, Eclipse Phase
admits a wider variety of skill combinations that could be potentially effec-
tive, including—strikingly—academic skills.
The game promotes a profound reverence for social science (“astroso-
ciology” is a trainable skill in this game). In advising players on how to use
skills related to knowledge, like the aforementioned astrosociology, the
sourcebook suggests the following: “The real value of Knowledge skills
is in helping the characters—and the players—understand the world of
Eclipse Phase. In particular these skills can be used to . . . understand the
applicable science, socio-economic factors, or cultural or historical con-
text” (Snead et al. 2009, 185). Rare is the game that asks you to consider
socioeconomics, or anything like “cultural or historical context.” The
gameplay immerses players in critical thinking. A prerequisite of play is
having some means of navigating the complicated political world of the
post-Fall solar system.
Academic knowledge becomes a skill that can move mountains in a
given story line; journalists, social justice activists, researchers, deep space
drifter avant-garde artists now all become people with power in their own

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 82  Katherine Angel Cross

right who can move the story along, in contrast to most games, which cen-
ter on combat experts. Multiple characters in the game are configured as
activists, from technosocialist Zora Moeller, who “feels a responsibility
to bring about the downfall of repressive capitalist structures” to various
activists for robotic rights and the rights of the animalian creatures known
as “uplifts.” Moeller and other activists mentioned in the game, such as Dr.
Katherine Santos, are women of color as well. The player is encouraged to
think in terms of not only a character’s ability to wound, but also his or her
ability to move in this world as a fully formed being. You as the player must
create a character that can act as an agent in a deeply troubled world that is
simultaneously rich in possibility, our own world through a dark looking
glass, but in “laboratory” form, free to be played with.
Pen-and-paper roleplaying games are an act of constant creation. It as
is if your character puts the world under her with each step she takes in
it; roleplaying is an act of imaginative constitution, making and remak-
ing. It is Connell’s structure of practice spelled out ludologically, Stryker’s
reclaimed Monster rising from the operating table, and Nakamura’s ghost
in the machine seizing its host. Eclipse Phase’s great distinction is that it
fully seizes on the process of becoming in order to both tell its own story
and entice players to consciously make their own in the same mold. A story
where identity is in flux, where technology’s social impact is highly vari-
able, where class, gender, and race are set center stage, and where one mili-
tates against powerful social forces in the crucible of trying times indeed
for the (trans)human race. What the authoritative voice of the sourcebook
does here is provide a rich and thriving society in which your character
confronts powerful social forces with her agency.
After all, this is a world where Cartesian dualism has folded back
against itself and collapsed into singularity. One’s consciousness is now a
downloadable and transmittable entity that can be “sleeved” into most any
body. Body-as-identity takes on a variety of meanings here; a body can be
like a beat-up used car one hopes to shed as soon as one can afford bet-
ter, or it can be a vital part of one’s identity, lovingly modified and altered
as an inextricable extension of one’s consciousness. Few other games—
video games or pen-and-paper games—encourage such. But beyond the
gendered possibilities here is the fact that this has become the material
foundation of class in this world: who has a biological body and who does
not. The “haves” specifically have biological bodies, while those who do
not either have low-grade bio bodies or mechanical ones. The latter, in par-

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 83

ticular, make up what the sourcebook refers to as “the clanking masses”—a

new underclass of human consciousnesses inhabiting mechanical bod-
ies made for menial and dangerous labor. Bodies matter, perhaps, more
than ever. What we see here are not ethereal Übermenschen homosocially
engaging in a contextless space, but full humans with bodies navigating a
deeply political world that is often as dirty and messy as it gets. The game
openly casts bodies as the contested terrain that they are in our own real
world and encourages players to think in those terms (Mohan et al. 2011).
The interesting things Eclipse Phase does are too numerous to explore
in one essay. Short stories that star femme genderqueer characters, artwork
featuring same-sex couples, a Latina doctor who acts as an early hero to
uplift rights activists, artwork that depicts women of color in positions of
strength sans objectification, a campaign setting where Asian people are
featured without Orientalist fetishization; Eclipse Phase compels its players
to cultivate a story in this world. Perhaps my favorite moment in the source-
books comes from a sidebarred short story when said doctor, Katherine
Santos, is proved right in the face of a male colleague who had just accused
her of having “lost [her] objectivity” (100). In the same story, a chimpan-
zee uplift speaks of this doctor as being his mother, noting that she is not
his “biological mother” before correcting himself by saying “as if the con-
cept of ‘biological’ means a damn thing anymore.” As well as being satisfy-
ing, this is one of several moments when the game developers throw the
notions of scientific objectivity and biological essentialism into question.

Conclusion

What makes pen-and-paper RPGs special is that they are a site of cre-
ation that necessarily expands the mind of the player. Fantasy is never a
far-off country that is forever foreign to even the peripheries of a person’s
consciousness; this is what makes it both dangerous and productive. The
roleplayed world is one that is constantly in the making. For both Pelle-
tier and myself, the “making” is essential to both the constitution of the
player’s identity and the remaking of social norms themselves. Eclipse
Phase’s fantasy has created a highly believable society, sparing no detail for
many of its moving (and breathing) parts. To extend the lab metaphor,
Eclipse Phase’s laboratory is fully stocked. Its laboratory is premised not on
techno-utopianism or apolitical optimism, but on the very critiques that
Nakamura raised in 1995: that technology had just as much power to rein-

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 84  Katherine Angel Cross

scribe oppression as to liberate us from it. Eclipse Phase enjoins its players
to toy with both ideas: the dangers and virtues of fantasy. The beautifully
terrible power of dreaming.
Games like this, which enlist creative, political minds in its design, can
help to break the tide of prejudicial game design and writing. These are
tools that feminists can easily seize upon, using the well-worn pathways
that have been established by young feminists online and by other social
justice activists with a presence online who have created a ready-made net-
work for roleplaying to become the next stage of feminist storytelling. A
rich body of feminist academic literature also lays a number of theoretical
groundworks for such a project (Cassell and Jenkins 1998; Taylor 2006;
Corneliussen 2008). Feminist game designer Filamena Young used just
such strategies to create a pen-and-paper RPG aimed at children called
Flatpack: Fix the Future (Young 2012). It engages children as creative play-
ers in a postapocalyptic world that is hopeful. Rather than emphasizing
destruction, it stresses reconstruction and the agency of young people in
building a new and better world. Young’s work is in genealogical relation
with the feminist science fiction that has gone before; unlike SF, however,
the laboratory thus proffered is an open workshop that is constituted
through active, imaginative work. Every feminist, for instance, can now
become an Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ, or Ursula K. LeGuin.
Gaming in rich settings that represent a complex society like our own
has the potential to address the serious issues that scholars like Lisa Naka-
mura and Jodi O’Brien (1999) raised with regard to freedom in the virtual
realm. O’Brien’s great concern was that virtual space seemed to demand
recourse to the body, always bringing social relations back to binarist sexual
referents. But what if a roleplaying game subverted the dyad entirely from
the first page? My own autoethnographic evidence testifies to immense
possibility even in relatively restrictive video games, and thus the promise
of more politically insightful games like Eclipse Phase is that much greater.
There can be little doubt that no game is perfect, and feminist scholars may
find much to criticize in Eclipse Phase itself. But the game is best under-
stood as both a beginning and an incitement. Similarly, as Fernández,
Nakamura, and others have noted, there is immense danger in seeing “the
virtual” in purely emancipatory terms—this maneuver obscures the very
real ways that power works in the world. But it is my modest hope that
games like Eclipse Phase, politically astute as they are, can actualize the bet-
ter angels of the virtual world.

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 The New Laboratory of Dreams 85

It is also my hope that this essay contributes in some small way to

the disruption of the utopia/dystopia dichotomy that pervades thinking
about imaginative fiction (Merrick 1998). Transcending this can produce
an even more stimulating and imaginative play space that simulates the
social turbulence of the real world. It works as well as it does because it
transcends old dichotomies while still being avowedly political. Although
not strictly a feminist RPG in provenance, it is a striking example of what
feminist RPGs might well offer. Science fiction gave fuller, imaginative
form to the utopian thinking of writers like Shulamith Firestone (1970),
who dreamed of technological solutions to women’s reproductive binds .
Pen-and-paper roleplaying games present us with another means of doing
so. In describing el camino de la mestiza (the mestiza way), Anzaldúa says
la mestiza “reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new
myths” (1999, 104). She may well have been describing roleplaying.
If roleplaying offers us the opportunity to be the characters we want to
see in popular media, and the opportunity to experiment with forgotten
futures and the utopias we dare not dream, then it behooves us all to enter
this laboratory of dreams and remake it.

Katherine Angel Cross is an undergraduate student and research assistant at Hunter Col-
lege, City University of New York, presently studying sociology and women and gender
studies. She is also coeditor of the feminist critical gaming blog The Border House.

Notes

1. Transhumanism, an international philosophical movement that has both

intrigued and troubled radical activists, is committed to “improving” the
human condition through the use of technology. An astute reader may well
note the potential political pitfalls of such a program, and they certainly have
not escaped transhumanism’s critics (for a stimulating example, see Midgley
2004; also Fernández 1999, 62). For the purposes of this essay, it is enough
to say that Eclipse Phase mostly steers clear of transhumanism’s more prob-
lematic dimensions, producing the politically engaged and complex roleplay-
ing game I am analyzing here.
2. For a good sampling of player reviews, see http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/
product_reviews.php?products_id=64135. Notably, next to none castigate
this highly political title for being “too political.”
3. A pen-and-paper roleplaying game is one in which players discursively act
out the roles of characters in a fictional setting. These players are refereed

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 86  Katherine Angel Cross

by a gamemaster (GM) who is responsible for guiding the direction of the

story according to the rule system laid out in the sourcebook. While the GM
is meant to be an arbiter who has the final say on rules and setting, and is the
“omniscient narrator” thereof, in practice the creation of the world is a col-
laborative process between both the GM and the players.
4. A small number of video games such as Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights
allow for extensive customization at both levels, but they are the exceptions
that both prove the rule and demonstrate the utility of roleplaying games in
any medium.
5. Skills, in the context of roleplaying games, are ways to mathematically model
proficiency in a certain activity. A skill is usually expressed as a number,
which is used by combining it with the result of a dice roll to try and rise
above a “challenge rating.” This allows a mixture of uncertainty (the dice)
and predictably rising success (the skill value) while allowing the difficulty
of the problem to vary (the challenge rating). Let us return to our example
of the anarchist kerfuffle. For the sake of simplicity, let us say the challenge
rating is 50 and a player has a diplomacy skill of 15. She may say something
like “I try to convince the syndicate leader to be more agreeable in these
talks” or (preferably) something with more flair like “I give an impassioned
speech about the need to respond to Collective X’s criticisms” and then pro-
ceed to act out the speech she has in mind. The player rolls a ten-sided die to
give her a multiple of ten; she rolls a 4—equivalent to 40. She adds this ran-
domly generated number to her diplomacy skill to get a total score of 55. She
thereby “wins” the check and “accomplishes” in the game what she said she
was trying to do. For more on how rules can positively structure a gameplay
experience, see Dormans 2006 and Nardi 2010.

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