Pete had been having a rough day. First he was late for school, then he’d been cruelly mocked by his classmate Britney and her posh-girl clique. Now he was developing a horrible suspicion that he might have eaten his neighbour’s cat.

Fortunately for the local feline population, Pete was a fictional character. A bemused and terrified teenage werewolf, he was part of a pen-and-paper roleplaying game called Monsterhearts, whose players assume the roles of supernatural creatures traversing the social minefield of school.

Roleplaying games have been a cornerstone of geek culture since the 1970s, when the fantasy adventure game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) first drew players to a novel and interactive form of storytelling. Halfway between a board game and a kind of improvisational theatre, it handed players control of characters in an unfolding story and challenged them to undertake a variety of perilous quests. With the aid of a dungeon master – a player acting as a combination of referee and narrator – players spoke their characters’ words, described their actions and guided them through subterranean caverns, battling monsters and seeking treasure.

The game offered players a previously unimagined degree of immersion and creative potential, and while it might seem a little dated in the age of smartphones and online gaming, tabletop roleplaying continues to thrive. Today D&D boasts millions of fans around the globe, and the countless games that have followed in its path have transported players to a variety of horror and science fiction settings. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of roleplaying’s development has been the emergence of the “story-game” movement: a passionate community of independent designers using games to explore new themes and approaches to storytelling.

Fiasco is a fast-paced and viciously funny game, which emulates the doom-laden farce of a Coen brothers film; Downfall has players collaboratively creating a tragically flawed society before playing out its destruction; and, in Romance Trilogy, designer Emily Care Boss has created a collection of games that explore love, sex and relationships.



Monsterhearts may be the most emotionally powerful example of this story-first approach to game design. It casts players as vampires, witches and werewolves, using the often-maligned genre of paranormal romance as a lens through which to explore teen sexuality. Its Canadian creator, Avery Alder, said she developed it after seeing the dismissive reception some strands of young adult fiction had received in the media.

“I wrote the game right when the Twilight movies and books were really popular,” she said. “I kept seeing men – usually college-educated white men – either hand-wringing or turning up their noses at these books and at the interest they held for young women. They were saying: ‘This doesn’t pass my personal bar of merit, this doesn’t count as literature.’

“I was incensed by that, because I felt there was an element of sexism involved. You had stories that were wildly popular and spoke to so many people, and they were being dismissed because they didn’t fit into a particular mould defined by older, academic men. It felt like a rejection of the experiences and emotions of teenage girls.”

Monsterhearts’ creator Avery Alder: ‘if you’re growing up in a homophobic environment, you’re having who are driven underground’ Photograph: Buried Without Ceremony

If Monsterhearts is a feminist statement, it’s also a thoughtful exploration of LGBT adolescence. Characters may be gifted with supernatural powers, but they’re still teenagers, and during play they will experience social awkwardness, battle raging hormones and struggle to establish their own identities when confronted by the bewildering possibilities of gender and sexual orientation.

“I explored a lot of my own identity as a queer woman and a trans woman through games,” Alder said, “and I wanted to create something about coming to terms with queerness.

“I think a common experience in adolescence is becoming aware of social differences in terms of race, class, beauty, ability, all of those things. You feel different, unvalued, alienated. So the metaphor of being a monster and having to keep your identity in the shadows speaks to all of those themes.

“A lot of queer youth are actively made to feel monstrous by people around them, and if you’re growing up in a homophobic environment then you’re having who you are driven underground.”

Sexuality isn’t just a thematic backdrop for the game: it’s woven into its core. A die roll might see your straight-identifying character suddenly finding themselves attracted to someone of their own gender, something that seems random and arbitrary until you consider that millions of people around the world have experienced similar moments of unexpected ambiguity over their own orientation.

Alder argued that games offered the ability to confront players with this kind of situation in a way that other forms of fiction simply couldn’t.

“If you think about a novel, that’s a really good way to explore a character’s interiority,” she said. “You have monologues, asides, reflections within a scene, lots of ways to get inside their head.



“But roleplaying or storytelling games offer a slightly different way of thinking. They allow you to inhabit a character’s decision-making process, to make their choices and to experience the fallout from their decisions. They offer a unique ability to not only witness a character’s internal process, but to interact with it and steer it.”

This chance to actively participate in stories has always been key to roleplaying’s appeal. In Monsterhearts’ case, it has proven so effective that fans have raised more than CA$95,000 (£56,000) to fund the development of a second edition of the game.

For Alder, though, the biggest reward has been the effect it has had on its players.

“A lot of trans women have told me: ‘Monsterhearts made me think a lot about who I am, it gave me the courage to come out,’” she said.

“It warms my heart to think that a game I made helped people to know themselves.”