A Comparative Analysis of Discord and Online Roleplay Forums: Erasure, Discrimination, and Stereotyping

Jun 8

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Updated: 7 days ago

WRD 210: Cultural Rhetorics

Winter 2025

I: Introduction

In 2017, a handful of authors and I joined into an empty discord. Over the next seven years, we would cultivate this space into Falling Stones: a vibrant, diverse culture of textual role-players (more than twenty of us as of current) coming together to write stories. Role-player, as a term, defines someone who engages in the act of roleplay, either vocally (i.e. Dungeons and Dragons) or textually (i.e. TTRPGs). Much like how children roleplay “house” or “doctor” with one another, writers create characters to engage in an overarching story, developing identity and relationships as they pertain to the persona they embody to engage with the written piece. I created this group after launching a migration event away from the old public forum I used throughout middle school, an educational block-coded-game forum many know as Scratch. While geared toward cultivating interests in STEM, this website was adopted by a sub-population of children and tweens who used it to write stories with one another. It was a great primer into roleplay as a genre, but the forum had its host of issues. Between 500-character comment caps and ambiguous forum layouts, authors using Scratch as a writing platform often harbored a love-hate relationship with it.

The primary issue, however—an issue far more grave than website design—was its stark erasure, discrimination against, and stereotyping of LGBTQ+ and racial groups. Scratch forums were notorious for exclusionary behaviors commonly prevalent amongst children (particularly tweens, who engage in “clique” culture), only these exclusions were far more openly racist and homophobic when brought to a digital sphere. The discord community I created, alongside fellow authors concerned with this erasure, aimed to upend these exclusionary practices through the development of nuanced writing styles that catered to cultural discourse. The text-based roleplay community Falling Stones resists both LGBTQ+ and racial exclusion, erasure, and stereotyping, otherwise commonplace practices throughout games and public online writing forums (i.e. Scratch), through the critique of outstanding social constructs and the provision of a safe space for minority groups.

II: Literature Review

Since the creation of tabletop roleplaying games, exclusion of racial and queer groups has maintained prevalence. Regardless of the form they come in, roleplaying games are built upon the guiding word of cisgender, heterosexual, white men, thus creating exclusive spaces that punish those outside of this binary. Even the titans of tabletop roleplays are guilty of this; D&D, one of the most popular voice-based roleplaying games, plays into stereotypes and passively encourages discrimination through its portrayal of disability, race, and gender. Much of this is perpetuated through the D&D handbook, which outlines the rules of the game. For example, the handbook has a “Conditions and the Madness Table”, which outlines the various effects a character can fall under. Amidst charmed, poisoned, and invisible, real-life disabilities like deafened, paralyzed, and blinded are placed alongside these other negative conditions. Shelly Jones, one of the authors featured in the gaming journal Analog Game Studies, writes about this phenomenon and how it otherizes disabled individuals: “Deafness, a condition that a player at the table might actually have, is equated to something like being magically charmed by a sexy nymph or being knocked on one’s butt for a round.” (Jones, par. 4). Furthering this, Antero Garcia of Stanford University found traces of stereotyping behavior in D&D rulebooks by conducting an ethnographic study using observations of D&D sessions, player interviews, and reviewal of the handbook to draw conclusions on the exclusionary nature of the game. He brings up a valid point regarding the handbook’s approach to gendered names: “In the section that reviews all the racial options for players, sample names are offered, and these are presented as “Child Names,” “Male Adult Names,” “Female Adult Names,” and “Family Names.” Even though the fantasy world of D&D is stated as intentionally supporting varied gendered identities, the racial categories within the rulebook make implicit assumptions clear.” (Garcia, 13). These are just two examples within a wide host of poorly worded and underdeveloped mechanics for D&D that actively work against players of minority. The dominance of hegemonies within tabletop roleplaying games translates not just to D&D, but to written tabletop games much like the forums I wrote in during my childhood, which we will explore throughout this analysis.

In this paper, I use a cultural rhetorics lens to compare Scratch sub-forums to my own cultural group Falling Stones, in order to show how Falling Stones resists minority erasure and exclusion. Throughout this quarter, I have defined cultural rhetorics in two parts: culture and rhetoric. I define culture as a dynamic culmination of practices, values, beliefs, lifestyles, and identities, bound together by the constellated relationships within them. In addition to this, I understand rhetoric as the explicit study of modes of language (written or otherwise), and how these modes can bring about change on a local scale (i.e. within one individual) or communal one (i.e. within an entire culture). When these two concepts are combined, we can craft cultural rhetorical discourse on a wide berth of topics. Within the sphere of cultural rhetorics, this paper also mentions concepts of erasure and stereotyping. I define erasure as the lack of acknowledgement for cultural practices, beliefs, and values, which thus leads to suppression. Meanwhile, I define stereotyping as confining a particular culture to a generalized, myopic understanding of their ideals. Finally, I use lexis derived from Falling Stones to help bolster analyses of Scratch sub-forums. Take “roleplayer” for example, a word I will be using often throughout this paper; roleplayer, meaning a person who engages with a roleplay group. This term is just an example of the lexis that makes up Falling Stones, though many words spawn from the abbreviation “RP” (meaning roleplay).

III: Analysis: Combatting Erasure Through the Character Creation Process

Online forums like Scratch or Amino engage in the erasure of racial and queer minority groups by failing to recognize key cultures within the character creation process. For individuals who are part of these groups, the lack of representation can be an unpromising introduction to roleplay. When purveying Scratch, I noticed that erasure most commonly occurs within the first stage of play: character creation. Much like an application for a job, players submit a filled-out character bio to the forum, where a moderator will then accept or reject you depending on the quality of your writing or adherence to the rules. Below are three different character bios from the Scratch forum; see if you spot the issues:

Name [] Age (12-18 years) [] Camp [] boy or girl [] Bf/Gf/crush/single [] Looks [] Talents [] Personality [] (Fluffhead101, “Willowshire”)
BIO: name / personality / likes / dislikes pet? / crush / dating / school / student or teacher / age / looks / anything else? (pika-mewfirestar, “School RP”)
Name//last name//interests//likes//dislikes//abilities/powers//friends//age//nickname (optional)// family//backstory// (Cocoa_Mocha3, “Marvel Roleplay”)

We can see in all three of these character application forms that gender, sexuality, and race are left completely unmentioned (or, in the case of bio one, are reduced to harmful binaries, like “boy or girl”). By failing to acknowledge these cornerstones to character identity and how they may interplay with other parts of the character forms (i.e. personality, looks, so on), a precedent is set that characters should present as straight, cisgender, and white, thus cutting a large majority of cultures from the expected norm of a fictitious world (that should operate to resist cultural hegemonies, not perpetuate them). This issue is echoed through A.A. George’s essay on GenCon, a tabletop role-play convention, and how a lack of player-side acknowledgement of race (seen through the absence of diversity in panelists) left him feeling discouraged about his overall ability to integrate into fictional worlds. Regarding discourse on racial visibility in tabletop games, he states that, “I’ve been told time and again by gamers, “I don’t see race” as if they were doing me a kindness. This is not enlightenment or progressiveness. It is ignorance. If you do not see race, you do not see me. You do not see my identity, my ethnicity, my history, my people.” (George, par. 20). By choosing to not provide cultural groups with spaces to express themselves authentically, role-players are missing a key component of the genre they are writing within: the capabilities of dissembling hegemonies through fiction. To combat this, we must set a precedence for the game to follow by designing a character creation process that caters to individuals of all cultural groups.

My cultural group, Falling Stones, does this through an intuitively designed character creation process. Before starting a new campaign, we designate at least a week in advance solely for character development. Our character sheets are not restricted to forum pages but are implemented into google docs that are often several pages long, thus opening a large space for players to think critically about the characters they are designing. Below is one of the biographies created by another author in our group for a roleplay campaign:

As we can see, this bio explicitly mentions ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, encouraging players to actively think about these identities in relation to the character they are designing. Instead of erasing these traits or reducing them to binaries, we are explicitly making mention of them, creating an active discourse between the player and their character that emboldens recognition of cultural minorities. Thus, Falling Stones works against erasure through a nuanced character development process.

IV: Analysis: Combatting Discrimination Through Inclusive Rulebooks

Secondly, online forums actively discriminate against racial and queer individuals by participating in exclusionary practices, and these practices are often rooted in a roleplay’s rule system. Children, often molded by church or parental teachings using the harmful rhetoric of framing minority groups as condemnable, echo these sentiments in their authorship. One roleplay titled “Willowshire”, a semi-popular sub-forum created in 2023 that was still operating as of four months ago, lent itself to this type of exclusion. The first rule on the forum read as follows:

“As a Christian RP studio, we love all people types, but per studio rules please create straight, male or female characters only. Thank you!” (Fluffhead101, “Willowshire”)

The sight was discouraging. Even seven years after I had left the forum, authors like those in “Willowshire” were still fortifying the complete exclusion of gender and sexual orientation spectrums. Another example of this occurs in “Marvel Roleplay”, an active sub-forum on Scratch dedicated to servicing Marvel-enthusiastic role-players. Much like Willowshire, this roleplay also incorporated exclusionary rules. Their first rule stated:

“I'd REALLY prefer if you'd use she/her or he/him pronouns (for your character) only because it's what most of us are used to and it's easier to remember.” (Cocoa_Mocha3, “Marvel Roleplay”)

Once more, a sub-forum on a child-friendly website explicitly bars characters outside the gender binary, hiding behind a passive-aggressive comment about pronouns outside the “norm” being “hard to remember”. These exclusionary behaviors reminded me of my own time on the forum, and why I left in the first place; not only was I discouraged by the commonality of sub-forums like “Willowshire” and “Marvel Roleplay”, but a lack of inclusive moderation allowed servers like these to grow into platform monoliths.

Another monolith that encouraged discrimination is D&D “The Dragon”, one of the most prolific tabletop magazines (with its first issue released in 1979, Quinn, par. 4) and its last released in 2007 (Quinn, par. 17)), covering a wide host of topics regarding D&D and tabletop roleplay. One of the most popular authors featured in the magazine, Len Lakofka, attempted to push for gendered D&D rules through discriminatory rhetoric. As Aron Trammell recounts in a review of D&D’s history in pop culture, “Representation and Discrimination in Role-Playing Games”, “Lakofka suggested that female characters should have a "beauty" score that connects to unique abilities like "charm men" or "seduce", while women in combat should fight at the level of "man-1". (Trammell, 3). This was a part of many proposed rule changes by Lakofka, whose clear misogynistic rhetoric was veiled behind a flawed understanding that gendered rules would encourage women to play D&D. As a woman, if these rules were in place, I would not only feel too demoralized to play D&D, but I would frankly be offended that a part of my identity would lead to such blatant handicapping. Trammell backs this viewpoint in his paper by stating that “a hostile (gaming) environment keeps minority groups from buying and playing games and seeking positions in the game industry, which perpetuates homogeneity and stereotyping of produced games." (Trammell, 4). When minorities are discriminated against in the gaming world, they are dissuaded from engaging, thus only further otherizing those who do chose to engage. This connects back to our literature review, where mention of the D&D handbook’s discrimination comes back into play. If a game’s guidebook, the very core of the game’s design, is inherently flawed, how can a player of minority expect to engage with the game in any meaningful way outside of homebrewing (creating their own) custom content? Similarly, how can we expect roleplay forums on Scratch to provide nuanced, inclusive story collaboration if the rules themselves are explicitly exclusionary to groups outside the most represented binary?

In Falling Stones, my discourse group, our rulebooks are always explicitly inclusive. The first rule in our primary server reads as follows:

“Be respectful. Racism, sexism and discrimination of any kind is strictly prohibited.” (Future, Falling Stones)

By explicitly barring any type of discriminatory actions, we actively foster a safe digital space of authorship for cultural minorities. In addition to the above rule, our discord server is set up to where you can include pronouns as a “role” in the application’s role system, one of many ways to categorize players. Pronouns include “she/her”, “he/him”, “they/them”, and an “other pronouns” role where players can explicitly outline what pronouns they want to use outside of these options. For even further customization, an introductions section in the server includes a form players can fill out and post, which includes pronouns and their comfortability with gendered terms (i.e. “dude”, “bro”, “queen”, so on). Players are encouraged to use the pronoun role system and introduction form. This clearly articulates that our server is a safe space for everyone across the gender spectrum, thus eliminating discrimination from our cultural group.

V: Analysis: Combatting Stereotyping Through Story Development

Finally, online forum sites cater to the tokenization of characters by leaning into racial and gender stereotypes without the provision of nuance or depth. We can see an example of this in “Eternal Paradox”, a sub-forum that caters to fans of the Percy Jackson fandom. The creator, @ongold, has developed a host of characters for this roleplay, which she has publicly posted to her page with artwork. Below, I will analyze two characters she has created for her own roleplay game: Mickayla Lamor and Percy Valentino. Mickayla Lamor is a 15-year-old black woman, portrayed with hoop earrings and dreadlocks pulled up into a bun. Percy Valentino is an 18-year-old white man, portrayed with fluffy brown hair and blue eyes. Below are ongold’s descriptions of their personalities.

Mickayla Lamor: “she seems friendly and naive, but she's actually very clever and cunning. she likes to trick/backstab people, and lure them into her trap. she only trusts her friends, and even to them she isn't entirely honest. over time, she's become a compulsive liar, and it's hard for her to change that.” (ongold, “mickayla lamor – a rp character”)

Percy Valentino: “just like the seasons, his personality changes every four months, though this isn't really his personality, rather the way he sees life and the emotions he expresses. in spring, he'll be extremely forgiving, happy and light, and kind in general. in summer, he'll be more laid back/chill, and pretty impulsive. in fall, he'll be very emotional, though this isn't always a bad thing. he'll also be very observative. in the winter, he'll be very quiet and thoughtful, and can lash out impulsively.” (ongold, “percy valentino – a rp character”)

Comparing the two biographies, there are stark differences in how these characters’ personalities are portrayed; this is a commonality on Scratch forums. Mickayla Lamor, a black character, is explicitly described with only negative, toxic attributes like manipulation and dishonesty. The positive attributes she is assigned are immediately dismissed as a front for more sinister behavior. The one true affirmative character trait in her personality biography is “clever”, while the rest of the characteristics are starkly negative. Percy Valentino however, a white character, is described with mostly positive characteristics like kind, calm, observational, and forgiving. We can observe a reversal in how Mickayla and Percy are written; much how Mickayla’s positive traits are subverted to hold negative meaning, Percy’s negative traits are subverted to place the character in a more favorable light: “In fall, he'll be very emotional, though this isn't always a bad thing”, ongold states (ongold). The one true negative trait described in Percy’s biography is impulsive, while the rest of the characteristics are noticeably positive. Not only this, but Percy’s personality is more nuanced, with more dedication to describing the ways his mood shifts through space and time, thus painting him as a complex character. Mickayla, however, is solely defined by her flaws.

This example feeds into the stereotype that black individuals are “dangerous” and “evil”, a belief held in perpetuity by society for hundreds of years, especially prevalent in America since the colonial era. As the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture states, “laziness, as well as characteristics of submissiveness, backwardness, lewdness, treachery, and dishonesty, historically became stereotypes assigned to African Americans.” (Smithsonian, par. 1). We can see the last two, treachery and dishonesty, blatantly portrayed in ongold’s character Mickayla Lamor. In fact, Mickayla appears to only represent these stereotypes; outside of these concepts, her character is woefully underdeveloped. David Leonard of Washington State University argues that portrayals like this show how race and gameplay are inextricable concepts. “Race matters in video games because many of them affirm the status quo, giving consent to racial inequality and the unequal distribution of resources and privileges,” Leonard states (Leonard, 2). Leonard goes on to explain that racial stereotyping in videogames is ubiquitous; this issue reaches far beyond the scope of Scratch: “Stereotypes can be found in virtually any game –Cuban drug dealers in Vice City, muscle-bound and violent rappers in Def Jam Vendetta, and Arab terrorists in nearly every war game. Ready to Rumble, a boxing game, covers all bases, including racialized stereotypes of seemingly every community of color.” (Leonard, 2). With race holding such prevalence over the gaming industry, it is imperative to portray these cultural groups as authentically as possible, yet many games—and roleplay groups— fail to do this. And yet this problem isn’t just the fault of game studios. Players’ dispositions also play a part in the perseverance of minority prejudices. Antero Garcia of Stanford University speaks on behalf of this topic, stating that, “digital and analog games both draw from tropes, from hegemonic cultural values, and from shared geek knowledge in ways that reinforce what is understood as an epistemological truth for the players of games.” (Garcia, 4). Games may perpetuate tropes, but players fortify these knowledges by engaging with presented hegemonies. This is exactly what happens on Scratch sub-forums and is what Falling Stones actively works against.

Falling Stones works against stereotyping through nuanced story development. Unlike roleplays like “Eternal Paradox” on Scratch that cater to bland, generalized representations of cultural groups, Falling Stones aims to critically analyze social constructs by encouraging players to engage with fictitious worlds that satirize discrimination. One example of this is the player race “Venaries” in Falling Stones. These half-bird creatures live on a floating island far above the rest of the world’s population. Their species is designated by two starkly different social groups: “otium” and “proelium”. “Otiums” live above ground, engaging in the arts and humanities amidst flowering gardens and glass atriums. Meanwhile, “proeliums” work underground, generating power for the island to stay afloat in harsh, deadly conditions (Future, Falling Stones). This is a direct criticism of America’s class disparity, especially as it pertains to the accumulation of opportunities and private education. While this is the case, players are encouraged to resist these social constructs. Many players who have chosen to create a “venarie” character have pushed against the social stereotypes of the two types of “venarie”. Take “Ar”, one of the player’s characters. While born underground as a “proelium”, they worked their way into a governmental position through meticulous campaigning—and eventually escaped the bias of the “venarie” social system altogether by starting a business on foreign soil. Each of the six player races in this campaign has social implications to overcome or consider, which players had to consider when creating their characters and have to actively take into account when engaging in roleplay. By encouraging players to push against fictional culture generalizations, we combat stereotyping on a meta-level.

VI: Conclusion

Through our analysis of Scratch’s shortcomings and how they are amended in Falling Stones, we can observe how this cultural discourse community resists erasure, discrimination, and stereotyping of racial and queer groups. These groups are targets for prejudiced systems, and tabletop roleplay games offer spaces in which this prejudice can be dismantled. By studying prejudice through a cultural rhetorics lens, we can observe how written communication can lend itself (Falling Stones) or neglect (Scratch) culture. My analysis provides insight into a gap of research on Scratch forums, which have been left relatively unmoderated despite their clear shortcomings in inclusivity. An exigency is painted when this is compared to the fact that Scratch is a website focused on children’s education and entertainment. Should we be encouraging young tweens to discriminate against their peers in such volatile manners, to the point of blatant exclusion? Or should we be implementing new systems into this forum site to encourage multicultural engagement? Roleplay has the ability to shape relationships and bolster creativity. It’s an incredible outlet for individuals of all ages to explore story-building on a collaborative front, and by privatizing it, we are eliminating any possibility of diversity in our stories. No child should feel pressured to create their own cultural space as I have, yet I am forever grateful that I have had the opportunity to create a group so accepting and nuanced. Falling Stones is a space that conceptualizes a forum that is truly accepting, a truth that online forums have yet to achieve. Racism and homophobia remain prevalent even today on these sites, perpetuated by children left unchecked by inefficient moderation systems

Works Cited

Cocoa_Mocha3. Rules posted in the studio description of the “Marvel Roleplay (Active)” studio. Scratch, scratch.mit.edu/studios/32913263/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2025.

Deterding, Sebastian. Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge, 2018.

Fluffhead101. Rules posted in the studio description of the “Willowshire: A Christian RP” studio. Scratch, scratch.mit.edu/studios/32428185/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2025.

Future. Message posted in the #🦅venaries channel of the “Falling Stones” Discord. Discord, 27 June 2021.

Garcia, Antero. “Chapter 1: ‘I Piss a lot of people off when I play dwarves like dwarves’: Race, gender, and critical systems in tabletop role-playing games.” Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education, vol. 123, no. 13, 1 Apr. 2021, pp. 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/016146812112301302.

George, A.A. “Gaming’s Race Problem: Gencon and Beyond.” Reactor, ReactorMag, 26 Jan. 2024, reactormag.com/gamings-race-problem-gen-con-and-beyond/.

Jones, Shelly. “Blinded by the Roll: The Critical Fail of Disability in D&D.” Analog Game Studies, 5 Mar. 2018, analoggamestudies.org/2018/03/blinded-by-the-roll-the-critical-fail-of-disability-in-dd/.

Leonard, David. “‘Live in your world, play in ours’: Race, video games, and consuming the other.” SIMILE: Studies In Media & Information Literacy Education, vol. 3, no. 4, 1 Nov. 2003, pp. 1–9, https://doi.org/10.3138/sim.3.4.002.

Lilac. Message posted in the #character-creation channel of the “Charisma | RP” Discord. Discord, 6 May 2022.

ongold. Description posted in the project description of “mickayla lamor – a rp character” Scratch project. Scratch, https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/796664606/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2025.

ongold. Description posted in the project description of “percy valentino – a rp character” Scratch project. Scratch, https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/946510155/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2025.

pika-mewfirestar. Rules posted in the studio description of the “School RP” studio. Scratch, https://scratch.mit.edu/studios/35637469/comments. Accessed 9 Mar. 2025.

Quinn, Daniel. “A Brief History of Dragon Magazine.” Medium, Medium, 22 Dec. 2018, danielquinn.medium.com/a-brief-history-of-dragon-magazine-bb3f94a7cd5d.

A Comparative Analysis of Discord and Online Roleplay Forums: Erasure, Discrimination, and Stereotyping

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