Wonder, Choice, and the Games We Make Together
Hi, I’m Christopher Rondeau: an English doctoral student here at the University of Tulsa, college instructor, writer, and lifelong fanatic of speculative fiction, comics, and games. Much of my work circles stories: how they are made, how they shape us, and how we participate in them. Gaming has become one of the places where those questions feel most immediate to me, especially when I think about the relationship between wonder and choice.
Wonder is often treated as a passive sensation. We encounter something immense, strange, beautiful, or terrifying, and we stand before it in awe. Science fiction and fantasy are especially good at producing this sensation: the first glimpse of an alien city, a map of an unexplored continent, a mysterious artifact with an unreadable history, a forest that seems to have its own intentions. Games can create those moments too. But they do something different.
In a film, novel, or television show, I may be emotionally invested in what happens, but the story’s major decisions have already been made. I can disagree with a character, imagine another ending, or argue with the author’s choices afterward, but I do not control the next action. The media moves forward without me. In a game, however, I am often required to decide. I must choose a path, accept a risk, trust someone, betray someone, explore the dark corridor, spend the last resource, or walk away.
Of course, digital games can limit those choices. They often offer carefully designed options that stay within a structure someone else created. Even so, the act of selecting matters. I am not only receiving meaning; I am helping produce it through attention, action, failure, and consequence. The story becomes partly mine because I was there when the decision was made.
This is where gaming’s sense of wonder becomes intense. Wonder is not only about seeing something extraordinary. It can also come from realizing that my response to that extraordinary thing matters. A ruined planet is fascinating; deciding whether to save its remaining inhabitants, exploit its resources, or leave it behind is something much more 
complicated and immersive.
Tabletop role-playing games take that idea even further. A tabletop role-playing game, or TTRPG, is a collaborative storytelling game played through conversation, imagination, rules, and usually dice. Each player takes the role of a character in a shared fictional world. At the same time, a game master describes situations and responds to the group’s choices, so the story develops through the decisions everyone makes at the table.
In a tabletop game, the world is not fully complete before play begins. The rulebook, setting guide, maps, miniatures, and character sheets offer possibilities, but they don’t determine everything. A game master may prepare a haunted village. Players may arrive with suspicious characters, strange ambitions, and completely unexpected questions. Then someone decides to befriend the ghost instead of fighting it. Someone else burns down the inn. A throwaway joke becomes a recurring villain. A minor nonplayer character becomes the emotional center of an entire campaign.
That is part of why tabletop gaming feels so full of possibility to me. It is collaborative, but it is also demanding. I cannot simply wait for the narrative to reveal what my character believes or what the right choice should be. I must decide, often with incomplete information and real consequences in the imagined world. The dice may complicate those decisions, and the other players may transform them, but the choice still must begin somewhere.
Wonder in gaming is not just the feeling of encountering an unfamiliar world, a dangerous creature, or an impossible choice. It is the moment when I have to respond to that world and become the architect of the decision that follows. In a tabletop role-playing game, I might choose to become a hero, a coward, a murderer, or something more complicated, and those choices can carry an overwhelming emotional weight because I helped make them. I am not simply watching a character act; I must live with what my character has done and decide what happens next. My research will expand on this idea by considering how agency, wonder, choice, and emotional investment shape our engagement with games and with media more broadly.