This presentation was delivered on October 20, 2022 at the Transformative Play Initiative Seminar 2022: Role-playing, Culture, and Heritage.
Description:
We elaborate a grounded-theoretic (Glaser & Strauss 1967) approach to discovering a framework for understanding the way that tabletop role-playing gamers (“TRPGers”) make sense of the Socio-Cultural Systemic (Archer 1996) spaces they articulate during their sessions of play, through their discussions online, and in the language of their artifacts. We seek to understand the play worlds they inhabit, seeing them as similar to the “art worlds” described by Becker (2008) to describe the milieux of similar creative communities. We believe that, through their participation in gaming groups and larger TRPG scenes, TRPGers manifest (heterogeneous, sociotechnical) actor-networks (Callon 2001; Michael 2016). We draw upon semi-structured interviews with key informants selected via a theoretical sampling process (Bloor & Wood 2006) to discover how members of TRPG scenes view themselves within time and space and how that mediates identity issues within those play worlds. We have noticed that as they discuss the contours of their play worlds, our informants help us understand how those play worlds understand and react to other play worlds. From the one-page TRPGs of itch.io to the massive volumes of the Old School Renaissance, our informants describe the (often permeable and overlapping) boundaries between TRPG scenes, as well as their membership in local and recurring playgroups.
Bios:
William J. White is Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State Altoona, where he teaches courses in speech, communication, and game studies. He is the author of Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001-2012: Designs & Discussions, and serves as co-editor of the International Journal of Role-Playing. He was a contributor to Role-Playing Game Studies: A Transmedia Handbook, and his work has appeared in Analog Game Studies and the Japanese Journal of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies as well as the IJRP.
Dr. Nicolas LaLone is an Assistant Professor of Information Systems and Quantitative Analysis at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. As a researcher of the socio-technical, Dr. LaLone researches games as training agents. Through his unique ability to translate complex computational concepts, he helps emergency managers deepen their ability to save lives through play. Dr. LaLone is currently working on a certification in emergency management and is also a co-chair of the FEMA Higher Education Program’s Special Interest Group on Science and Technology Integration. He is also a member of The International Association of Emergency Management’s (IAEM) Region 7 team as an Outreach coordinator while holding the same post in IAEM’s Emerging Technology Committee. All of Dr. LaLone’s work focuses on expanding emergency management’s technical capacity to better align with consumer technologies and games serve as a way to do so. When not writing, researching, or learning, Dr. LaLone spends time with his partner, an Emergency Room Veterinarian, his two cats, and a giant board game collection.
Nicholas Mizer is a lecturer in the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is interested in questions of how collaborative imagination shapes the human experience of worlds, especially how imagining other worlds together can serve as a way to re-enchant and re-make our own world. One direction this works take him is through developing critically gameful pedagogy; that is courses-as-games that re-imagine the classroom community as a playfully democratic space. His book, Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds, explores shared imagined worlds through a phenomenological ethnography of tabletop role-playing games.
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This seminar is hosted by the Transformative Play Initiative in the Games & Society Lab at the Department of Game Design, Uppsala University Campus Gotland. This seminar is made possible by financial support from the Sustainable Heritage Research Forum (SuHRF). The Transformative Play Initiative explores the use of analog role-playing games as vehicles for lasting personal and social change.
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Graphic Design by Liliia Chorna. Music by Elias Faltin. Video edited by Rezmo (Mohammad Mohammad Rezaie).