thread: 2012-04-30 : Updates!
On 2012-05-02, Evan wrote:
That's just it, Ben: academia has learned too little from game designers.
What has happened thus far in RPG studies looks like this:
* Gary Alan Fine did a full sociological study of gaming groups and came up with some great findings ... for 1983.
* For about the next decades, academics studying RPGs pretty much apes what Fine did, only in either a hobbyist or a snooty fashion, neither of which came close to looking at TRPGs as a medium just like TV or the backs of cereal boxes.
* Daniel Mackay attempts a TRPGs as "art" argument in 2001, but then gets mired (IMHO) in a classic cultural studies paradigm filled with Foucault, Butler and all the theory showing how TRPGs are hegemonic, etc.
* The Gaming as Culture book (2004) begins to examine the material underpinnings of the RPG industry, but by that point the Forgites and John H. Kim already had a better handle on the thing than those scholars.
* Post-2006, game studies is a palpable, exponentially multiplying field, the Nordic folks' research on RPGs as a medium takes off and several American scholars (Sarah Bowman, Jennifer Cover, Michelle Nephew) publish work that explains how TRPGs work to a lay audience.
* 2012: We begin to look at scholarship and realize all at once we've been spending so much attention to the identity, performance, culture and purely semantic debates about TRPGs that we neglected the Big Picture the designers have been talking about for over a decade: how do TRPG systems and sub-systems actually work to produce affect and narrative, i.e. How they function as a medium, frame our attention and focus us on a certain form of subjectivity.
Mid-level theory from film studies is the school of David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson. They argued for a film aesthetics that begins with the film itself rather than the theoretical arguments we want the film to answer or the discourse surrounding the film. But since game rules are a huge factor in structuring actual play, study of game design strategies themselves is pivotal in uncovering hidden and not-so-hidden logics of the TRPG as medium.
I want to be able to analyze a TRPG, let alone AP thereof, like I would a film.
