thread: 2012-04-30 : Updates!
On 2012-05-02, Evan wrote:
It wasn't a thing while I was in school either; we had an "RPG Theory" study group in college, which meant there were 4 of us who sat around and read Greg Costikyan, Jonathan Tweet and Ron Edwards and carried out the forum debates face-to-face.
But now game studies exists, and there are people publishing authoritative works like this:
http://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Dragons-Digital-Denizens-Approaches/dp/1441195181
I'm reading things and seeing where they're totally right and where they're totally not.
So to answer "Does Vincent want to get in on it somehow?": I'm not sure! Emily's article in Playground Worlds on basic Forge theory is bar none THE most cited article from the recent Knutepunkt books, so I think there's an appetite for it in the field. But you've got your own way of explaining things to a wide audience that's NOT academia, which is probably better in the long run. All that made clear, I am still totally citing you in my upcoming article on RPG combat, so watch out! ;-)
A potentially-sound academic theory of RPGs is, like, more or less what Markus Montola, Jaakko Stenros and J. Tuomas Harviainen are all about. So I'd read their work, and then introduce the following caveats:
1. Given that TRPGs are a game and an artform, we should analyze them as such.
2. This means they emerge from specific social and historical contexts, embody certain aesthetics, and offer certain opportunities for affective and narrative engagement to an audience.
3. Patterns and discontinuities in both game design and gameplay both prove critical in identifying the salient points of engagement between game and player. Social and textual framing strategies guide players toward certain types of play, while the players then acquiesce to, resist, gainfully misunderstand and/or alter the system to suit their situation.
4. Such research is important given the time, money and labor investment of a significant, international body of well-educated creative workers, who then often apply understandings learned in TRPGs and larps to other contexts (teaching, collaborative work, military operations, etc.)
NB: My RPG combat project, for example, looks at the combat sub-systems of about 30 different RPGs and comes to the conclusion that they have mostly similar underlying presumptions about time, probability and the body. I examine the text of the TRPG, but I also treat myself as a highly subjective player of these systems, and argue from a position of experience as well.
