A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis

"A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis" proposes an interpretive framework for studying role-playing games, treating them as sets of texts that participants and observers read and understand. Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics and bridging traditions such as the Forge and Nordic larp communities, the work argues that role-playing research has suffered from a lack of shared methodology, discourse corruption, and subjective bias, including the distorting effects of theory canonization and normative paradigms. Its central remedy is an adapted hermeneutic system grounded in the Hermeneutical Circle and the explicit deconstruction of researchers' pre-understandings, which the author presents as a translation tool for moving theory across different role-playing cultures.

The core conceptual argument holds that role-playing differs from ordinary games in lacking winning conditions and intentional competitive structure. As a result, it operates primarily through imaginatio, the reasonably compatible imagining of shared fictions, rather than intellectio, and occupies a liminoid rather than fully liminal space. Because each session unfolds across several simultaneous layers, the author proposes a four-layer model comprising the real world, meta-dialogue among players, the diegetic or in-fiction layer, and the fictional world inhabited by characters. Each layer can be temporarily "frozen" and read as text, with the caveat that such reduction has limits and should not exclude compatible analytic approaches.

The work's conclusions are primarily methodological rather than empirical. It contains no quantitative data; its contribution rests on conceptual argument and typological modeling. The author argues that players' subjective interpretations of shared game texts form a feedback cycle, and that interpretive understanding can be tested by applying Gadamer's principle to check whether analytic tools hold across contexts. Hermeneutic analysis, the author concludes, is best understood as a complementary method that reveals how players experience games, not as a standalone scientific approach.