Analog Role-Playing Game Studies: A Brazilian Overview

This paper offers a mixed-methods overview of analog role-playing games in Brazil, combining bibliographic research with autoethnographic document analysis. Its central argument is that these games, both tabletop RPGs (TRPGs) and live-action role-playing (larp), constitute a neglected area of game studies, partly because their analog nature and role-playing elements strain conventional definitions of games, and partly because Brazilian scholarship is published largely in Portuguese, remains isolated from international dialogue, and is poorly documented. The authors frame their work as an evocative rather than exhaustive survey, tracing the practice from photocopied imports of commercial TRPGs in the 1970s and 1980s through the first national publications, the first international RPG meeting in 1993, the magazine Dragão Brasil in 1994, and the arrival of larp through Vampire.

The paper traces a turbulent publishing and play history. A boom in Vampire larps and boffer larp in the 2000s was followed by a moral panic between 2001 and 2005 that produced age-rating rules, sales bans, and a slowdown in publishing, compounded by internet piracy, the shift to d20 and the Open Game License, and distribution crises. Later developments include independent and PbtA-style design, the avant-garde larp work of Boi Voador and NpLarp, the growth of streaming and free larp repositories, and a distinctive distribution culture that relies on photocopies, newsstands, PDFs, and crowdfunding.

On research output, the authors find that education dominates the Brazilian academic literature, accounting for 36 of 92 CAPES theses and dissertations in the Education/Teaching area. Lattes data indicate substantial scholarly interest, with roughly 906 to 1,865 researchers mentioning RPGs on their resumes, of whom around 910 hold doctorates. Yet the paper identifies fragmentation as the field's principal weakness: researchers frequently fail to engage with peers, repeat basic explanations of the subject, and rarely connect TRPG with larp or with international scholarship. Partial remedies include the Facebook group "Estudos sobre RPG," the journal Dados, the REVEL/REBEL initiatives, and an aggregator blog. The authors conclude that the field needs stronger documentation of actual play practice and greater consensus and cross-field dialogue to mature.