Defining Role-Playing Games as Language-Games

Arjoranta's paper, "Defining Role-Playing Games as Language-Games," argues that role-playing games resist a single, final definition and that the search for one may be misguided. Drawing on Wittgenstein's concept of language-games and family resemblance, the author contends that RPGs are better understood as a family of overlapping, context-dependent practices than as a category with fixed essential attributes. The central thesis is that the most useful way to characterize RPGs is through shared narrative power and the social, interactive co-creation of a game world, rather than through checklists of features such as a game master, characters, or a rulebook.

The paper engages critically with Hitchens and Drachen's influential six-part definition, faulting it for being too broad, since it would include some first-person shooters, and for assuming a strict binary between players and game masters, which collaborative and indie examples such as #kotikatu and The Mountain Witch complicate. Examining digital games, the author finds that the boundary between digital RPGs and other genres is similarly blurry. Digital RPGs differ from tabletop and live-action forms in visual cues, play-space limits, and emotional expression, yet several defining qualities are shared with action and adventure titles, meaning no definition will escape limit cases.

The paper also treats definition itself as a normative and power-laden act, since choosing criteria determines what is included and excluded. Its proposed working definition frames RPGs as interactive, social "ergodic" texts in which shared narrative power is central, drawing on Aarseth's modes of interaction. In this view, the explorative mode is a minimum requirement and the true text is the narrative co-created during play, not the rulebook. The scope spans pen-and-paper, live-action, Nordic larp, and digital traditions.