International Journal of Role-Playing: Issue 1

The inaugural issue of the International Journal of Role-Playing positions itself as a hybrid knowledge network linking academia, industry, the arts, and player communities, and its central aim is to establish a more rigorous scholarly foundation for the study of role-playing games. Its contributions converge on a shared concern: despite the diversity of forms, from pen-and-paper and live-action play to massively multiplayer online games, there is no widely accepted definition of what qualifies as a role-playing game, and this absence hinders research. The issue responds by reviewing existing definitions, which are found to be either too vague or too broad, and by surveying seven recognized forms as the basis for a more precise working definition built on participants, game world, player-controlled characters, character development, interaction, and emergent narrative.

Several contributions develop these theoretical foundations in depth. Markus Montola argues that role-playing is a social process governed by an imaginary game world, a distributed power structure, and personified characters, and that its objectives emerge from diegetic and exogenous frames rather than from endogenous rules. Erik Champion examines Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion as a case study, concluding that the game excels at environmental presence but is weaker in social and cultural presence, and proposing design remedies such as dynamic NPC responses and persistent player-influenced artefacts. A companion study of World of Warcraft combines autoethnography and a small survey of 27 respondents, finding that location correlates most strongly with preference for online versus tabletop play, and that online role-play offers convenience at the cost of player ownership over the game world. J. Tuomas Harviainen's hermeneutic framework treats role-playing situations as texts for interpretation, arguing that fragmented methodologies across research schools can be bridged through Ricoeur-influenced analysis.

Taken together, the issue covers primarily English-language scholarship and a mix of tabletop, digital, and larp practice, with a time frame anchored around the late 2000s. Its findings are largely theoretical and interpretive rather than quantitative, and the authors repeatedly acknowledge that their proposed definitions and frameworks remain provisional. The issue closes by inviting peer-reviewed submissions for its second installment, reflecting its aim to build a continuing, cross-disciplinary discourse.