Multimodal Framework for Enhancing RPG Playfulness through Avatar Acting Affordances

This paper proposes a third category of play for role-playing games alongside narrative (screenplay) and competitive (gameplay) play: performative roleplay, the player's expressive acting through an avatar. Drawing on performing arts traditions such as preexpressive theatre, Boal's spect-actor concept, and improvised live action role play, the author argues that avatar affordances for customizing form, abilities, dialogue, and actions should be studied as a distinct dimension of player experience. The central contribution is the SGRplay framework (Screenplay, Gameplay, Roleplay), which positions it against established models such as MDA, text/staging/performance frameworks, and transmedia world-building approaches.

The framework was operationalized as a thirty-question survey, with ten questions per play type, rated and normalized into a three-part Playfulness Factor. The author reports using this instrument in undergraduate and graduate game studies and design courses at Florida Atlantic University from 2019 to 2021. A worked example applies the survey to Vader Immortal, yielding an SGR total of 16 out of a possible 30 and a normalized profile of roughly 0.37 screenplay, 0.28 gameplay, and 0.35 roleplay, which plots near the center of a Venn diagram representing balanced, or "playful," experiences. Illustrative examples from titles such as Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Ghost of Tsushima, The Walking Dead, and Mass Effect show how improvised avatar performance can diverge from scripted or competitive requirements.

The scope of the work is conceptual and pedagogical rather than empirically broad: the evidence consists of one game's scored profile and classroom use over a three-year period, with no reported sample size, inter-rater reliability, or validation of the survey's measurement properties. The author identifies planned next steps, including refining and automating the questionnaire, crowdsourcing data online, and maintaining a public visualization of how RPGs cluster across the multimodal play space. The framework is presented as applicable to any RPG, with room-scale VR experiences proposed as an especially suitable testbed.