Role-Playing Games: The State of Knowledge

This panel document, presented at the DiGRA 2009 conference, offers a state-of-the-art overview of role-playing games (RPGs) research across tabletop, live-action, digital, and alternate reality formats. Its central aim is to survey the current understanding of RPGs as a genre that spans many forms and disciplines, and to identify both open problems and future directions. The authors, drawn from institutions in Denmark, the Netherlands, Australia, Finland, and Sweden, frame RPGs as a particularly revealing case for game studies because they foreground the interplay between player, character, game world, and collaboratively constructed narrative.

The document highlights several substantive themes. It examines the role of the Game Master as a drama manager and story facilitator, noting that the cognitive processes and detailed mechanics of GM functionality remain poorly understood despite decades of hobbyist discussion and some proposed models of authorial control. It explores how RPG design principles might inform serious games and digital storytelling systems, and considers the limited role of mechanics in supporting role-play within commercial MMORPGs, where meta-game rules tend to dominate. The authors also argue that RPGs challenge conventional definitions of games, with some researchers regarding them as a "limit case" that tests the boundaries of what counts as a game and what is possible within one.

Methodologically, the work is a synthesis of existing literature and practitioner accounts, including play reports, ethnographies, design research, and experimental prototypes such as the "Pataphysic Institute" MMORPG. It identifies documentation as a distinctive challenge: non-digital RPGs are ephemeral, co-created by every participant, and rarely replayable in identical form, which complicates both criticism and empirical research. The document concludes that RPG research has matured into an established subfield whose insights extend well beyond the genre itself.