International Journal of Role-Playing

Playing with Leadership: A Multiple Case Study of Leadership Development Larps

Playing with Leadership: A Multiple Case Study of Abstract: Learning and development solutions often contain some form of role-playing activity.

"It Might Have a Little to Do with Wish Fulfillment": The Life-Giving Force of Queer Performance in TTRPG Spaces

"It Might Have a Little to Do with Wish Fulfillment": The Life-Giving Force of Queer Performance in TTRPG Spaces Abstract: In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant asserts that "fantasy [can serve] as a life-sustaining defense against the attritions of ordinary violent history," which is a statement that holds true for many queer…

Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-out from Role-playing Games Can Affect a Player's Sense of Self

Bleed and Identity: A Conceptual Model of Bleed and How Bleed-out from Role-playing Games Can Affect a Abstract: The RPG concept bleed describes the spillover of physical states, mental states, physicality, values, opinions, and other similar concepts from player to character and vice versa.

Gaming Capital in Contemporary Role-playing Game Platforms

Gaming Capital in Contemporary Role-playing Game Platforms Abstract: Gaming capital: a fifteen-year-old theory detailing how one's gaming knowledge can be conceptualized into something tangible.

Bridging Historical and Present-Day Queer Community Through Embodied Role-playing

This article examines Just a Little Lovin' (JaLL), a Nordic live action role-playing game set in New York during the HIV/AIDS crisis, and asks what participants can learn from embodying queer history.

• The central argument is that the affirmative frame of the larp Just a Little Lovin' (JaLL), supported by metareflection and transformational containers, lets players explore marginalized aspects of their identity through emotional, emancipatory, and ego bleed.
• Sustained personal growth requires integration work that extends well beyond the game itself, and the author's own integration of a queer identity was slow and depended on finding lasting queer communities rather than on the larp alone.
• The evidence is qualitative and reflective, drawing on the author's 2016 play and 2022 organizing experience, participant observations, and off-game conversations; no survey sample or systematic data collection is reported.

Experiencing China's Intangible Cultural Heritage in Role-Playing Games: Comparative Studies Between MMORPGs and Larps

This study examines how China's intangible cultural heritage (ICH) is represented in role-playing games, comparing two massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), A Dream of Jianghu and Justice Online, with a live-action role-playing game (larp) known as Jubensha, exemplified by The Secret of the Gauze Lantern.

• China has 42 elements on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list and 1,557 nationally recognized ICH items, many of which are declining due to a shortage of young practitioners.
• The Chinese government invested 7.76 billion yuan in intangible cultural heritage safeguarding over the past decade.
• The study argues that MMORPGs and Jubensha (live-action role-playing) can both help safeguard Chinese heritage, but in distinct ways: MMORPGs showcase national-level heritage from many regions, while Jubensha focuses on the customs of small local communities.

Larp as a Potential Space for Non-Formal Queer Cultural Heritage

Larp, or live action role-playing, is argued here to hold real potential as a non-formal space for documenting, disseminating, and educating audiences about queer history, culture, and heritage.

• The report argues that larp (live action role-playing) can serve as a non-formal space for documenting and educating audiences about queer history, positioned as analogous to drag venues and social spaces that have long transmitted queer heritage outside institutional archives.
• The central case study is the larp Just a Little Lovin' (2011), which depicts the 1980s HIV/AIDS crisis and the queer social worlds surrounding it.
• Player testimony reportedly describes simulated queer venues and historically grounded framing activities as deepening participants' understanding of 1980s queer community, its subcultures, and the impact of the AIDS epidemic.

Playing With the Fictitious "I": Early Forms of Educational Role-Playing in Hungary, 1938-1978

Eszter Leveleki's Bánk, a Hungarian children's summer camp that operated from 1938 to 1978 under successive repressive regimes, is the subject of this study, which argues that the camp developed forms of play remarkably close to modern educational live-action role-play (edu-larp).

• The study argues that Eszter Leveleki's Bánk, a Hungarian children's summer camp operating from 1938 to 1978 under successive repressive regimes, developed forms of play remarkably close to modern educational live-action role-play (edu-larp).
• Its practices, including ritualized games, an invented language called "traditage," and the fictional kingdom of Pipecland, are presented as prefiguring the larp movement, with descendants evolving into full edu-larps by the late 1980s.
• The camp's "Grand Play" was an elaborate, competitive, culturally embedded form of play that deliberately blurred the boundary between in-game and out-of-game worlds, with participants adopting "Fictitious I" alter egos as citizens of Bánk.

Playing with Wonders: Objects, Role-Playing Games, and the Cultural Legacy of Bispo do Rosário for the City of Rio de Janeiro

This paper examines how physical objects can stimulate imagination and new modes of thinking, using the art of Arthur Bispo do Rosário as a foundation for micro role-playing games set in Rio de Janeiro.

• The paper proposes the "Storytelling Cloak," a double-sided, reconfigurable garment inspired by Arthur Bispo do Rosário's Presentation Cloak, to which removable elements are attached and reused or recombined by successive participants.
• The authors frame physical "Living Objects" as tools that carry narrative and provoke wonder beyond rational thought, drawing on theories of the marvelous (Sarah Tindal Kareem), the "poetics of delirium" (João Frayze-Pereira), and the Romantic concept of witz as a sparking fragment.
• Small-scale experiments with volunteers, some familiar and some unfamiliar with Bispo's work and some experienced or inexperienced in storytelling, produced autobiographical, fictional, and historical narratives about Rio de Janeiro followed by debriefs and feedback.

Towards the Post-Modern Art Week: Anthropophagic Reflexes in the Brazilian Larp Scenes

This essay by Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama applies Oswald de Andrade's concept of anthropophagy, the cultural metaphor of critically digesting the Other, to larp (live-action role-playing) in Brazil.

• Larp is argued to be inherently anthropophagic: character construction digests media and biographical references, and the bleed between player and character reinforces this exchange.
• The essay frames its argument through Oswald de Andrade's anthropophagy, the Brazilian Modern Art Week of 1922, and its legacy across literature, theater, cinema, music, and education.
• Larp is presented as essentially dialogic, a counterpoint to the discursive imbalance of mass media and authoritarian communication, drawing on Vilém Flusser's communicology and his four communicational structures (circle, amphitheater, pyramid, bundle).

The People: A Serious Role-playing Game Designed to Address a Humanitarian Crisis

The People is a case study of a serious role-playing board game developed by Weronika Szatkowska with researchers and NGOs, including Badacze i Badaczki na Granicy, Wolno Nam, and Grupa Granica, in response to the 2021 migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border.

• The People is a serious role-playing board game by Weronika Szatkowska, developed with researchers and NGOs in response to the 2021 migration crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, and places players as residents of the 183-village State of Emergency Zone, some sympathetic to refugees and others seeking to block their passage.
• The game's distinct contribution is framing the refugee problem through the affected borderland community rather than solely the perspective of asylum seekers, unlike earlier titles such as Bury Me My Love and The Migrant Trail.
• The design draws on serious-games research arguing that role-play can foster empathy, experiential learning, and identity exploration, with the debriefing phase treated as critical for processing emotions.

Playing Political Science: Leveraging Game Design in the Post-Secondary Classroom

Mikael Hellström's paper examines how game design principles can be applied to structure a post-secondary political science course, drawing on Lee Sheldon's "Multiplayer Classroom" model, which treats a course as a persistent computer game with experience points, quests, and player roles derived from Richard Bartle's taxonomy…

• The paper applies Lee Sheldon's 'Multiplayer Classroom' model, treating a course as a persistent game with experience points, quests, and player roles drawn from Richard Bartle's player-type taxonomy.
• The design was implemented in Winter 2015 at the University of Calgary across a 400-level comparative politics seminar (about 75–80 students) and an evening public administration course (about 20 students).
• Students could resubmit quests without limit, and experience points determined final grades, with 2,000 XP serving as the threshold for an A; some students reached it within weeks and pursued research beyond the assigned readings.