International Journal of Role-Playing
Open-access peer-reviewed journal on role-playing games, larp and related play forms, now hosted by Uppsala University.
Documents
Playing House in a World of Night: Discursive Trajectories of Masculinity in a Tabletop Role-Playing Game
William J. White's study examines how male players enact and negotiate masculine identities during a session of Ganakagok, a small-press indie tabletop role-playing game he designed, set on a starlit island of ice at the approach of dawn.
- The study analyses a 2009 play session of Ganakagok, a small-press indie tabletop role-playing game designed by the author, William J. White, and argues that RPGs can function as aesthetic and expressive performance rather than merely as play.
- Male players oriented their characters toward three normative ideal types of masculinity: the traditional or respectable, the rough or virile, and the sensitive or liberated.
- Players modulated these masculine positions through free indirect style, irony, and self-parody, and narratives of masculinity were renegotiated across the course of a session.
Stereotypes and Individual Differences in Role-Playing Games
Research on role-playing gamers challenges the familiar image of players as young, socially awkward males prone to antisocial behavior.
- Role-playing gamers are not the stereotypical young, socially awkward males: Entertainment Software Association figures from 2007 and 2009 put the share of women at roughly 40 percent and the average player age at about 35.
- Role-playing games were a substantial market in 2008, accounting for 5.4 percent of US video game sales and 19.6 percent of computer game sales, though the genre still lacks an agreed formal definition.
- Personality research on role-playing gamers is mixed and modest: several studies report higher openness to experience and some describe more introversion, while neuroticism and psychoticism generally show no meaningful difference from control groups.
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.
- Arjoranta argues role-playing games resist a single final definition and are better understood as a family of overlapping, context-dependent practices in the Wittgensteinian sense of family resemblance.
- The paper locates the essence of RPGs in shared narrative power and the social, interactive co-creation of a game world, rather than in checklists of features such as a game master, characters, or a rulebook.
- The author faults Hitchens and Drachen's six-part definition as too broad, since it would include some first-person shooters, and as assuming a strict player/game-master binary that collaborative and indie examples like #kotikatu and The Mountain Witch complicate.
A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis
"A Hermeneutical Approach to Role-Playing Analysis" proposes an interpretive framework for studying role-playing games, treating them as sets of texts that participants and observers read and understand.
- The paper proposes an interpretive, hermeneutical framework (drawing on Paul Ricoeur and bridging the Forge and Nordic larp communities) to address role-playing research's lack of shared methodology, discourse corruption, and subjective bias.
- Its central remedy is an adapted hermeneutic system built on the Hermeneutical Circle and explicit deconstruction of researchers' pre-understandings, presented as a translation tool for moving theory across different role-playing cultures.
- Role-playing lacks winning conditions and intentional competitive structure, so it operates mainly through imaginatio (shared imagining of fictions) rather than intellectio, and occupies a liminoid rather than fully liminal space.
Seeking Fulfillment: Comparing Role-Play in Table-Top Gaming and World of Warcraft
Jason Pittman and Christopher Paul's study argues that role-play has largely migrated from tabletop settings into online environments, and that game scholarship has underexamined this shift.
- The core argument is that the key difference between tabletop role-play and World of Warcraft is who controls the fictional world: a human Game Master adapts rules and outcomes dynamically in tabletop play, while a computer program enforces fixed game logic in WoW.
- Fulfillment was split almost evenly between tabletop and WoW play, with WoW preferred for convenience and visual immersion and tabletop valued for creative freedom and face-to-face social interaction.
- Location and age were the strongest correlates of preference: rural respondents exclusively favored WoW, urban respondents leaned toward tabletop or had no preference, and younger players preferred WoW more strongly than late-college-age players.
Roles and Worlds in the Hybrid RPG Game of Oblivion
Erik Champion's analysis argues that single-player role-playing games such as The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion can convey a sense of social and cultural worlds, but that the notion of "world" in commercial games remains poorly defined.
- The report argues that environmental, social, and cultural dimensions of virtual worlds are routinely conflated in research and should be distinguished as separate analytical categories.
- Oblivion is assessed as a strong environmental simulation (wildlife behaviour, weather, seasonal flora, hazards, independently running ecological processes) and a weak social world, with NPCs following hard-coded behaviours and gossip delivered as monologue.
- Oblivion is judged a comparatively weak cultural world because its role-playing functions mainly as game-balance attributes rather than meaningful cultural practices, and its curatorial and interpretive dimensions are underdeveloped.
The Many Faces of Role-Playing Games
"The Many Faces of Role-Playing Games" addresses a longstanding problem in game studies: role-playing games (RPGs) have spanned three decades and many forms, from pen-and-paper tabletop play to live-action events, single-player digital titles, massively multiplayer online worlds, freeform games, and pervasive play, yet no…
- Role-playing games have spanned three decades across formats including pen-and-paper tabletop, live-action, single-player digital, massively multiplayer online, freeform, and pervasive play, yet lack a widely accepted definition distinguishing them from other game types.
- The authors argue existing definitions are either normative, too narrow, or so broad that first-person shooters and platformers would qualify, and aim to derive a more discriminating definition from features common across seven representative RPG formats.
- RPGs are distinguished by a combination of features rather than a single mechanic: an imaginary game world, player-controlled characters with developable traits, a game master role or functional equivalent, wide but abstractly handled interaction, and emergent narrative.
The Invisible Rules of Role-Playing: The Social Framework of Role-Playing Process
Markus Montola's paper argues that role-playing is best understood as a social process resting on three implicit "invisible rules": the imaginary game world, the power structure governing who shapes that world, and the personified player character.
- Role-playing is framed as a social process resting on three implicit "invisible rules": the imaginary game world, the power structure governing who shapes that world, and the personified player character, rather than as a fixed artifact.
- The shared game world is produced through an interpretation loop in which players interpret input, adjust their subjective diegesis, and communicate those adjustments, so the world is never fixed by a rulebook alone.
- Players redefine rule-given elements through cultural convention and negotiation, and the fictional world need only be coherent rather than realistic or complete.