Okay, I have to clear this up a bit: though Frans Mäyrä looks forward to one in Beyond Role and Play foreword, no faculties of role-playing studies exist yet.

But that is not an unpenetrable barrier. There are no MMORPG institutions yet either, and the virtual reality doctors are just popping up from various places. Personally, I'm doing my stuff at cultural studies, and it forces me to consider some things in my work -- like applying also some perspectives from that field. Game studies, computer game studies, performative arts, TV & cinema studies, literature studies, narratology, communication, mathematics, organization, culture... whatever. It all depends on how you are going to study role-playing.

Game researchers had the same issue 10 years ago, where they all studied games from different approaches. They ended up having this ludology movement going, and are quite far in establishing ludology as a separate academic discipline: studying games as games, as opposed to studying games as narratives or whatnot. Of course it has taken them years of work.

I visited Vancouver last summer, and immediately we ended up having informal talks about putting up a special interest group for role-playing studies within the international Digital Games Research Association. When we get that SIG up, it's a step again. The seminar on role-playing we are throwing is a small step, but yet another.

Role-playing research is often smuggled into larger projects. In the project I work for is largely technology-oriented, but one of our case studies deals with larp, since technologically augmented larp is an interesting business prospect and a testing platform for many new technologies. What I'm going to do after the project ends in 2008 is that I'm going to apply a pretty regular PhD grant for the dissertation work.

Tabletop role-playing is not in high boom at the moment, but you can further it if you only think broader. In DiGRA 2005 I presented Designing Goals for Online Role-Players which rises from tabletop understanding of role-playing and (hopefully) is also very applicable there -- even though the focus in the particular paper is MMORPG. Or like my colleague Petri Lankoski does, in his research on characters in digital games, where he still produces things like Character Design Fundamentals for Role-Playing Games.

In order to have role-playing studies, you must give it birth from other disciplines.

Best,

- Markus

Game researchers had the same issue 10 years ago, where they all studied games from different approaches. They ended up having this ludology movement going, and are quite far in establishing ludology as a separate academic discipline: studying games as games, as opposed to studying games as narratives or whatnot. Of course it has taken them years of work.

I have nothing of substance to add except that the information in this thread is great.  Also, a brief suggestion -- if you want an article from a Forgie, like someone who has ideas in threads that you'd like to see developed for your conference, the best thing to do is probably PM them and ask if they'd be interested in writing an article.  I know that isn't the way it's usually done, but the casual atmosphere here makes people go "oh, well, I couldn't possibly submit an academic article" when, of course, they've pretty much already written several first drafts.

Keep up the good work!

yrs--
--Ben

The careers centre at the university where I work is doing a seminar in December and some research on " games and simulations which help enhance employability skills in our students." I'm going to mooch along to it and see if there's anything relevant.

There seem to have been a few  papers on this (mainly relating to web-based RP or groupwork actitivities), such as:

http://www.simplay.net/papers/E-Learning.html

http://ausweb.scu.edu.au/aw01/papers/refereed/ip/paper.html

http://www.ausis.com.au/Papers/suppose.html

It'll be interesting to see what they're doing at any rate. I suspect that a lot of their work on how to organise such RP in a cohesive way mirrors Forge work in some ways.

-Matt

A good friend of ours, Tom Cantine, wrote his MA Thesis based off of role-playing experience several years ago:

The Role of Detection in Rule Enforcement

It's strongly informed and focused on LARP play, not tabletop, but it's a formal acedemic paper on role-playing; specifically a Masters Thesis in Philosophy.

Worth noting for those that do follow and read that it's many years old; Tom has since moved on to get his PhD, work for a while, go back to school, and is currently articling as a lawyer, I believe.

James

A recent MA thesis (in sociology), also about larp but with some perspectives that translate well to tabletop rpgs:
http://fate.laiv.org/pub/gtb_opp.htm

.eirik.

Blankshield wrote:
A good friend of ours, Tom Cantine, wrote his MA Thesis based off of role-playing experience several years ago:

The Role of Detection in Rule Enforcement

Montola wrote:
Okay, I have to clear this up a bit: though Frans Mäyrä looks forward to one in Beyond Role and Play foreword, no faculties of role-playing studies exist yet.

But that is not an unpenetrable barrier. There are no MMORPG institutions yet either, and the virtual reality doctors are just popping up from various places.

pekkok wrote:
I was not in Vancouver myself, but I heard that there was a pandemic of "working on an MMORPG paper, using WoW as a case study" (read: poor junkies explaining away while they shoot up) cases - some were even stealing playtime from the conference :).

Hence, I think it's fairly safe to assume that we get a plethora of MMORPG academics in the near future - the quality of papers might be a different issue; but let's hope for one or two good ones. Personally I'm not worried at all of the presence of digital games in academia, at least in the long run.

As you mention later in your post, roleplaying is often present in academic projects as a part of larger whole (mostly digital games projects) - I'm actually a bit worried about this phenomenon. As solitary instances these are quite ok, but if roleplaying becomes characterized as a co-habitant with other areas such as digital gaming, it may well become academized in a fairly constrained manner - I think this is a real danger, actually. In academic projects the money bringing parts will draw the lines and set the goals - and in this kind of scenario, roleplaying might well end up as the persistent side-issue (roleplaying in MMORPGs, using character forms from roleplaying in digital game design etc.).

My dissertation plan was accepted!

http://users.tkk.fi/~mmontola/rplan2005.html

Now I only need to do the work! :-)

- Markus

Wow, that's excellent news. Looking forward to the results, and being able to call you Dr. Montola. :-)

Also I have to say that this thread has been excellent in terms of showing some things that have happened, and may continue. It might be interesting to note that some of the "Detection" paper influenced my design contributions to Universalis, and how I think about other designs. So they are having a practical impact in addition to the academic interest they generate.

Mike