A Mission Statement

I've been playing tabletop role-playing games for 40 years now. That is absolutely insane to me that the one hobby that has always been present in my life is middle-aged now. Since my formal education is in psychology, I can look at my relationship with the hobby through Erik Erikson's development theory. Middle age, Erikson posited, is the struggle between generativity and stagnation. Are we contributing to society and family or just spinning our wheels? As much as that is a struggle in the real world, it's also something I have been considering concerning role-playing games. How am I contributing to my fellow players (family) and the greater role-playing game community (society)?

I've been in academia for about five years now, working in disability support at a tiny school in New Jersey, and I enjoy it more than the other worlds I've worked in. I thought, "How can I combine the hobby I love the most--gaming--with the work environment I've enjoyed the most?" In the Fall of 2023, I taught a freshman seminar focused on role-playing games and their intersection with culture, identity, and learning. It was neither a total success nor a total failure, but it was a learning experience. I believe there is much to learn about role-playing games and that the benefits of this learning will go far beyond the table. 

As I explore my academic future, this blog will serve as the process's journal. I've long felt that tabletop role-playing game theory is spread widely but quite isolated. My hope is to start connecting these isolated theories with one another and provide a starting point for people to do their own exploration of role-playing games.

My first post will cover why theorizing about role-playing games is so damn difficult.

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Does studying tabletop role-playing games have any impact on playing tabletop role-playing games? That is really the million-dollar question. What is the value of studying games if there is no application for those studies? Part of the difficulty in applying anything to the play  of role-playing games is how hard it is to study it.  John Kim's discussion of narrative in TRPGs  illustrates the complex interactions compared to more traditional media: There are far more moving parts in TRPGs when it comes understanding gameplay. The play of the game exists in the discourse between the game master and the players, not in the rules of the game or the design of the adventure. All of these things inform  gameplay but none of them are  gameplay. Given the exponential complexity accompanying adding person after person to the shared play, we wonder if we will ever fully understand that shared experience. If we cannot understand the shared gaming experience, does that mean...
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Tabletop role-playing games are a complex endeavor. This has nothing to do with the complexity of the rules but is a result of how they work and how we can study that working. The first difficulty is even identifying what a role-playing game is. A good place to start is Routledge's Role-playing Game Studies  (I'll talk about this book in more detail in a later post). The editors, Jose Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, discuss how the definition of a game is elusive, role-playing games even more so. Part of this is because role-playing games exist across a wide array of forms--tabletop, computer games, MMOs, live-action, and so on. In the "What is a role-playing game?" section of many games, you'll see everything from Mike Pondsmith's definition from Teenagers from Outer Space  (1987): "Role-playing is 'Let's pretend," with rules," to Hitchens and Drachen's (2009) definition that is six paragraphs each defining a different aspect of what...
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