Role-playing games have traversed a daunting path through history, evocative of the fantastical and harrowing stories depicted in the pages of their aging rules books. From the tales of great bounty at the genres inception, to the tribulations and perilous reporting by news media that nearly paralyzed an industry; we seek to pay homage to one of the oldest forms of play and narrative synergy. In our review of role-playing games, we will address the origins of role play, several influential archetypes, and their impact on the development of the forerunner to all modern RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons. Afterwards, we chart role-playing’s course through the tumultuous 1980s and its unholy marriage with broadcast slander. Subsequently, our quest will lead us through RPGs digital transformation and allocation into several complementary offspring of the gaming behemoth. In the end we will heed the traveler’s warnings of addiction, obsession and identity lost, and share a tale or two of fans annual conventions.

ABSTRACT Starting from a complex debate in a focus-group with four teenagers (aged between thirteen and fifteen), on why and how they enjoy or dislike the movies based on role-playing games (RPG), this paper tries to raise some questions about the differences and relationship between the condition of the spectator and that of the computer-gamer. Its central focus is on the circular road of self-presence representations, from linear narrative to level-stratified experiencing of the computer game, and back. After a short summary of the current tendencies in interpreting the mutations from spectatorship to game-controlling representations, the paper will try to sketch a hypothesis-theory concerning the displacement of the moral and aesthetical values, as classical foundation of audience motivations in cultural consumption, towards the “experience” value, seen as a chance to identify, build and consume different and alternative constructs of the Subject/Self. The paper-essay constitutes a small part from The Everyday Drama Research and Creation Program, a complex interdisciplinary research project conducted over the last five years by the author and by C.C. Buricea-Mlinarcic PhD, both from the Theatre and Television Faculty of the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania. The actual theme/field of this program – “The X-Men & Women Generation”- focuses on the young people’s representations of self based on their cultural consumption. The Everyday Drama Research and Creation Program was awarded a two year grant from the Romanian Ministry of Culture (2007-2008) and produces empirical and theoretical studies, video-productions, written journalism, plays and theatre productions.

As games, particularly virtual worlds, become increasingly popular and as they begin to approximate large scale social systems in size and nature, they have also become spaces where play and learning have merged in fundamental ways. More important is the idea that the kind of learning that happens in the spaces of these massively multiplayer online games is fundamentally different than what we have come to consider as standard pedagogical practice. The distinction the authors make is that traditional paradigms of instruction have addressed learning as “learning about,” while these new forms of learning deal with knowl¬edge through the dynamic of “learning to be.” It is the authors’ contention that the experi¬ences offered within virtual worlds provide a fundamentally different way of thinking about learning that may provide some keys to the development of future pedagogical practice. Keywords: learning; World of Warcraft; conceptual blending; pedagogy; imagination

Like many massively-multiplayer role-playing games, Final Fantasy XI is a persistent world with a heroic fantasy setting. This paper discusses fictive player identities, and describes specific visual and ludological tropes of race and nationality, and the techniques by which the game engineers the complicity of the player in the problematics it represents. Some of these are coherent with themes and structures developed in earlier (single-player) iterations of the Final Fantasy franchise; others are original to the multiplayer title. This treatment of the game-as-text is offered as an exercise in critical close-play, and as an example of a necessarily hybrid approach to the study of game genres.

Landscapes evolve. Forests turn into cities, rivers change course and even mountains slowly erode. Perhaps it stands to reason then, that the landscapes of the fantastic evolve as well. In recent times, the evolution of the imaginary worlds found in speculative works of fiction appears to favour diversity and inclusiveness, keeping in touch with wider societal trends. This transition in fantastic chronotopes is extensively chronicled in the genre of Tabletop Role-Playing Games, or TRPGs for short. The present paper aims to examine the evolution of fantastical landscapes within the very influential TRPG genre through the combined framework of narrative and cultural theories. The settings of the most successful TRPGs, Dungeons and Dragons and World of Darkness, will serve as examples. The results will provide valuable insights into how and why the worlds of speculative fiction change over time, often in response to wider societal change.

International Journal of Role-Playing Issue 2: Full Issue Table of Contents Editorial -- Markus MontolaThe International Journal of Role-Playing is a response to a growing need for a place where the varied and wonderful fields of role-playing research and development, covering academia, the industry and the arts, can exchange knowledge and research, form networks and communicate. Jonne Arjoranta -- Defining Role-Playing Games as Language-Games This paper looks at one of the latest attempts to define role-playing games, and shows some potential problems with it. As an answer to these problems another definition is proposed, consisting of a game world, participants, shared narrative power and interaction. William J. White -- Playing House in a World of Night: Discursive Trajectories of Masculinity in a Tabletop Role-Playing Game Using excerpts from the transcript of a tabletop role-playing game session, this study examines how male players enact ideas about masculinity. Myriel Balzer ...

My essay is premised on the observation that while canonical theories of fantastic genre fiction (fantasy, science fiction, horror) proposed by critics such as Tzetvan Todorov and Darko Suvin center on epistemic aporia, most recent examples in popular culture reject fundamental difference, alterity, and the unknown in favor of postmodern play within a limited set of generic conventions. I argue that today, tabletop roleplaying game systems (RPGs) provide a superior hermeneutic for understanding how the fantasy genre operates in mass culture than does traditional genre theory. After providing a brief overview of the historical development of fantasy gaming out of wargaming and mass market fantasy literature in the 1970s, I show how RPGs formalized fantasy's generic tropes into a modular system that enabled participants to produce fictions across and between genres. Through a reading of Poul Anderson's use of the " multiverse " trope in his novel Three Hearts and Three Lions, the notion that reality consists of an infinite number of interconnected worlds, I argue RPGs completed a reorientation toward the fantastic begun by mass-market fantasy literature. Epistemological concerns, distinctions between fantastic genres, and individual authorship are de-emphasized in favor of established formal conventions, a shift which encourages a participatory model of consumption and ease of transmission across diverse media. I then use the HBO adaptation of George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones novels as an example of how this paradigmatic shift in the fantastic has moved beyond the niche markets of fantasy fiction and roleplaying games to manifest itself today as a hegemonic cultural norm.