The World Ends With You: Reading as Participation The last decades of research in the education field have shifted focus from the cognitive activities of autonomous individuals to participants’ activities in situated learning practices. Yet, emphasis in the Bologna Process and in the on-going reforms of swedish education is on the learning subject as a free, rational consumer of neatly defined competencies that the labour market requires. The article argues that a stronger participants’ perspective could help resist a neoliberal trend in education. Instead of thinking of participation as something that individuals do, the notion could be built upon radical constructivist systems theory. Learning and participation should be put in terms of construction and reconstruction of identity within evolving social systems. With the example of a piece of recent ergodic literature, the Nintendo DS game The World Ends With You, it is demonstrated how the common educational activity of reading can be described as a process of simultaneous construction of reader identity and meaning within a specific practice. The article argues that such a perspective counters the core notions in the neoliberal understanding of education, notably the autonomous individual and learning as an active acquisition of neatly defined knowledge that is »out there«. A new participants’ perspective could also have immediate consequences for the choice of method and theme in every day practice in education.

The Case of the Mutant Science Fiction Detective Story: Literariness and Popular Culture in Education This article states that the main schools of pedagogy of literature are in their respective ways designed to seize upon the benefits of literariness, which is a feature that some texts are still considered to have and others are considered to lack. With the example of Henrik Örnebring’s novel Blodsmak: Ett fall för Sennja Maler (»Taste of Blood: A Case for Sennja Maler«), it is demonstrated how a book that by all reader accounts lacks literariness, can be given it by altering the reader’s expectations. It is suggested that a turn in perspectives might be beneficial: the pedagogy of literature should be considered a creative activity, in the sense that it produces texts with desirable qualities rather than discovers »existent« qualities. This would open up a range of possibilities, for instance by making genre fiction more interesting to the education system. It is contended that this turn in perspectives could be strongly supported by modern systems theory, which would also bring wider implications for comparative literature.

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Review/Recension

IJRP 12: Full Issue Table of Contents William J. White, Evan Torner, and Sarah Lynne Bowman,“Editorial: The Social Epistemology of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies” Reflections on the interdisciplinary and heterogeneous nature of role-playing games studies, as evident in the five uniquely distinct articles in Issue 12. Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama and Luiz Falcão, “Analog Role-Playing Game Studies: A Brazilian Overview” An overview of the history of role-playing games and their respective game communities in Brazil, as well as the development of role-playing game study scholarship, including research on RPGs in education. Marissa Baker, “An Analysis of the Literature Surrounding the Intersection of Role-Playing Games, Race, and Identity” A review and examination of a body of multidisciplinary scholarship on representation and race in fantasy RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons and World of Warcraft. Pascal Martinolli, “A Scholarly Character Sheet to Frame Learning Activities and Improve Engagement” An evaluation of the use of role-playing game inspired character sheets in a graduate seminar on library instruction to assess the participants’ knowledge, present the curriculum, and measure the their progress. Hanne Grasmo and Jaakko Stenros, “Nordic Erotic Larp: Designing for Sexual Playfulness” Mapping, organizing, and understanding the phenomena of erotic larp design through a systemic examination of 25 design abstracts of Nordic art larps from the last decade. Christian Mehrstam, “Recomposing Lovecraft: Genre Emulation asAutopoiesis in the First Edition of Call of Cthulhu” An examination of how genre is emulated in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu (1981), analyzing the game’s potential to answer social needs during the Reagan era.