Roles, Plays, and the Roles We Play While Playing Games

Abstract

Simulation & Gaming, I am very happy to see the ways in which more and more volumes on role-playing studies are now coming out from high-profile publishers. Several of them discuss the ways in which the formalized forms-role-playing games, as opposed role-plays, began, and how their related theories have developed. Jon Peterson's (in press) upcoming The Elusive Shift, due out in December 2020, documents the early years of how the players of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and other early role-playing games started theorizing about their game genre. William J. White's (2020) Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge analyzes the ways in which one of the most influential indie role-playing communities, The Forge, discussed game design and theory, leading to influences far beyond just role-playing game creation. Others works look at role-playing cultures. Björn-Ole Kamm's (2020) Role-Playing Games of Japan is about exactly what the title says: role-playing in Japan and how it sometimes very significantly differs from other countries. Nicholas J. Mizer's (2019) Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds provides a very nice counterpoint for it, describing actual play sessions of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS. And the newest edition in the nearly annual Nordic live-action role-playing convention books, What Do We Do When We Play? (Saitta et al., 2020) contains both research articles on role-playing, as well as numerous methods fro improving design and player skills. We can furthermore see similar topics between the lines in volumes such as Christopher A. Paul's (2019) Free-to-Play: Mobile Video Games, Bias, and Norms. As many luminaries in our field have observed, we also tend to take roles in games that are not role-playing games per se (e.g., Crookall et al., 1987; Klabbers, 2009). In MONOPOLY, we become temporary ultra-capitalists, and in a medical simulation, surgeons. Merijke Coenraad et al.'s (2020) Experiencing cybersecurity one game at a time: A systematic review of cybersecurity digital games introduces readers to cybersecurity games. Using a systematic sample of 181 located games, they show how cybersecurity professionals are depicted in various ways, and how there is still a need for a deeper, more professional depictions as well.