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

As a former editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Role-Playing and soon also one of the former editors-in-chief of 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. Professional wargaming: A flawed but useful tool by John Curry (2020) reviews past military war games and brings forth the ways in which while they have had severe flaws and thus put into question many arguments on their predictive ability, they can also still function in efficient ways.

Kristoffer S. Fjællingsdal and Christian A. Klöckner (2020), in Green across the board: Board games as tools for dialogue and simplified environmental communication, use game nights and focus group interviews with 17 players to display the possibilities of environmental board gaming. Karlie A. Krause et al. (2020) address one of the most debated topics in video gaming – game violence and its effects on players. Their Exploring the effects of violent video games on healthcare trainees, based on a survey with 81 students, argues that playing such games may in fact lower personal distress scores in certain professions.

Paola Andrea Ortiz-Rendón et al.’s (2020) A study of cognitive results in marketing and finance students likewise analyses game effects on students. Building upon sessions of 281 Colombian marketing and finance students with a marketing audit game, the authors were able to observe significant improvement in the knowledge of some student demographics, while results with some others remained inconclusive and thus call for further testing. Alexandra Sierra Rativa et al. (2020) in The Influence of game character appearance on empathy and immersion: Virtual non-robotic versus robotic animals compare player reactions to virtual animals of different types. They observe, with 100 participants, that body appearance and facial expressiveness were an important influence on players’ experiences. Conscientiousness in game-based learning, by Liu Yi et al. (2020), uses player surveys with 60 students at a Chinese technical university, and finds that conscientiousness, particularly perfectionism, is related to game acceptance and learning from the games.

In one way or another, all of these games and simulations deal with taking of roles – in business, war, or environmental work – or take up the issues of how the roles of non-human non-player characters may affect the experiences of players.