[Roleplaying] Peer review articles for live roleplaying

[Jonathan Walton]

I have to say that this problem exists in all small or emerging
fields.  When I was researching Christian sectarianism in China, the
main problem is that very few articles talk about it and most are
reports posted on Evangelical websites about encounters in the
(illegal) missionary field in China. But you have to make do with the
best materials you can find, wherever they happen to be.  To ignore or
refuse to quote valuable potentially sources because they don't reach
some arbitrarily defined standards... are we not ultimately reduced to
not talking about a subject at all?  This is the way fields of inquiry
are established, no? Starting with amateur and mediocre scholarship,
with the occasional standout or very professional article, and
building up from there until there is a more substantial body of work
published in peer-reviewed journals that people have heard of.
Starting things like the IJRP is great, but it's going to be a while
before there is sufficient competition for publishing in the IJRP as
well, yeah?  We ourselves have to provide rigorous standards for
roleplaying studies right now, because no one else is going to do it
for us, but I don't think that means we have to hold our very small,
gradually emerging field to the same standards as everyone else. I
don't think that's possible, at this stage.

Jonathan Walton
MA Candidate, China Studies
University of Washington
Seattle