[Roleplaying] Peer Review of Articles

[William J. White]

Hey everyone --
I think there are two things at stake. One is the formation of a self-aware
scholarly community with role-playing as its object. Now, that community will
be of necessity "interdisciplinary," since declaring the object of your
research interest in no way commits you to a method of investigation. And it
will be in this case polyglot and internationally distributed, and so anything
that keeps its members apprised of each other's doings is a good thing.
Summaries that help the potential reader understand a writer's disciplinary
perspective, for instance, could be a handy thing, serving to guide the
dedication of resources to have *this* particular article, essay, or thesis
translated or at least referenced.
But the other thing that's at stake is a sense of what *other* audiences are
available for role-playing research. I'm thinking of the sort of thing that
Sean Hendricks has done, where he frames his studies of role-playing as
discourse analysis so that he can publish in linguistics journals; he has a
2003 piece in the _Texas Linguistics Forum_ called "Negotiation of Expertise in
Fantasy Role-Playing"; it's similar to the piece in _Gaming as Culture_, but is
framed as contributing to the scholarly discourse on conversational
interaction. Here's the abstract:
"Scholars in the field of conversational interaction propose that the
distinction between expert and novice in an interaction is not a dichotomous
relationship that is maintained throughout the interaction. Instead, the
distribution of expertise among participants in an interaction can be seen as
fluid and dynamic, where participants are seen as 'more-knowing' or
'less-knowing' at different moments in the interaction. This article examines
the distribution of expertise in the discourse of an RPG."
It basically says, "Here, look, conversational interaction scholars! This thing
you're interested in, you can see it happening here in this place that I'm
interested in!" It's what Bruno Latour calls "enrollment."
In my view, studying role-playing within the academy currently requires a kind
of guerilla scholarship.
-- Bill>



William J. White, Ph.D. (wjw11 at psu.edu)
Associate Professor, Communication Arts & Sciences
Penn State Altoona 
(814) 949-5689


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