[Roleplaying] Peer Review of Articles

[Lars Konzack]

Hi,

I think we are in a cultural shift towards interactive experiences and the older generation can't relate to that. That's why they insist on peer review articles because that's how they can delay the development of a new cultural elite based in interactive aesthetics and culture. 

Consequently it makes perfect sense to say that studying role-playing within the academy currently requires a kind of guerilla scholarship.

We are developing new grounds that is necessary for the 21st Century. The older generation is still relating to old-fashioned views based on Modernist (Marxist, Freudian, or Darwinian) theories or Postmodern (Post-Marxist, Post-Freudian or Neo-Darwinist) theories. We have to move forward and reinvent the humanities without these misrepresentations of thoughts and ideas.

Lars Konzack


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: William J. White 
  To: roleplaying at digra.org 
  Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 1:49 PM
  Subject: [Roleplaying] Peer Review of Articles


  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





------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Roleplaying mailing list
  Roleplaying at digra.org
  http://mail.digra.org/mailman/listinfo/roleplaying
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.digra.org/pipermail/roleplaying/attachments/20091208/6b56864c/attachment.html