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[Commlist] CfP: Monsters, Magic, Mediality – The Tabletop Role-Playing Game as a Link between Analog and Digital Game Studies

Tue Dec 12 08:51:48 GMT 2023






CfP: Monsters, Magic, Mediality – The Tabletop Role-Playing Game as a Link between Analog and Digital Game Studies

At first glance, the tabletop role-playing game seems like an analog medium par excellence – even if pen and paper represent the mediality and materiality of tabletop role-playing games only incompletely, they are nevertheless clear symbols of the analog.

A group of usually three to six players who sit around a table together, with their character sheets and a few dice in front of them, at the head the game master behind a cardboard cutout called a “game master's screen”, in the middle of the table a battle map  with miniatures, which mark the positions of the characters in the room, weighed down by some books – this is how we usually imagine a typical role-playing group (see, for example, the television series Stranger Things). This type of archetypical gaming group was dealt a hard blow by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, because contact restrictions and voluntary self-isolation made it impossible or at least inadvisable for role-playing groups to come together. After a brief slump in gaming activity, tabletop role-playing as a hobby (like so many other areas of life) shifted to the virtual world, although digitisation had already begun beforehand – platforms such as Roll20 (2012) or Foundry VTT (2020) were already available in 2020. This development did not end when the lockdowns subsided: New platforms continue to emerge (e.g. Alchemy (2023)) and new media conventions are established.

In its simplest form, tabletop role-playing over the internet uses voice chat or video meeting software to replace usual face-to-face communication, while retaining physical components such as character sheets and dice. The required game components can also be substituted digitally as desired. So-called virtual tabletops (VTTs) provide a completely virtual gaming environment that offers everything you need to play at the table. VTTs also offer functions that no longer have an equivalent in analog games – but do have them in digital (role-playing) games. These include audiovisual elements such as animated battle maps, background music or sound effects, but above all convenience features which, for example, automate dice tests and thus partially delegate the responsibility for maintaining the game system to the computer. By transferring face-to-face communication at the gaming table to remote communication, but above all through the aforementioned automation, the mediality of the “classic” tabletop role-playing game is, on the one hand, approaching the mediality of the digital game, and on the other hand, genuinely digital formats are also emerging by explicitly taking up the digital communication situation and make it a game principle (e.g. Alice is Missing (2020)).

Another parallel can be observed in the area of secondary reception: Watching someone play obviously has a certain appeal not only in the digital game sector – Let's Play videos, which are sometimes called Actual Play videos in this context, are also flourishing in the tabletop role-playing game scene (e.g. Critical Role), also in a similar function. On the one hand, they serve as entertainment for recipients, but on the other hand, they also help them to get to know unfamiliar games and improve their own acting skills through observational learning. They superimpose or extend the communication situation of role-playing, which we would like to characterise as “mediatised imagination”, to a further level, whereby feedback effects arise between the different levels.

The process of remediation between tabletop role-playing games and digital games has been reversed: The mediality of the tabletop role-playing game takes on the peculiarities of the digital game; at the same time, however, it also borders on the mediality of the board game, which now also regularly exceeds its analogous nature – consider, for example, supporting apps or programs such as the Tabletop Simulator (2015), which is used in both board games and tabletop role-playing games as a virtual gaming environment. We see complex board games with a strong narrative component, such as Eldritch Horror (2013) or Tainted Grail (2019), as closely related. These games allow acting in character and even promote it to a certain extent, but they also work without this acting component. But even minimalist games like the “campfire” game The Werewolves of Millers Hollow (2001), which uses very few game materials, can exhibit role-playing in their performance. Also worth mentioning are legacy games (e.g. Pandemic Legacy (2016)), in which the results of one game affect future playthroughs similar to a role-playing game campaign.

With this call for papers we would therefore like to invite you to take the term “game studies” seriously in its literal sense, to understand it inclusively and thus to understand all these different manifestations of “role-playing” as a single media continuum. It does not seem useful to us to determine what is “still” a tabletop role-playing game and what is “already” a board game or digital game, but rather to accept the fluid transitions as such. We accordingly welcome perspectives from both digital game studies and board game studies, but also from all other disciplines that can contribute to the specific mediality or medialities of the tabletop role-playing game and its current developments in more detail and to examine them from different angles.

Possible topics could be:
* the influence of the digitalisation of tabletop role-playing games (medium, narrative forms, gaming practices) * the influence of Actual Play videos (medium, role-playing discourse, gaming practices)
* the influence of audio/video recording on role-playing practices
* exploration of methodological approaches (hybridity, performativity/performance, mediality) * characteristics of semi-oral storytelling (e.g. proto-, para- and transtextuality) * effects of different medialities on communication practices in a game context * media convergence of digital role-playing games and tabletop role-playing games
* historical development of media conventions
* reception studies
* case studies on titles that are particularly interesting in terms of their mediality
* examination and comparison of different Actual Play formats

Information about the process:

Contributions should not exceed a maximum of 35,000 characters (including spaces).

If you are interested, please send an abstract with a maximum of 300 words by 5 February 2024 to (paidia /at/ germanistik.uni-muenchen.de) <mailto:(paidia /at/ germanistik.uni-muenchen.de)>. Please use a common file format (.doc, .docx, .odt). Since all proposals are reviewed using a blind peer review process, please ensure that your text document is anonymized.

You will probably receive feedback from us by the end of February 2024.

The deadline for submission of complete contributions is 30 June 2024.

The issue is scheduled to be published in the fourth quarter of 2024 in PAIDIA – Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung (paidia.de <http://paidia.de>).

While PAIDIA is mostly in German (and the official CfP at https://paidia.de/cfp-monsters-magic-mediality/ <https://paidia.de/cfp-monsters-magic-mediality/> is available only in German), we welcome contributions in English as well.

There are no article processing charges or any other kind of payment from the authors required for publication.

The editors of the special edition will be happy to answer any questions you may have. Please also send emails to (paidia /at/ germanistik.uni-muenchen.de) <mailto:(paidia /at/ germanistik.uni-muenchen.de)>.

Franziska Ascher (University of Innsbruck) – (franziska.ascher /at/ uibk.ac.at) <mailto:(franziska.ascher /at/ uibk.ac.at)> Lukas Daniel Klausner (FH St. Pölten) – (lukas.daniel.klausner /at/ fhstp.ac.at) <mailto:(lukas.daniel.klausner /at/ fhstp.ac.at)> Tobias Unterhuber (University of Innsbruck) – (tobias.unterhuber /at/ uibk.ac.at) <mailto:(tobias.unterhuber /at/ uibk.ac.at)>
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