Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations

2 minute read

A bunch of role-playing game scholars wrote a handbook for role-playing game studies. It’s published by Routledge, but as an academic handbook, it’s fairly expensive.

For Free RPG Day, the editors suggested that the authors would share their authors copies of the chapters they wrote – according to the publishing agreement, authors can share their own versions of the texts, but only the their own chapters and only the versions that precede the professional layout. So if you are interested in what we wrote and don’t care about how pretty it looks, here’s most of the chapters as author’s copies.

Most of them are downloadable from the links, but unfortunately some of the authors used services that put some kind of walls in front of the downloads. If you have trouble downloading the chapters, I can only suggest that you ask them for a copy.

The links were originally shared by the editors on Facebook and Twitter, but this compilation was collected by Jukka Särkijärvi and he graciously gave me permission to reshare it.

Book Contents

1 The Many Faces of Role-Playing Game Studies

Sebastian Deterding and José P. Zagal

PART I: DEFINITIONS

2 Definitions of “Role-Playing Games”

José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding

PART II: FORMS

3 Precursors

Jon Peterson

4 Tabletop Role-Playing Games

William J. White, Jonne Arjoranta, Michael Hitchens, Jon Peterson, Evan Torner, and Jonathan Walton

5 Live-Action Role-Playing Games

J. Tuomas Harviainen, Rafael Bienia, Simon Brind, Michael Hitchens, Yaraslau I. Kot, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, David W. Simkins, Jaakko Stenros, and Ian Sturrock

6 Single-Player Computer Role-Playing Games

Douglas Schules, Jon Peterson, and Martin Picard

7 Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games

Mark Chen, Riley Leary, Jon Peterson, and David W. Simkins

8 Online Freeform Role-Playing Games

Jessica Hammer

9 The Impact of Role-playing Games on Culture

Esther MacCallum-Stewart, Jaakko Stenros, and Staffan Björk