My doctoral dissertation, Systemic Perspectives on Information in Physically Performed Role-play was published online today, without two of the articles. Those are still copyrighted by Sage, and will be added to the pdf next August, when the embargo period ends. The defence is at the University of Tampere, Finland, at noon, on October 18th ( Read more... )

Markus Montola's doctoral dissertation, On the Edge of the Magic Cirle: Understanding Role-playing and Pervasive Games, which I reviewed some time ago here is now online. Here's the link to that completely free piece of essential role-playing research. Go read.

After a long wait, Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-Playing, edited by Evan Torner and William J. White, is finally in my hands. I co-authored one chapter in it, due to which I won't be posting a review on Amazon, just here. McFarland, as a publisher, isn't always exactly as academic as it claims to be, but in the case of ( Read more... )

Three new master's theses (or the equivalent) on the market, all freely available through the right channels (and it's possible to buy Hook's in print, too).

1) Nathan Hook: Identities at Play. Available hereNathan presents some really nice points on in-play identities, in a rather abrupt manner. Some typos disrupt the flow, but all in all, good ( Read more... )

Some months ago, I spotted the CFP for a Blackwell book, "Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy, to be edited by Christopher Robichaud. I, like a dozen colleagues, sent in an article proposal. Then, nothing happened. Not even a confirmation of proposal reception. Through indirect means, I eventually found out that the editor had apparently decided to ( Read more... )

Through a hint, I came across a recent Canadian master's thesis on religion in Demon: the Fallen. Given my history and own research, it naturally interested me. You can find it here. Trenton Streck-Havill bases a lot of his ideas on Cover's book on tabletop rpg (which as you may know I don't think of as a very high-quality piece of research), and ( Read more... )

By request, I ran Frederik Berg Østergaard's jeepform "Fat Man Down" to quite a mixed group. For those who don't know it, it's about people being mean to an overweight man - a social commentary on how people treat others, in the form of a freeform game. One of the harshest games on the market (actually, it's downloadable for free, here. Being mean ( Read more... )

Last on my list of delayed reviews comes the Solmukohta 2012 book (with varying covers), States of Play edited by Juhana Pettersson. After the Danes presented three books last year, a change of style was needed, and Juhana provided just that. The book reads like a cross-over between game documentation and game journalism, in a good sense. The key ( Read more... )

The documentation tradition amongst Nordic larpers has reached the point where people are starting to demand a focus on design rather than just documenting others' works (see Talk Larp...), I know. Some documentary works, however, nevertheless not only merit their existence but also justify loads of promotion. The Book of Kapo, edited by Claus ( Read more... )

The short book, Playing the learning game: A practical introduction to educational roleplaying, edited by Martin E. Andresen, is a layman-friendly guide to the basics of edu-larping, in a very hands-on manner. Born out of the Larpwriter Challenge project, it gives example scenarios, a few experience reports and some practical ideas for people ( Read more... )