The roundup essay at Alexandrian (the short, 2012 essay) tries to make the term edition- and game-agnostic; I don't think it entirely succeeds. The primary issue is the section What is a Roleplaying Game. That's where we see the usual, "I'm a neutral arbitrator, but if you don't play it my way, you're not really playing an RPG. I mean, sure, you can have your fun, but that's not real fun" maneuver.
I feel like someone else has done academic research on this ...
...{I}t picks up one of a few perennial debates: realism versus playability; task resolution; game design and play advice; gender, ethnicity, and sex; and finally, the subject matter of the post, player and system typologies – what people enjoy about playing RPGs, how different people may have different preferences or styles, and how game design may accommodate that. The post responds dismissively to one of the most influential typologies, the Threefold Model, trying to focus the discussion on what “really” matters – player emotion – while also trying to claim a middle ground: “The thing is, different people’s emotional responses to different gaming techniques differ.”
This move – third – can be found again and again: “Making different kinds of games to support different kinds of play and different kinds of people shouldn’t de-legitimize the kinds of play that already exist” “People can often enjoy many different types of games. And if someone starts playing these ‘wrong’ games, they probably are getting something they missed elsewhere” Each time, a new piece of theory wishes to end fruitless debate and provide a big ecumenical tent of tolerance, yet by contributing a new piece that disagrees with previous ones, it does the opposite: continue the debate. While Henley’s blog post overtly makes light of the self-seriousness of RPG theory, it also tries to make its own theory stick. We see here at work some motives for RPG theorizing we identified: the joy of intellectual argument (and connecting over it); the desire to help design and play ‘better’ (implying particular normative ideas about what ‘good’ means); and the jockeying for social status and recognition within one’s community.
Finally, fourth, we see the almost-eternal return of debates and points made previously (Henley’s appeals to affect theory are far from new), due to the ephemeral nature and fragmented structure of RPG theorizing. As Bourdieu put it: “To account for the infinite diversity of practices{, one has} to reconstruct the networks of interrelated relationship which are present in each”. In this respect, valiant attempts to capture its history can only scratch the surface. Cultural sociology may prove just as helpful. Future research on RPG theorizing will likely reveal just how rhizomatic our processes and means of thought and communication actually are.
Evan Torner (2018). Same as it ever was.