Advanced Adventures the focus of scholarly paper...

[jgbrowning]

from my blog, Sorcery & Super Science!

Excerpt: "There are so few scholarly treatments of table-top gaming, that I thought I should let everyone know that I'm majorly stoked that our Advanced Adventures line is the focus of a Master's degree paper about art, nostalgia, and the Old-School Renaissance. Awesome!

The essay was written by Darren Allan Crouse, and supervised by Dr. Greg Gillespie, in the Department of Popular Culture at Brock University in Ontario. In the study, Crouse discusses the construction of nostalgia in the art of our Advanced Adventures line. He challenges traditional academic understandings of nostalgia as simple escapism. Crouse argues that, while the Advanced Adventures pay homage to the history of RPGs, the series is an expression of an emerging old school gaming subculture who use nostalgia in new and creative ways - while charting new directions for their hobby.

This is obviously a dreadfully terse simplification of the paper. Read the entire paper for yourself at Your Games Now."

I am very pleased and proud about this.

joe b.

 

[nedjer]

Totally applaud this as interesting first steps. Regrettably, the current position is that you can't publish to peer review in this area.

I wouldn't dare to publish on tabletop RPGs - be like sticking my academic reputation in a Stuka and snapping the handle on the air-brakes halfway down.

 

[jgbrowning]

Totally applaud this as interesting first steps. Regrettably, the current position is that you can't publish to peer review in this area.

I wouldn't dare to publish on tabletop RPGs - be like sticking my academic reputation in a Stuka and snapping the handle on the air-brakes halfway down.

Heh. His discipline is in Popular Culture so I'd hope that, if not now, sometime in the future it won't seem any different than studies of any other type of popular culture.

joe b.

 

[nedjer]

Heh. His discipline is in Popular Culture so I'd hope that, if not now, sometime in the future it won't seem any different than studies of any other type of popular culture.

joe b.

Wish it were as simple as that. Take this conference. There's all manner of games there, and sexy disciplines including applied psychology and technology; but pretty much everything is electronic.

If the skills and content in electronic games - based on a few simplistic algorithms - are valued, it should seem obvious to look for the value in similar games systems run by phenomenally sophisticated devices like brains. Especially when brains have their own electricity supply and are accessible to everyone on a pretty regular basis.

Trouble is you can't turn much of a profit on a boardgame or a tabletop RPG - compared to a 3DS Nintendogs set up. And nobody wants to get off the merry-go-round of 'improvement' and 'innovation'.

Fortunately, there's more than one approach to skinning this particular cat; but it has to be done not simply in the face of mere ambivalence, but against a range of vested interests.