Ethnographic article on gamers

[roguerouge]

Read it here: Underwood

The Abstract: "Tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) are a folkloric form for creating and reaffirming community bonds and performing identity. Gaming is used to communicate and perform cultural capital and identity through fictional narratives, functioning as a form of community building and/or personal expression. With quotations from ethnographic research over the course of 2 years, including interviews with several groups of gamers and participant observation, I examine the ways that players create and affirm social bonds. I return to Michel De Certeau's idea of textual poaching, as adapted by Henry Jenkins, to contrast with it a new concept of genre farming. As both platform for and object of genre farming, RPGs allow players to display cultural competence, create and reaffirm social ties, and seek entertainment in a collaborative fashion."

Games played: Exalted

What do you think of the paper?

 

[Wycen]

I didn't read it, but in scrolling down to see how long it was I noted the word/name Buttercup. I wonder if that's our ENWorld Buttercup.

 

[mach1.9pants]

Nah...

 

[S'mon]

Hmm. Going just by the abstract - while I think there is an element of truth, how does that relate to multicultural gamer groups? Especially with games mixing European & east-Asian gamers, the two large demographics, I've seen some friction in terms of cultural expectations - nothing clear-cut, though. I also had an Indian ethnic-Sikh (but Christian by conversion) player comment to me that all the villains in LoTR were non-white, and he didn't like that. I think he generally enjoyed the Western cultural norms in our games, but always played 'outsiders' (mostly elves in humanocentric settings). My current 3.5 D&D game is knowingly based on southern Europe at the time of the Islamic conquests, with the PCs as the Franks-analogues, but it's more a thought-exercise than a work of group bonding, I don't expect my mostly deracinated and multicultural players to identify out-of-game with the protagonists' situation.