it's not 1910... in the interanet age you are telling me that no one else is studying this?
Have
you ever heard of anyone else taking RPG theory particularly seriously?
The closest thing we get is the already-referenced MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) framework, which is generic to gaming overall, not specific to roleplaying games. It's just not a field that has attracted a lot of academic scholarship in a public-facing way. There are studies of games in other fields, e.g. a friend of mine is a doctorate researcher in social psychology specifically focused on gaming (mostly video games, but pretty I'm sure she would consider live-person RPGs within her field...perhaps I should ask). But specifically academic analysis of
what RPGs are, of
how RPGs work, and
why RPGs are made? Few have specifically sought out to make their contributions readily accessible, and none (to the best of my knowledge) have done so nearly as heavily as Edwards.
In much the same way that
many folks were
interested in neurological and mental health issues in Freud's day, but how many of
them have you heard of? Perhaps John P. Gray, a psychologist who died before Freud even got started? I admit, my knowledge of psychology is limited to a couple undergrad courses because I find the field interesting, but people basically
don't talk about pre-Freud psychology or psychiatry. There absolutely were theorists
other than Freud, their work
informed Freud. But he's such a big deal, both because he advocated his position so widely and influenced so many things in such a dramatic way, there's really nowhere else to begin.
Sort of like how Socrates is generally seen as having "founded" western philosophy...even though there are
several pre-Socratic philosophers. We just know almost nothing about them, other than what later philosophers wrote about them and their works. Hell,
Pythagoras was one of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and we attribute to him a major mathematical theorem! Yet it is Socrates where things get started.
For better and for worse, there are few widely-available, readily-cited, RPG-specific theorists out there, and Ron Edwards stands head and shoulders above the rest for how easy his work is to cite (by design; he put it on the internet for a reason) and how heavily discussed his work is (again, by design).