The Many Faces of Roleplaying: How ‘RPG’ Became Everything and Nothing

[Autumnal]

But so does 'video game' which can mean anything from Pac Man to Call of Duty to Baldur's Gate 3. Or 'book' which can mean anything from the Bible to Dan Brown to Tolkien to A Brief History of Time.

And “book” can also mean something copied by hand by a scribe, a Folio Society tome, a zine, and ebook, an audiobook….

I honestly wonder sometimes how gamers ever manage to communicate.

Objection! Presumes facts not in evidence! Often we don’t!

Wittgenstein argued in his Philosophical Investigations that there is no single feature shared universally by all games, but rather that all games share what might be called 'resemblances'. For much of the long history of language, 'game' has enjoyed and participated in various degrees of vagueness.

"Role-playing" also participates in vagueness; it seems to follow naturally from the fact that two nebulous terms, "role-playing" and "game", taken together, are not going to admit of convenient or simple understanding - this admission does not of course preclude "RPG" from being used however the term is perceived to best serve marketing, or for that matter, any other interest(s).

Always happy to see Wittgenstein come up in these things. The point strikes me as something that should be self-evident.