https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqt2Jr9v-K4
Join Jukka Särkijärvi and Evan Torner in discussing the latest in scholarship on tabletop RPGs from the past few years. From Gary Alan Fine's 1983 study Shared Fantasy to Williams, Hendricks, and Winkler's 2006 edited volume Gaming as Culture, the first wave of RPG scholarship attempted to describe this unique artform and medium in terms of the people who played it. The second wave (2008-2018) of scholarship saw formal institutionalization of RPG aesthetics in the work of Cover (2010), Bowman (2010), Montola and Stenros (2008, 2010), and in journals such as the International Journal of Role-Playing, Analog Game Studies, and the Role-Playing Game Studies book (Zagal and Deterding 2018). Särkijärvi and Torner are here to tackle the *third* wave: a number of RPG monographs released in the past 2 years with any number of foci: • Usva (Anastasia) Seregina's Performing Fantasy and Reality in Contemporary Culture (2018) • Mika Loponen's The Semiospheres of Prejudice in the Fantastic Arts (2019) • Nick Mizer's Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds (2019) • Curtis D. Carbonell's Dread Trident: Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Modern Fantastic (2019) • Björn-Ole Kamm's Role-Playing Games of Japan (2020) • William J. White's Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012: Designs and Discussions (2020) • Jon Peterson's Elusive Shift (2020) • Michal Mochocki's Role-play as a Heritage Practice: Historical Larp, Tabletop RPG and Reenactment (2021) • Stephanie Hedge and Jennifer Grouling's Roleplaying in the Digital Age (2021) • Shelly Jones' Watch Us Roll (2021) Särkijärvi and Torner have read these books and will discuss them in brief, both to give an executive summary of their contents while also situating that work in a larger conversation about RPGs.