What an interesting find on my digra news roll; The International Journal of Role-Playing! With some really interesting articles in it as well. Including a great one about the stereotypes about role-playing gamers. From an MMORPG perspective though the most interesting article was one by Dr. Christopher Paul & Jason Pittman, both from University of Alabama who looked at Role-Play In Table-top Gaming and World of Warcraft. Their results are both unsurprising and confirmatory to my own experiences
“The imagination and open-endedness of table-top roleplay is a dynamic that is often stifled in WoW.”
“online gaming comes with the notable cost of losing complete control of the game world, which increases ease of play, but dramatically decreases feelings of ownership about game play.”
In other words, not only do you lose the pure creative spirit of many role-playing sessions (which cannot be replicated by anything requiring pre-programming), because of that, your sense of shared ownership of the game is also decreased.
Anyway, it’s certainly an interesting little journal that I’ll be keeping an eye on (and have added to my “required reading” feed) Alas, unless I have some great undergraduate students next year who want to do role-playing game orientated research (and produced a good paper) I can’t foresee myself trying to publish in an unranked journal of this kind (who knows I could be lucky…) But it’s certainly a readable publication (abet an unranked one) and looking at the editorial board, which includes Richard Bartle and a host of other worthies, it’s actually surprisingly strong from a peer reviewed editorial perspective.
If only it was ranked at least 2 star in the ABS ranking lists of dooooom… <sigh>. Honestly, whilst I understand the need to have some kind of system for understanding research output quality, I do feel newer and more off-the-wall journals get crushed (particularly in the UK) by this “league table” approach to REF-able submissions only.
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