may · contain · language

I promised I'd make an English translation of the abstract of my role-playing paper - and here it is! It was quite fun, at not entirely as difficult as I'd imagined. I still don't really have a translation of "kombinerad c- och d-uppsats i Svenska språket", so I'll just have to try and explain... It's an undergraduate level paper... a pretty big one. It counts as two papers, actually. It started as my obligatory "special study" on a level one step down I won't even bother to search for an English/American equivalent of. The project grew a bit larger than was originally intended, and I eventually got the offer to also let it count as my "special study" on the so called "D" or - officially - "advanced" level (and the advanced thing is actually an internationally recognized designation, thanks to the Bologna process) - what would sort of be my exam paper if I decided to get either a Master's degree or the old Swedish "magisterexamen" (which is sort of the same but just almost). (I haven't actually got either yet, though I qualify for the "magisterexamen" and I'll apply for it when I get around to it... it'd probably be a good thing if that was sooner rather than later.) "Svenska språket" is the study field, "Swedish language". Now, the abstract:
 

Role-Playing Games as Language Games – A study of language use in a tabletop role-playing game

 

Abstract

 

In tabletop role-playing games, or simply role-playing games, one creates a fictive world using language and acts in this world. The participants take on the role of one character each and describe what these characters do. One participant, the gamemaster, instead describes what the characters see and what happens around them, and plays the roles of persons they meet. The purpose of this paper is to describe how role-playing games work from a language perspective, focusing on how the participants collaboratively build a fictive world and how they later act in this world, and also on how the role-players avoid misunderstandings involving the domains of reality and fiction and how these are ”held apart” in the conversation. This purpose is achieved by an analysis of a recording of a role-playing session.

A chronological description of the session, with special focus on the first part, shows how the session can be divided into different phases, and how the gamemaster moves ”the plot” forward in a way reminiscent of a book or a film. This chronological description also gives a clear image of how the gamemaster and the players build the world of the game together and act in it through the characters. As in other kinds of oral fiction-creating, utterances which describe the fictive world also create it. However, for additions brought in to the fiction to become a part of the shared image of the game world, they need to be accepted by the other partcipants, and the conversation can be described as a negotiation about what description of the game world is to be regarded as ”true”. Decisive for this acceptance is that an utterance follows the formal and informal rules of the role-playing game. The game's most basic structure is that of the gamemaster's descriptions of environments and events being followed by the players' descriptions of what their characters do. Often, however, various kinds of questions and the answers to these can be as important a part of the game. Jokes and out-of-character (and seemingly non-game related) discussions can also have an impact on the construction of the game world. An interesting part of the game is dialogues, where players and gamemaster directly take on the roles of the game-world characters and say what they say, rather than primarily describing their actions.

Reality and fiction is primarily kept apart (and misunderstandings avoided) by letting only one domain,at a time, the game world or our reality, function as the ground for the conversation (to be where the conversation ”is” in some sense). With a term borrowed from Sven Strömqvist's Make-Believe through Words (1984) it becomes the background domain. Ambiguous expressions are by default assumed to refer to something in the background domain. This, for example, is true of personal pronouns as jag (I) and du (you, sing.), since these are used to refer to the player characters. Switching between the domains can be done in many ways and for different reasons, often analogous to shifting between various topics in a ”normal” conversation. Questions such as which is the current background domain, or whether a particular expression has its referent outside the background domain, can often be decided by assessing what is meaningful and reasonable, or with the help of the strong intralinguistic cohesion maintained throughout the game. Various kinds of more or less explicit ”domain markers” also play a part, as do the typical structures found in many of the ”game utterances”. Combined with an avoidance of ”returning to reality” once the game world has been taken as background domain, these factors make misunderstandings rare. When they do arise, repair strategies are available, and the problems are quickly solved.

In the discussion at the end of the paper, a comparison with other kinds of ”fiction creation”, like writing and reading of novels and storytelling, is made. One important point is the social element present also in these contexts. Communication of all kinds, indeed, can often be said to create a parallell world and, as in the role-playing game, a negotiation on how this world is to be described is needed. This also is discussed at the end of the paper, along with questions about how much in the language and language use of role-playing games that can be said to be ”unique”, and also how much is predictable given the basic premises of role-playing games.
 

Keywords: role-playing games, conversation analysis, pragmatics
 
Link to the full paper (in Swedish).
 
Now just one thing remains... Nothing above is really news to those of my readers who know Swedish (which I still suspect is all my readers), at least not if they checked in two weeks ago. Thinking of this I've promised a bonus of some sort. Let's see... I can't imagine that Bernardo Borgeson minds that I link to this nice short film.

Ok, that wraps it up I guess. See you in a week!