Preparing a Tabletop Role-Playing Game Experiment: Methodological Notes for Studying the Immersion of Tabletop Role-Playing Game Participants

• Authors: Hlavacska András
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The study aims to contribute to the research that seeks a better understanding of the language of tabletop role-playing games through the analysis of video recordings of game sessions. In the autumn of 2021, the Tabletop Role-playing Game Research Group at the Department of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Debrecen performed an experiment, the aim of which was to analyse the communication of roleplaying participants through video recordings. During the experiment, the research team recorded 38 hours and 47 minutes of video footage of the games played by participants with no previous role-playing experience; a text transcript was made of the recordings, in which different types of utterances were marked with colour codes. In this study, we present the preparation and execution of the experiment, paying special attention to preliminary proposals for similar experiments in the future. The experiment served as a basis of a subsequent quantitative and qualitative analysis, the purpose of which was to make the role-play participants’ immersion the subject of a closer examination. It is important to emphasise that this study does not discuss the results of the analysis due to the partial processing of the video recordings. However, it scrutinises the methodological possibility of examining the immersive experience of role-players through their communication.

Keywords

EN

ergodic media text; focus group discussions; immersion; language; speech type categories; tabletop role-playing game; team psychological safety; video recording

• Publisher: Univerzita sv. Cyrila a Metoda (Trnava)
• Journal: Acta Ludologica
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 7
• Issue: Special Issue
• Pages: 84-97
• Physical description: Media and Communication, Game studies, Theory of digital games
• Document type: Article

Contributors

author

Hlavacska András

• University of Debrecen, Faculty of Humanities