TRPG Elements to Engage Students in Information Literacy Workshops

I had the chance to participate to a librarian conference in Québec (colloque BES-CPI). I presented 6 gamified activities (3 with TRPG elements) to improve the engagement of the university students in the information literacy workshops.

Download the presentation presented in English at McGill U. one week later : https://drive.google.com/open?id=15PpbXwOlVEMiHES6W7xfgH4fRV24LDpR (the original in French http://hdl.handle.net/1866/21087
(CC-BY Pascal Martinolli UdeM)

My librarian flavors : Hospitality + Science + Game
(/RPG + Simulation + Science populatization)
Photo: Lëa-Kim Châteauneuf, CC BY:SA https://t.co/UYezV73qbf

150+ participants came from all Québec province, mostly from higher education (universities, cégeps, engineer & business schools). Exective staff, librarians & technicians. A great opportunity to show how interesting TRPG can be used to design active learning activities (I was cited in the next 3 presentations, so I think I made an impact). The 3 roleplayified activities were :

• A scholarly character sheet ;
• Publish & Perish ;
• Self-driven side-quests.

I will develop these activities in future posts. Thanks to my fellow coworkers at the BLSH for your help and support. Thanks to the participants of the Donjons & Donnees probantes study day where I playtested a part of this presentation.

Exhibition Donjons & Données probantes in the Université de Montréal

From October 17 to 25, 2018, the Library of humanities and social sciences of Université de Montréal is hosting an exhibition named Donjons & Données probantes («Evidence-Based Dungeons») on the academic research and tabletop role-playing games.
Designed by Sébastien Savard and me, this exhibition shows :

• how the scientific studies answered the moral panic of the 80s ?
• how the academic and para-academic researches reattributed the original authorship to the creation of tabletop roleplaying games ?
• how and why the design of D&D evolved through the decades ?
• what designed the Québec and Canadian publishers and authors ?
• how the innovations in game design evolved from 1974 to 2018 ?

Overview

Different editions of D&D (from Dave Arneson basement in 1971 to the 5th ed.)

Scientific peer-reviewed answers to the moral panics of the 80s

do-it-yourself culture in the design of TRPG

Québec authors and publishers

Walkthrough map by Jason Bradley Thompson (@mockman) : OSR, dungeon crawl & humor in The Tomb of Horrors
(a link with a lot of maps)

Nouvelle-France map of the XVIIe by Dyson Logos for the Scenario from Ontario (Ennie award 2018)

Map homemade with pencil and Photoshop, illustrating how TRPG can inspire a strong engagement in self-learning (author: Zulaan)

Hidden level : « On the shoulders of cloud giants » or a Timeline of innovations in TRPG designs from 1974 à 2018

ThesaurusRex: a controlled vocabulary thesaurus for RPGs

Merci Faerandel !

Sébastien Delfino the ludographer invited me to design a controlled vocabulary thesaurus for indexing and retrieving informations in references database about :

• Research on role-playing games;
• RPG game designs;
• RPG techniques.

Browse and comment ThesaurusRex here

From now on, I will use it to index my database on RPG: ZOtRPG. This database will include more and more references on game designs and techniques (before it was more focused on academic research). Related topics are moved to another database : ZOtRPG_B-side (literature, video game, games, gamification, etc.).

 

You can use it for your own information system (blog tags, reference manager, etc.). The rules of a thesaurus are:

1. Only one keyword for all synonyms of the same concept possibles.
   Example: game master = used for GM, dungeon master, DM, arcane keeper, referee, etc.
2. If the keywords are organized hierarchically, it allows the user to navigate in concepts.Example: mechanics > task resolution > action > extended action. If the user starts a research with pacing + action, and if he wants to go further, the thesaurus shows him which keywords to combine with pacing.
3. « By using this keyword to retrieve informations, does the user will be satisfied by this reference? ». If the answer is Yes: you can attribute this keyword to your reference.

Bibliometry 101: role-play in PubMed

I recently read in the awesome Role-Playing Game Studies :

« By 1960, the concept [of role-play] had been introduced in settings ranging from schools (Gillies 1948) to industry (Bavelas 1947) to prisons (Lassner 1950). Many papers would follow. Having been wholly absent from psychology journals before 1948, "role-playing" appeared as a keyword in three Pubmed citations in 1960, rising to a hundred papers per year in 1975 and even more thereafter. » (Bowman & Lieberoth 2018, p. 245)

PubMed is an open access database. Researching the keyword "role-play*" leads to this result. It is possible to export a CSV file, import it in Excel and produce this:

"Role Playing" term was created as a MESH (Medical Subject Headings, the National Library of Medicine's controlled vocabulary thesaurus) in 1991. Before the term redirected to "psychodrama" (from 1975 to 1990).
____________

Bowman, Sarah Lynne, & Andreas Lieberoth. 2018. « Psychology and Role-Playing Games ». In Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, edited by Sebastian Deterding & José P. Zagal, 245‑64. London: Routledge.

Role-playing games : Basic bibliometry with PsycNET (draft)

Martinolli, Pascal. « Role-Playing Games : Basic Bibliometry with PsycNET (Draft) », Feb. 2018. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IIDcCyXpFGHdRgTVHKxogcNPFYzDp-Gl. (open access and reuse : CC BY)

Number of peer-reviewed publications
about TRPG in PsycNET

This draft paper is a basic bibliometric analysis of the topic of tabletop role-playing games with the PsycNET databases. It also extends the bibliometric analysis to several related topics: role playing, pretend play, psychodrama, etc.

Additional informations (csv data, references, source code...)

Referencing the Imaginary: An Analysis of Library Collection of Role-Playing Game Materials [peer-reviewed article]

Schneider, E. and Hutchison, B. (2015). Referencing the Imaginary: An Analysis of Library Collection of Role-Playing Game Materials. The Reference
Librarian, 56 (3) : 174–188.

A recent survey shows RPG materials are very poorly collected and referenced in public and academics libraries, even in the Library of Congress (Schneider and Hutchison, 2015). Two reasons reported are the lasting effects of the moral panics of the 80s and the repeated book theft by patrons. I add other reasons: weeding of overused books, policy and choice of collection development, misknowledge of the complex publishing habits of the hobby (numerous game lines, numerous editions and optional books).

Q1: How Widely Are These Materials Collected by Libraries? 
The answer to this question is clearly that these materials are not widely collected. Looking at only the 953 OCLC participants that had any of these titles, the average number of titles in a collection was 3.67, or 5.16% of the search list. More than 90% of OCLC participants in the United States had no materials from the search list.(Schneider and Hutchison, 2015, p.184).

Theses local libraries have the largest RPG collections in the survey, ie. at least 100-150 items (Schneider and Hutchison, 2015, p.185).

• Public libraries 
• Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana 
• Genesee District Library in Flint, Michigan

• Academic library 

• Oberlin College Library in Oberlin, Ohio

 

Noncirculating collections of TRPG 

The Edwin and Terry Murray Collection of Role-Playing Games at Duke University’s Rubenstein Library includes 10,000 items (250 lin. ft.) : 2400 game books, 75 boxed sets, 140 packs of figurines, 19 card games, 100 different magazines and serials, even 13 manuscripts material from the Murray’s game notes. The collection ranges from 1972 to 2011. Unfortunately, « no other library collection was found anywhere near the scale of this collection. » (Schneider and Hutchison, 2015, p.186).

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My own quick searches in national libraries catalogs 

The Library of Congress online catalog, with the subjects ’Roleplaying game’ or ’Roleplaying game supplement’, showed only 71 results.

In the online catalog of the BnF (Bibliothèque nationale de France), the request ’Jeux de rôles (jeux)’ as subject heading showed that approximately 285 items (25% of the 381 results were adventures gamebooks or choose your own adventure books) were TRPGs. Most of them were core rulebooks and there was not complete series of any game.

The online catalog of the BAnQ (Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec), with the request ’Jeux de rôle (Jeux de société)’ as subject heading, showed 160 items (61% of the 404 results were non RPGs books). 151 of these items were from two Québec publishers named Dream Pod 9 (138 items) and Ianus Publications (23 items). These items are constituting complete collections but they are available for consultation only in the Collection nationale of the BAnQ because, through legal deposit, BAnQ collects all materials published in Québec.