Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Forum-Based Role Playing Games as Digital Storytelling, Paperback / softback Book

Forum-Based Role Playing Games as Digital Storytelling Paperback / softback

Part of the Studies in Gaming series

Paperback / softback

Description

When people hear the term “role-playing games”, they tend to think of two things: A group of friends sitting around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons, or video games with exciting graphics.

Between those two, however, exists a third style of gaming.

Hundreds of online forums offer gathering places for thousands of players—people who come together to role-play in writing.

They create stories by taking turns, describing events through their characters’ eyes.

Whether it is the arena of the Hunger Games, the epic battles of the Marvel Universe, or love stories in a fantasy version of New York, people build their own spaces of words, and inhabit them day after day. But what makes thousands of players, many teenagers among them, voluntarily type up novel-length stories?

How do they use the resources of the Internet, gathering images, sounds, and video clips to weave them into one coherent narrative?

How do they create together through improvisation and negotiation, in ways that connect them to older forms of storytelling?

Through observing more than a hundred websites, and participating in five of them for a year, Csenge Virág Zalka creates a pilot study that delves into a subculture of unbound creativity.