The Role-Playing Society

Andrew Byers is a visiting assistant professor of history at Duke University. His research interests include popular culture, biopolitics, and the history of geek culture. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia. Francesco Crocco is the associate director of the online writing lab at Excelsior College. His research interests include game-based learning, gamification, and utopian studies. He lives in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Table of Contents


Introduction

Part I. The Player’s Guide: The Psychological and Cultural Impact of a Game Genre

The Satanic Panic and Dungeons & Dragons: A ­Twenty-Five-Year Retrospective (Andrew Byers)

Psychological Effects of Fantasy Games on Their Players: A ­Discourse-Based Look at the Evidence (Andreas Lieberoth and Jonas ­Trier-Knudsen)

Building the Culture of Contingency: Adaptive Choice in Ludic Literature from ­Role-Playing Games to Choose Your Own Adventure Books (Tim Bryant)

Part II. The Tome of Knowledge: Playing to Learn in and across the Disciplines

Raiding the Last Frontier: Overcoming the Language Barrier in the ESL Classroom (Timm Woods)

“Do you want to be Dr. Frankenstein or Edna Pontellier?”: How Getting into Character Enhances Literary Studies (Jonathan M. Bradley)

Playing Between the Lines: Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies with Virtual Worlds (Reneta D. Lansiquot, Candido Cabo and Tamrah D. Cunningham)

Part III. The Book of Change: Enacting Social Transformations

Teacher as Dungeon Master: Connected Learning, Democratic Classrooms, and Rolling for Initiative (Antero Garcia)

Playing for Change: FreeMarket and the Rise of Serious Tabletop ­Role-Playing Games (Troy Leaman)

Leveling Influence: Klout and the Introduction of Social Leveling (Joseph B. Meyer)

Part IV. The Manual of Play: Seeding New Avenues of Gaming

Shapers, Portals and Exotic Matter: Living Fiction and Augmented Reality in Google’s Ingress (Kai-Uwe Werbeck)

Descent to Munchkin: From ­Pen-and-Paper to Board and Card (Cathlena Martin and Benton Tyler)

The RPG Classroom: ­Re-Purposing Game Mechanics for the Gamification of Education (Francesco Crocco)

About the Contributors

Index