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Seminar: Playing as Inquiry at ROCKET
No full textThis PowerPoint presentation presents Playing as Inquiry, a methods-forward account of the León Multimodal Protocol (LMP) for studying transformation in tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) at scale. The presentation is designed for scholarly audiences interested in qualitative methods, game studies, and transdisciplinary research design, with an explicit commitment to accessibility through consistent verbal description of visual materials.
The talk begins by situating TTRPGs as layered narrative, social, and material systems in which meaning emerges across embodied performance, language, rules negotiation, artifacts, platforms, and memory over time. From this foundation, the presentation identifies a core methodological problem: traditional qualitative approaches struggle to scale from single sessions to large, longitudinal corpora comprising hundreds of sessions and heterogeneous evidence types. This “scale problem” motivates the need for a structured, auditable protocol.
The LMP is introduced as a pipeline that moves systematically from play to analytic claims. Key stages include standardized campaign structuring, multimodal transcription using time-bounded transcription boxes, constructivist grounded theory coding, and iterative synthesis supported by CAQDAS tools and digital analysis platforms. Visual diagrams illustrate how raw audio-visual data, notes, maps, and messaging logs are preserved as distinct yet traceable layers rather than collapsed into a single transcript.
Methodologically, the presentation integrates Collaborative Auto-Ethnography (CoAE), Participatory Action Research, narrative inquiry, grounded theory, and digital analysis into a layered methods stack. This stack enables multimodal traceability, cross-session synthesis, and built-in validity through peer review, feedback loops, and transparent data lineage. A phased timeline shows how the protocol is developed, tested, and refined across multiple research cycles.
The presentation concludes by articulating the primary contribution of the LMP: a reproducible, extensible framework for analyzing transformation in TTRPGs that balances depth with scale. By operationalizing collaboration, reflexivity, and methodological rigor, the protocol positions TTRPG play as a legitimate and analyzable site of socio-critical inquiry, while offering tools transferable to other complex, multimodal research contexts.https://digitalcommons.njit.edu/stemresources/1129/thumbnail.jp
Of modern monsters and scientific magic: the design challenges of simulating an enchanted world in Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition
Full text linkThis article analyzes the magical system of Dungeons and Dragons 5 edition in the context of an idea of the enchanted world, highlighting controversial relationships between this concept and the rules of the game. On the one hand, D&D’s magic constantly borrows the imagery and ideas from different texts that follow the logic of enchanted world, starting with the idea of magic itself and ending with particular spells being grounded in the fundamental traits of enchanted world like ubiquitous of liminality and the anxiety about agency. On the other hand, broader logic of D&D’s rules inadvertently influences the way those spells function accordingly, making them more aligned with disenchanted logic of modernity. This combination of superficial fidelity and procedural reimagining make the magic system of D&D a perfect example of naturalization of modernity as the only possible worldview
