Forum-Based Role Playing Games as Digital Storytelling
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Csenge Virág Zalka is a professional storyteller and researcher from Budapest, Hungary. Her interests focus on role-playing games as a form of storytelling, historical fiction, oral traditions and popular culture. Series editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell teaches American studies, anthropology, and writing at Pace University in New York.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 through 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, gather 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, the author has created a pilot study that delves into a subculture of unbounded creativity.
Preface
Introduction: “Do you want to thread?”
One—Stories at the Crossroads: Theorizing Forum Games
The Theory of Play and the Theory of Interactivity
Forum Games as Narratives
Play Versus Narrative
Fandom and Fan Fiction
Between pages 40 and 41 are 4 color
plates containing 4 photographs
Two—Thread by Thread: Shaping Language and Narrative in Forum Games
Improvisation and Collaboration
Regulating Language and Narrative
Regulating Language and Narrative Through Player Behavior
Between You and Me: A Case Study of Consent
Developing Language and Writing Skills
Trends in Activity and Popularity
From Language to Multimodality
Three—Beyond Words: Multimodality in Forum-Based Role-Playing
Images—The Visual Mode
Music and Sound—The Aural Mode
Movement—The Gestural Mode
Layout—The Spatial Mode
Numbers and Coding—The Numeric Mode
Time—The Temporal Mode
The Case Study of the Mad Hatter: Representing Characters Through Multimodal Posts
Conclusion
Four—From Classroom to Big Screen: The Possibilities of Forum Gaming
Forum RPGs as a Distinct Gaming Style
“But is it really storytelling?”
Forum Games and the Composition Classroom
Forum Games and Language Education
Forum Games in Transmedia Storytelling Projects
Appendix A: Site Sample
Appendix B: Coding Criteria
Appendix C: Glossary of Terms
Works Cited
Index