This chapter lays out the conceptual foundation that
one must possess in order to examine the role-playing game
phenomenon. First. I will present what has been done in the
scholarly community on rpgs . This section will also serve
as a justification for this study. In the second section, I
will examine the games themselves , explaining their form and
history to the reader.
Considering the massive popular impact that roleplaying games have had over the last two decades , there is remarkably little scholarship on them . Scanning across
anthropological and sociological literature, one can find
almost nothing that explicitly concerns this genre of play.
With rare exceptions, the recent literature is still
primarily dedicated to children's play, traditional games ,
and general theory.