Role Playing Materials - Rafael Bienia

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of role players to inform ethnographic role playing. In their text for a Nordic larp conference book, Montola, Stenros, and Saitta (2015) describe the process of changing roles with regard to situations as steering. “Steering is the process in which a player influences the behavior of her character for non-diegetic reasons” (p. 108). Non-diegetic reasons are reasons not linked to the narrative elements that construct the story world, but relate to elements that players consider not part of the game, such as physical safety. In this case, players might not run “in the pitch-black forest even when [their] pursuers do” (Montola et al., 2015, p. 110). The decision when to steer depends on context. It might be the case that players ignore physical safety to some extent and run through a dark forest, as I did in the introductory example of the fleeing wizard. As their text informs other role players, it focuses on the “dual consciousness” of players who steer their roles as participant and character. I add here the researcher as a third “consciousness” or perspective. Thus, controlling three perspectives adds to diegetic and non-diegetic reasons of a role player those reasons important for doing research. By using role playing as an ethnographic method to control field-work perspectives, my practice and understanding of role playing changed.

      I have observed that the difficulty of steering three different roles resulted in a change of my personal role-playing style. I would not have observed this change if I had not been familiar with role playing before. My personal style changed because I had to distribute play time between participating, playing a character, and doing research. When I observed this change, I alienated my style further. For example, when I began this study in 2011, I stopped making costumes for larp and relied more and more on less time-consuming practices, such as recycling previous costumes, or borrowing costumes from friends, or buying costume parts instead of making them myself. In 2012 and 2014, I ran tabletop role-playing games with less effort than I used to invest. I intensified my participation in several role-playing games and groups in the beginning of my field work in 2011 and 2012, and withdrew from 2013 until 2015 almost completely—returning only when in need of further clarification and verification of conclusions.5 Moving outside my comfort zone became a point of self-reflection. This alienation caused a tension with my personal style that was about doing costumes myself. The inner reluctance to alienate my play style invigorated my reflections on the inter-relational demands, the seduction, and coercion of materials I had not been aware of before.

      At the beginning of my study for each empirical chapter, I took an informed position to alienate what I took for granted about role playing. Taking different perspectives, oscillating between participating and observing, I produced different types of written field notes. Everything that seemed familiar or unproblematic became the source of inquiry. The question was how I came to know about an aspect and what material traces were there. Steering helped to control different roles, reflect upon changes in observation and participation, and develop sensibility for the actor that I followed for every chapter.

      Participation per chapter. For Chapter 3, I followed the material actor costume to larps that took place at a former military area in Bexbach, Germany from 2010 until 2012. The former military area has been turned into a larp area and renamed Utopion. At Utopion, I focused on two larp campaigns and a fest larp that took place there. A larp campaign is a series of usually annual larp events that continue a longer narrative. The two larp campaigns were Alcyon (Fantasiewelten e.V.) and Dunkle Pfade (Nachtfalken Orga). Both larps involved around 150 participants. Fest larps are larger in scale, ranging from 1,300 participants at Epic Empires to 8,500 participants at Conquest of Mythodea. I chose Epic Empires (Epic Empires Event UG), because it took place at Utopion and involved organizers and participants of the two larp campaigns. Beside these larps, I took part in other larps. Some differed from my selection, as they drew upon a different genre than fantasy, took less time, or were played in other parts of Germany and Europe. Field notes included data samples differing in size and medium: hand-written narratives of what happened during the day, quick notes written during gameplay in a small notebook that I carried with me, and photographs of costumes, props, and locations. From the perspective of observer as participant, I wrote these notes in the evening in my tent and when the larp was over on Sunday. After the larp, I used the photographs to distance myself and describe scenes from a complete observer perspective. The photographs and the quickly written notes were from the perspective of complete participant, sometimes using the voice of my characters.

      For Chapter 4, I followed two material actors, a smartphone and a virtual reality headset. With the smartphone, I explored the larp Obscurus 2 in Spaarnwoude, the Netherlands, which took place in a contemporary world (2012) ruled by criminals. The mixed reality technology involved was a banking software that players could access with their smartphones. It served as an example for augmented reality technology, because it added a digital layer of information to the location of the larp. With the virtual reality headset Oculus Rift DK2, I explored role playing in computer role-playing games in 2014. The virtual reality headset replaces the monitor with a 360° display. Additionally, I interviewed a designer of the augmented reality role-playing game DSA Hexenwald (sprylab, 2013) and Dutch larp organizers who have used mixed reality technology before. Similar to the methods in the larp chapter, I wrote field notes during Obscurus 2 and while playing with the virtual reality headset. I participated as a player and followed how both material actors co-operate with the heterogeneous sites. Additionally, I took videos of myself role-playing with the headset. Here too, the perspectives changed, from complete participant to complete observer.

      For Chapter 5, I examined six materials that produce role playing in tabletop role-playing games taking place at different locations in Germany and at my home in Maastricht, the Netherlands from 2010 through 2014. The game system that I focused on was Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 (Cook et al., 2003), but I also participated in sessions of Vampire: The Requiem (Marmell et al., 2004), Call of Cthulhu (Petersen & Willis, 2004), and Das Schwarze Auge (Herz et al., 2005). In this chapter, I relied less on field notes than on interviews with other players. The reason was that I changed my perspective one step further for this chapter, to that of role-playing materials. Letting materials speak allowed me to take ethnographic role playing further by role-playing non-human elements. I explain this experiment in more detail in Chapter 5.

      As all of the chapters draw upon interviews, I will explain my use of interviews in more detail before I discuss the ethical questions involved in this study.

      Semi-structured interviews engage the interviewer and interviewee in a formal interview situation. Each of the interviews took 60 minutes via online voice communication. This type of qualitative interview connects a list of open questions prepared before the interview with the opportunity to explore further certain themes that emerge during the interview (Kruse, 2011; Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009; Silverman, 1985). As interviewer, I had prepared six questions and let the conversation follow the interviewee’s answers. Thus, I could follow the topic of “role playing and materials” and let the interviewee lead. Beside technical difficulties that might occur when establishing an online voice communication, I had positive experiences regarding online interviews. Similarly to Michielse (2015), my interviewees preferred this form of communication, because it was natural to them, and because they could share visual information. Some send me pictures of their living room where they play tabletop role-playing games, while one interview partner showed me his game master screen while using the camera of his laptop. This procedure resulted in reliable and comparable qualitative data. After transcription, I translated the interviews from German into English. The final number of interviews was 10 for larp, three for mixed reality

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