The Roles We Played: Exploring Intimacy in Research

Intimate relationships can serve as catalysts impelling us to deeply interact with others, and, consequently helping us to develop a greater understanding of ourselves, those with whom we come into contact, and the wider world. This manuscript describes the challenges and constraints I faced when engaged in qualitative research with an intimate other. I borrow from Dr. Carolyn Ellis’ (2007) concept of relational ethics, which requires researchers to: (a) act from their hearts and minds, (b) acknowledge interpersonal bonds to others, and (c) take responsibility for actions and their consequences. Power is a part of intimate relationships, so exploring and discussing power issues is critical in developing a solid research design and research processes when we involve intimate others, not to mention a solid baseline for a familial relationship. In this manuscript, I share methods I developed to interrogate my own awareness of my situated power/authority

Playing at Women and Men: A Discourse Analysis of Gender and Sexuality Performance in an Online Play-by-Post Role-Playing Game

Online play-by-post role-playing games mark the discursive intersection between computer-mediated-communication and gaming. The performance of gender and sexuality is an important aspect of online play-by-post role-playing games. Although play-by-post role-playing games are open world and do not have the same graphical and technological constraints as other forms of gaming, the performances on them are governed by both explicit and implicit rules. Performances of gender and sexuality are also governed by cultural standards. This thesis seeks to describe how players perform gender and sexuality within these boundaries. This thesis describes the performance of gender and sexuality on the website Another Day in Paradise. I located meaningful performances of gender and sexuality within discourse pulled from Another Day in Paradise. I then organized these performances into themes. These themes were further organized into three clusters. Performances of gender and sexuality in romantic interactions include expectations of men and women have of each other while courting. Self-aware gender expectations show characters as aware of how they perform gender and sexuality in traditional ways and draw on popular tropes. Performance of gender and sexuality in non-romantic interactions portrays how gender and sexuality are performed between friends and in parent-child relationships. Analysis of these thematic clusters portrays traditional, heteronormative, and patriarchal performances of gender and sexuality. Men are shown as having power, not just in romantic relationships but in familial and plutonic relationships as well, while women are shown as subservient to men

TTRPG UX: Requirements & Beyond

Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPG) allow the player to immerse themselves in a world where anything can happen - within the rules. You can become someone new, fight demons, play out exciting and speculative storylines, all with the help of your party. This ability to place yourself in the life of another person (or ethereal being) resonates with principles of User Experience Design (UX) where usability experts strive to understand the impact their application or interface might have on a hypothetical audience. This paper explores the parallels and potentials of TTRPG within the context of UX and Requirements, its characters, contexts and interactions. We propose creating playable UX worlds with the potential to provide deeper, more insightful output, and make recommendations for the addition of a TTRPG approach to User Experience processes

On the Importance of Queer Romances - Role-play as Exploration and Performance of Sexuality

This article investigates various kinds of analog and digital role-playing games (RPG) from the perspective of queer romance. We are interested in finding out how ‘queer’ appears in the composition of role-playing games through analysing players’ explorations and performances, as well as the options for romance in these games. We will look into a variety of role-playing games as research material in this study, from non-digital play – such as traditional tabletop role-playing games to live action role-play, or larp – to single-player digital RPGs. We ask how queerness affects the options for romance, whether localised in an event or in the composition of a single character, and what kind of exploration it serves. Is queerness to be found in the romance mechanic, or crunch, of RPGs, or is it part of the fluff: the setting and character descriptions? This article’s orientation is theoretical, and the main reference material here comes from RPG studies as well as queer game studies.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Taxation of Virtual Assets

The development of vast social networks through Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games has created in-game communities in which virtual assets have real-world values. The question has thus arisen whether such virtual assets are legal subjects of taxation. This iBrief will detail and discuss the various exclusions to taxable income, and analyze their application to the possibility of creating potential tax liability based on in-kind exchanges of virtual assets