Rules of the House: Strategy, Tactic, and Violence in One World By Night, World of Darkness, Live-Action Role-Play Games

The following thesis focuses on governance of institutionalized play in three World of Darkness live-action role-play (larp) games (ethnographic field work conducted between May and August of 2016), whose players have willingly allowed the international organization of One World by Night – an organization made up of their peers – to unify them in such a way as to create connection, community, and shared story across the world. I analyze four locii within these games (the book, the organization, the storyteller, and the player) using Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, specifically focusing on the roles of the tactician and the strategist, to illustrate how the varying levels of power within these games work with, and pull against, each other. As the field work was originally conducted to investigate violence within these physical role-play games, the heart of this thesis, and one of the threads that connects each chapter, is a discussion of violence, used to confirm the serious attitude these games can sometimes engender. Though Michele de Certeau may not be a name generally associated with the discussion of gaming, it is my hope to show that gaming communities can be analyzed using the same theories anthropologists might use to examine any other community or society, as gaming communities are not separate from the rest of the world, but an integral part of the system

<探索的研究論文>振り返るための一時停止： エスノグラフィー・ライティングにおける対話的方法論を反芻する

The following piece explores the methodology of the dissertation I am currently constructing, which plays with form, employs short stories created through play, fictional characters who act as guides, and interactivity, asking the reader to add commentary, reflect on their own experiences, play games, and change the work itself as they read. Completing ethnographic research through and about the pandemic required a radical reframing of my methodology, not only during the research but also afterward as I began writing. How do you explain what it was like to live, play, and research during such a profound and collective experience? I studied face-to-face tabletop roleplaying (ttrpg) game communities, their process of losing the table, and finding it again online. The purpose of the interactivity in the piece is to bring to bear the experiences of living through a pandemic and political unrest, which melded pain and play together through the tools of play found within the community I observed and participated in, that of the ttrpg players in the Midwest, USA. This particular piece is a rumination on the methodology of writing, what my experience means in this context, and explores the what, how, and why of tools being used. Some of these tools will be utilized here where space allows.以下の記事は，私が現在執筆中の学位論文の方法論を探るものである．この学位論文は，形式を弄するものであり，遊びを通して創作された短編小説，ガイド役の架空の人物，そして読者に解説を加えたり，自身の経験を振り返ったり，ゲームをしたり，読みながら記事そのものを変化させたりするよう求める双方向性を採用している．パンデミックを通じて，またパンデミックに関するエスノグラフィック調査を完了させるためには，調査中だけでなく，その後執筆を始めるにあたっても，私の方法論を根本的に見直す必要があった．このような深遠で集団的な体験の中で生活し，遊び，研究することがどのようなものであったかをどのように説明するか。私は，対面式の卓上ロールプレイングゲーム（ttrpg）のコミュニティや，テーブルを失い，オンラインで再びテーブルを見つける過程を研究した．この記事における双方向性の目的は，パンデミックと政情不安を生き抜いた経験を生かすことであり，私が観察し参加したアメリカ中西部のttrpgプレイヤーたちのコミュニティで見つけた遊びの道具を通して，痛みと遊びを融合させたのである．この特別な作品は，執筆の方法論，この文脈における私の経験の意味，そして使用されているツールの何を，どのように，そしてなぜを探求するものである．スペースが許す限り，これらのツールのいくつかをここで使用する