Constructing a functional system of magic that helps readers suspend disbelief is a crucial part of worldbuilding in the fantasy genres. Yet creating a believable, compelling and original fictional universe can be daunting. To help inspire writers, this guide provides an overview of how magic has been understood in history and used in myth, legend and modern fiction. Different forms of magic are explored and a broad range of stories-from Nordic myths to modern novels-are described and referenced. Discussion explores how magic as a concept shapes, and is shaped by, fictional worlds and societies.

Actual play is a movement within role-playing gaming in which players livestream their gameplay for others to watch and enjoy. This new medium has allowed the playing of games to become a digestible, consumable text for individuals to watch, enjoy, learn from, and analyze. Bridging the gap between the analog and the digital, actual play is changing and challenging our expectations of tabletop role-playing and providing a space for new scholarship. This edited collection of essays focuses on Dungeons and Dragons actual play and examines this phenomenon from a variety of different disciplinary approaches. Authors explore how to define actual play, how fans interact with and affect the narrative and gameplay of actual play, the diversity of gamers (or lack thereof) within actual play media, and how audiences can use actual play media for more than mere entertainment.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the bestselling and most influential video games of the past decade. From the return of world-threatening dragons to an ongoing civil war, the province of Skyrim is rich with adventure, lore, magic, history, and stunning vistas. Beyond its visual spectacle alone, Skyrim is an exemplary gameworld that reproduces out-of-game realities, controversies, and histories for its players. Being Dragonborn, then, comes to signify a host of ethical and ideological choices for the player, both inside and outside the gameworld. These essays show how playing Skyrim, in many ways, is akin to "playing" 21st century America with its various crises, conflicts, divisions, and inequalities. Topics covered include racial inequality and white supremacy, gender construction and misogyny, the politics of modding, rhetorics of gameplay, and narrative features.

A lot of work has been done talking about what masculinity is and what it does within video games, but less has been given to considering how and why this happens, and the processes involved. This book considers the array of daily relationships involved in producing masculinity and how those actions and relationships translate to video games. Moreover, it examines the ways the actual play of the games maps onto the stories to create contradictory moments that show that, while toxic masculinity certainly exists, it is far from inevitable. Topics covered include the nature of masculine apprenticeship and nurturing, labor, fatherhood, the scapegoating of women, and reckoning with mortality, among many others.

The Digital Age has created massive technological and disciplinary shifts in tabletop role-playing, increasing the appreciation of games like Dungeons & Dragons. Millions tune in to watch and listen to RPG players on podcasts and streaming platforms, while virtual tabletops connect online players. Such shifts elicit new scholarly perspectives. This collection includes essays on the transmedia ecology that has connected analog with digital and audio spaces. Essays explore the boundaries of virtual tabletops and how users engage with a variety of technology to further role-playing. Authors map the growing diversity of the TRPG fandom and detail how players interact with RPG-related podcasts. Interviewed are content creators like Griffin McElroy of The Adventure Zone podcast, Roll20 co-creator Nolan T. Jones, board game designers Nikki Valens and Isaac Childres and fan artists Tracey Alvarez and Alex Schiltz. These essays and interviews expand the academic perspective to reflect the future of role-playing.

Any miniature wargame is greatly enhanced by realistic and evocative scenery and buildings, but commercial ready-made pieces can be expensive. Building your own can be a cost-effective and very rewarding alternative, another hobby in itself, but it can be hard to know where to start. Wargames Terrain and Buildings is a series of books aimed at giving wargamers the skills, techniques and guidance they need to create their own stunning and practical model buildings. In this volume, master modeller Tony Hardwood shares his years of experience and presents the reader with a wide range of projects for the Napoleonic era. With the aid of step-by-step photographs, he guides the reader through building and finishing each of these models, which are organized in three sections of increasing complexity and encompass a range of scales and different materials. Nine projects are included but the techniques and skills demonstrated along the way, along with valuable advice on tools, construction materials and paints, can be adapted and applied to a much wider range of structures to grace your battlefields.

Since the release of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974, role-playing games have spawned a vibrant industry and subculture whose origins, characteristics, cultures and player experiences have been well explored. Yet there has been little attention devoted to the meaningful ways RPGs have shaped society at large over the last four decades. RPGs were influential on video game design and have been widely represented in film, television and other media. They have made their mark on other areas of society, as well, including education, social media, corporate training and the military. This collection of new essays illustrates the broad appeal and impact of role-playing games. Topics range from a critical reexamination of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, to the growing significance of RPGs in education, to the potential for ""serious"" RPGs to provoke awareness and social change. The contributors discuss the myriad subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways in which the values, concepts and mechanics of RPGs have infiltrated popular culture.

Welcome to the obsessive world of Fantasy Football, where managers will do anything to succeed. Every Saturday afternoon, 5.8 million people around the world settle down to see how their team will get on. But this isn't the team they support. It's THEIR team. They have spent hour after hour assessing injuries, swapping subs and tweaking formations. Because when the day is done and the scores are in, they want to be able to look in the mirror and say, 'THAT TRIPLE CAPTAIN CALL WAS AN ACT OF GENIUS!' David Wardale - writer for the UK's number one Fantasy Football site, Fantasy Football Scout - meets previous winners to discover how they beat millions to the crown. He reveals the leagues where failure involves outright humiliation and discovers just how low some managers will go to claim a psychological advantage. Along the way, he finds Saudi sheikhs, stats professors, most of Norway and a member of one of the biggest pop bands of all time, all of them united by their unflinching desire for Fantasy Football greatness.

For Johan Huizinga, play is the motor of humanity's cultural development, and it has accompanied us through history. However, since the late 20th century, its influence has been more pervasive than ever before, and gamification has become a buzzword in social and cultural life. Hand in hand with this cultural turn, theories of Postmodernism emerged, also privileging interactive playful behavior. If play drives culture, understanding it is therefore understanding culture in Postmodern times. Many of the core concepts of Postmodern thought also inform the new medium of the pen&paper role-playing game that coalesced at about the same time as Postmodern theories, a symptom of and feeding into the processes of cultural change. Analyzing these language games beyond their entertainment value shows how current socio-political conditions affect the shifting dynamic and mutual relationship between individual and society. A deep exploration of the complex interrelationship between narrative, game, players, and society raises questions of authority, agency, and responsibility that provide insights into the crisis of engagement that we see in our societies, while at the same time offering a new and original appreciation of the socio-political potential in games as the leading medium of the 21st century.

Global esports explores the recent surge of esports in the global scene and comprehensively discusses people's understanding of this spectacle. By historicizing and institutionalizing esports, the contributors analyze the rapid growth of esports and its implications in culture and digital economy. Dal Yong Jin curates a discussion as to why esports has become a global phenomenon. From games such as Spacewar to Starcraft to Overwatch, a key theme, distinguishing this collection from others, is a potential shift of esports from online to mobile gaming. The book addresses why many global game players and fans play and enjoy online and mobile games in professional game competitions, and therefore, they investigate the manner in which the transfer to, from and between online and mobile gaming culture is occurring in a specific subset of global youth. The remaining focus identifies the major platforms used to enjoy esports, including broadcasting and smartphones. By analyzing these unexamined or less-discussed agendas, this book sheds light on the current debates on the growth of global esports culture.

Digital role-playing games such as Rift, Diablo III, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning help players develop skills in critical thinking, problem solving, digital literacy and engagement. The author examines both the benefits and the drawbacks of role-playing games and their application to real-world teaching techniques. Readers will learn how to incorporate games-based instruction into their own classes and workplace training, as well as approaches to redesigning curriculum and programs.

This book explores video games as important cultural artifacts and as sources of powerful, compelling storytelling. It begins by considering the fundamental structures of video games-including immersion and player agency-and deepens the exploration of such elements by considering how each plays a role in storytelling. The book moves from the theoretical to the practical by considering numerous modern games and the stories they tell through careful, considered analysis of each title's story. Games considered at length include the Mass Effect series, BioShock, The Last of Us and many more. The book also explores genres like the visual novel, which are less frequently considered in video game study. What emerges from this book, which appeals to academics, game enthusiasts, and the general public, is the importance of considering video games as serious and important sources of storytelling exploring complex thematic subjects like identity, morality, and the impact of player choice.

Through classroom activities, wizard rock concerts and organizations like the Harry Potter Alliance, Harry Potter fans are using creativity to positively impact the world. This collection of essays and interviews examines how playful fandom - from fanfiction to Muggle quidditch, cosplay, role-playing games and even Harry Potter burlesque - not only re-imagines the canon but also challenges consumerism, questions notions of identity and fosters participatory culture. The contributors explore issues applicable to fan studies and performance studies at large, such as the role of performance, the nature of community, and questions of representation and ownership in the digital age. Presented in three sections, the essays discuss discrepancies between sanctioned versions of Harry Potter and fan creations, the reenactment and reinterpretation of the original narrative in fan performance, and collaborative and participatory performances that break down the boundaries between actors and audiences.

This ethnography of a live action role-playing (LARP) community examines the structure of play, how new participants are introduced and apprenticed into the culture, player expectations and motivations, and games as they are designed and as they are performed. The main focus is on LARP's affordance for learning across a variety of disciplines and interests. The book is intended for LARP participants, academics interested in play or in collaborative development, those interested in new uses of familiar learning environments, and game developers with an interest in creating games with highly interactive narratives and co-creative play experiences in which the role of designer and player is blurred.

This collection of all-new essays approaches the topic of immersion as a product of social and media relations in the 21st century. Examining the premises and aesthetics of live-action and tabletop role-playing games, reality television, social media apps and first-person shooters, the essays take both game rules and the media discourse that games produce as serious objects of study. Scholars of social psychology, sociology, role-playing theory, game studies, and television studies all examine games and game-like environments like reality shows as interdependent sites of social friction and power negotiation. The ten essays articulate the importance of game rules in our analyses of contemporary media products, and demonstrate methods that allow us to see those game rules in action during the contested process of play.

Game designers, authors, artists, and scholars discuss how roles are played and how stories are created in role-playing games, board games, computer games, interactive fictions, massively multiplayer games, improvisational theater, and other "playable media." Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story-something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play. Second Person-so called because in these games and playable media it is "you" who plays the roles, "you" for whom the story is being told-first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lottery and its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction-for the singular "you"-including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Facade. Finally, contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering, among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques (as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game). In engaging essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.

With videogames now one of the world's most popular diversions, the virtual world has increasing psychological influence on real-world players. This book examines the relationships between virtual and non-virtual identity in visual role-playing games. Utilizing James Gee's theoretical constructs of real-world identity, virtual-world identity, and projective identity, this research shows dynamic, varying and complex relationships between the virtual avatar and the players sense of self and makes recommendations of terminology for future identity researchers. Features 15 photographs of videogame screens, bibliography, and an appendix of sample videogame transcription data.

Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like "World of Warcraft "and "Second Life"), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around "fun." Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? "Exodus to the Virtual World" explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live--both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.

Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

The digital technologies of the 21st century are reshaping how we experience storytelling. More than ever before, storylines from the world's most popular narratives cross from the pages of books to the movie theatre, to our television screens and in comic books series. Plots intersect and intertwine, allowing audiences many different entry points to the narratives. In this sometimes bewildering array of stories across media, one thing binds them together: their large-scale fictional world. Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers describes how writers can co-create vast worlds for use as common settings for their own stories. Using the worlds of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, A Game of Thrones, and Dungeons & Dragons as models, this book guides readers through a step-by-step process of building sprawling fictional worlds complete with competing social forces that have complex histories and yet are always evolving. It also shows readers how to populate a catalog with hundreds of unique people, places, and things that grow organically from their world, which become a rich repository of story making potential. The companion website collaborativeworldbuilding.com features links to online resources, past worldbuilding projects, and an innovative card system designed to work with this book.