An Introduction

As a technical writer, I frequently design and create content for educational forms of digital media. Through that work, I have become interested in digital media as a form of social/cultural discourse which employs both explicit and implicit narratives (or surface narratives and their embedded cultural and meta-textual messages), and the issues of user investment and empowerment that rise from those narratives. Since meaningfully responsive artifacts offer more opportunity for narrative investment than do static ones; studying digital media offers greater insight into how narrative investment can affect user empowerment. Within the broad subject of 'games as social discourse', my research interests focus on the under-utilized potential of tabletop role-playing games as creative and analytical tools. While role-playing games do not currently enjoy a great deal of respect as a research topic, in my experience running and directing them, not only do they present a challenging environment for exploring social issues in a narrative context, they also offer a unique palette for experimenting with the inter-relation between structural systems and narrative.

The problems of identification, disenfranchisement, and empowerment are seen throughout the digital media field, and they are intimately tied to the implicit narratives employed in a media artifact. I am most familiar with this from my work at PtCT with well@home, a patient-operated telemonitoring tool which educates patients about their medical status and assists them in self-care. Allowing elderly patients to take control over their care is a powerful tool for empowerment and has been demonstrated in clinical trials to produce dramatic gains in patient health; but that control hinges on the degree to which patients feel respected and encouraged by the support system, and in turn the degree to which they feel invested in the process of self-care. The importance that these forms of narrative and identification demonstratively have is the basis of the bridge between media studies and human computer interaction. Tabletop role-playing games offer a radical potential for studying this phenomenon and creating powerful identifying experiences in digital media.

To properly explore the role of narrative identification in digital environments, we need to better understand how players build roles and share authorship of the worlds they inhabit; and that relationship is best reflected by the collaborative storytelling which occurs between a game-master (or GM) and player. Creating even a strictly original interactive work requires an awareness of the available tools, and as a GM, I have pertinent experience in using the 'rules' which govern a narrative experience to facilitate collaborative processes. Just as awareness of the context of a game system can help a GM to invisibly incorporate player actions into the evolving narrative, awareness of a media artifact's context can help a content creator incorporate user actions into a rewarding experience. In my own independent study of this subject, I have been working on a web tool which can bridge the system comprehension barrier that plagues new players. This is a necessary first step toward creating a system knowledge independent web application for creating collaborative narratives. By creating collaborative spaces like this which allow players and GMs to focus on characterization and narrative, the most significant hurdle in using tabletop role-playing games for narrative research is cleared. The fluidity of the boundary between explicit and implicit narratives makes postmodernist and dramatic analysis particularly fruitful in a discussion about meaning creation and character investment. To that end, I am composing a paper with Celia Pearce about absurdist theatrical traditions in narrative game design.

Media artifacts express layered narratives, and tabletop role-playing games offer a unique tool set for analyzing those narratives and representing the way players invest in them. My history as a game master and storyteller, my independent work (both production and publication-oriented) and the comfortability in teaching myself technical skills that it implies, all make me an excellent choice for researching this topic. And the close alignment of these research interests with that of the Digital Media program (in particular the research of Brian Magerko, Fox Harrell, and Celia Pearce) makes Georgia Tech the best choice for this type of research.