Background: Domain and Potential Users

Domain

I myself am a dilettante when it comes to tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), more of a collector than a player and more of an accumulator than a collector, but I find the theory of game design and the history of games and gaming interesting, and include among my friends many more serious hobbyists, including some successful independent game designers.

For my project, I propose to develop a metadata schema for describing tabletop RPG systems—that is, not games themselves, but families of games defined by shared rules, design decisions, and in some cases (e.g. Alder, n.d.¹) even theme and emotional tone. Some, such as the d20 System² published by Wizards of the Coast as a derivative of the long-running Dungeons & Dragons series, are rigidly defined, intended and licensed for commercial use; others, such as Vincent Baker’s Powered by the Apocalypse³, are more like philosophical approaches to game design open for adoption and adaptation, in whole or in part, by both amateur and professional designers.

Each system captures a set of design decisions and intentions that differentiate the systems from one another while creating commonalities among games based on the same system, and systems also are related to one another both historically and structurally; these characteristics seem amenable to capture and description in a controlled, structured way, perhaps drawing on work such as that of Zagal and Deterding on gameplay design patterns.⁴

Potential users

Potential users of the metadata schema include game designers, scholars of RPG studies (a growing field which now includes its own peer-reviewed journals, such as the International Journal of Role-Playing⁵ published by the Department of Game Design at Uppsala University), developers of websites or databases collecting RPG information, and serious bibliographers of RPGs (the last two categories likely having some overlap). Some of these audiences might find the process of taxonomizing systems and creating controlled vocabularies more valuable than the documents produced; the schema would nonetheless facilitate doing so in a structured way. Some of these audiences might find the schema useful for (meta)data collection and analysis; others as an interchange format, or as the basis for a display system; a URI-addressable reference database of RPG systems might also be a linked data resource for other collections of linked data on role-playing games and gaming.