Bullshit Your Way Through This!

I got a fairly positive reaction to the last paper I posted (the Guitar Hero expertise study), so I’m pulling out a paper I wrote first semester and posting it here for everyone’s perusal. This was for the first half of the Introduction to the Learning Sciences course I took from David Shaffer in Fall, 2006 (Ed Psych 795), and featured me trying to make sense of fieldwork data I’d gathered on learning in a live-action role-playing game (yep, a LARP).

I’ve been interested in role-playing for a while, though I haven’t done any form of it (or any acting whatsoever) since an abortive attempt to play the tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu with Scott Mongeau back in college. Friends of mine and I had planned on playing a few tabletop RPGs in recent years, but nothing really came of it. So, when we were asked to observe and record a naturally-occuring learning environment for this course assignment last Fall, I looked for something game-related. Thanks to my officemate’s knowledge of this stuff, I was introduced to an interesting LARP group on campus, playing a variant of the White Wolf game Mage.

I’d never witnessed a LARP before, but now find this stuff surprisingly interesting. There’s a stereotype that LARPers are “geeks with no lives” who like to dress up and escape into fantasy worlds, but I found this group of LARPers to be great — they were sociable, very friendly, and quite creative. The amount of work that goes into inhabiting a role and actually playing one of these games is frankly enormous, more reminiscent of an ever-evolving, collaborative improv game than the navel-gazing that LARPs are stereotyped as. While I didn’t find the game of Mage to be all that personally engaging, there are many others out there and I might give one a shot soon.

At any rate, here is a link to my paper, entitled “‘Bullshit your way through this!’: Learning to LARP through revoicing.” Disclaimer: Like with the Guitar Hero paper, this was written for a class and has not been vetted by the local IRB. I’m presenting it here as an example of a paper I wrote for a class, and am not presenting this as ongoing research.

Additionally, it also had rather strict guidelines — the reliance on O’Connor and Michaels is indication that we had to try to contrast it or tie it to a particular course reading, and I lucked out in that my fieldwork data seemed to match O’Connor & Michaels’ theoretical stance fairly well. At the very least, the phenomenon of revoicing seems key in the learning and enculturation going on in this particular LARP. I may be interested in following up on this result in the future, but for now, I present it as just the result of a class project.

As per usual, any comments are welcome. Post ‘em.