Overview: Ritual, Myth, and Symbolism
Welcome to our unit on ritual, myth, and symbolism. We can consider role-playing games ritual spaces, but rituals can also be embedded into role-playing games for deeper experiences. Symbolism is often a core component of art and can be especially potent in role-playing games due to enactment and embodiment, including culturally significant symbols, personally important symbols, and archetypes. Storytelling is an essential aspect of role-playing games and is a way that humans make sense of their reality and experiences, including mythology and allegory.
This unit will also provide a brief introduction to academic writing in game design. Research and game design are similar processes, especially when doing Research Through Design, the method we are employing in this class. Like a scientific experiment, you are designing the game, testing it, and adjusting/iterating the experiment according to the results. Academic research makes the hypothesis, theory, method, process, results, analysis (discussion), and conclusion more obvious. While you may engage in these components in a more intuitive manner, academic writing spells them out for the reader to follow regardless of whether they are familiar with your topic or not.
Academic work is unique because it indicates a thorough engagement with others in the discourse, or “scholarly conversation.” In role-playing games, this discourse also includes more informal or “popular” sources, such as magazines or social media threads, since our work is practice-based. Whether engaging with scholarly or popular sources, in this class, we will present our work in a formal academic manner.
As we will learn, academic writing is different from creative writing in that the information is highly structured up front for the reader with a strong degree of rigor. Part of this structure is the argument, which means a structured, focused claim that is supported with reasoning and evidence. In this unit, we will examine the ways in which claims are structured, which should help you integrate all the important components needed for a persuasive paper.
Uppsala University offers writing support through the linked Language Workshop. We encourage you to make an appointment if you need additional writing support.
In this Unit, we will cover:
- Academic Writing
- Ritual
- Symbolic Enactment
- Archetypes
- Myth
Note: Some of the materials below may not be available outside of this course. We have linked resources that are open access. Do not distribute PDFs.
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Required materials:
Videos:
- Liu, Jessica. 2020. “Develop a Theoretical Framework in 3 Steps | Scribbr.” Scribbr. YouTube, August 20.
Readings:
- Beltrán, Whitney “Strix.” 2012. “Yearning for the Hero Within: Live Action Role-Playing as Engagement with Mythical Archetypes.” In Wyrd Con Companion Book 2012, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman and Aaron Vanek, 89-96. Los Angeles, CA: Wyrd Con, 2012.
- Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Simon Brind, Elektra Diakolambrianou, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Guus Quinten van Tilborg, Josephine Baird, and Alessandro Giovannucci. In review. “Chapter 6: Key Concepts and Techniques: Myth, Symbolism, Ritual, Magic, Narrative, Culture, and Conflict.” In Transformative Role-playing Game Design, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, Elektra Diakolambrianou, and Simon Brind, 186-225. Transformative Play Research Series. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala University Press.
- Bowman, Sarah Lynne, Josephine Baird, Kjell Hedgard Hugaas, Elektra Diakolambrianou, and Taisto Suominen In review. “Chapter 7: Research in Transformative Game Design.” In Transformative Role-playing Game Design, edited by Sarah Lynne Bowman, Elektra Diakolambrianou, and Simon Brind, 226-253. Transformative Play Research Series. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala University Press.
- Nesbitt, Laurel. 2022. “The Toulmin Method.” The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University.