Common styles – ideas of what experience one hopes to achieve through play – are achieving goals and making progress according to rules, acting out and immersing oneself in a role, creating an interesting story, or simulating a world. ![]() Commonly recognized forms are TRPGs, larps, CRPGs, and MORPGs. From there, RPGs and their communities evolved increasingly idiosyncratic forms and styles, afforded by their material under-determinations. RPGs can be traced to a shared historical ancestor: the TRPG D&D. Hence, if we ask for a definition of “role-playing games”, we can only refer to either how particular groups at particular points in time empirically use the word and organize actions and the material world around it or how we, as a scientific observer, choose to use the word to foreground and understand a particular perspective: viewing RPGs as a performance or as a virtual economy, etc. However, because “role-playing games” is a social category created by humans, it has no unchanging, context-independent essence. Existing definitions often assume games and, with them, RPGs to be a natural kind with some unchanging essence. ![]() ![]() People disagree because they often have an unclear idea of what kind of phenomena they are talking about and, therefore, what kind of definition is appropriate. Many de nitions of “role-play” and “role-playing games” have been suggested, but there is no broad consensus.
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