Identity Performativity theory is relatively new to the field of linguistics and as such has been the subject of a growing number of research in linguistics. Most popularly, focus on performativity has been the discursive construction of gendered identity/identities. Though a number of studies have sought to examine the role language performance plays in construction, a surprising few have aimed to look at activities focused on the intentional creation and maintenance of identities in a specifically performative context such as: improvisational acting and roleplaying games. This study uses a social constructionist framework through discourse analysis to examine a community of practice centered around the performance of multiple roles during a 9 hour session of Dungeons and Dragons, a tabletop roleplaying game, in order to see what strategies players employed to call out specific gendered roles and what those strategies might assume about identity construction. Primarily, how does language choice illustrate the theory that identity is not only co-constructed, but that each person embodies a series of sometimes conflicting gender identities that are often contested? The results of the research show evidence that each person constructs for themselves and others not one, but multiple, identities in the course of conversation and often for different purposes.

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“Playing pretend” is often regarded as childish, but many people continue to role-play well into adulthood through various forms of games, activities, and experiences that become an established part of societal norm. In this study, I attempt to establish links between marginalized identities, self-discovery, self-acceptance, and role-play. My findings may help in development of serious and applied games, as well as role-play’s use in therapeutic settings. I surveyed players online from a specific Art Role-Playing Game (ARPG) community, Pouflons, to find out how their characters’ personas and identities spillover and bleed into the player’s primary identity. Existing literature has reported instances of bleed between character and player identity, but usually in an autoethnographic report, small study, or only in theory. I intended to confirm the phenomena of identity bleed and emancipatory bleed by using a larger sample size, at 138 complete responses. I found that this community had a large population of people identifying as LGBT and that a clear majority of players report that their identity has been affected by their role-play.

In real life we each experience the world separately through our individual bodies, which necessitates what Kenneth Burke calls "identification." In this paper, I assert that as artistic media have structured our aesthetic experience in a way that increasingly resembles our lived, embodied experiences, our identification with fictional characters requires less imaginative effort and is more automatic and powerful. I will show this by analyzing how we inhabit characters through sensory engagement, point of view, and narrative form in literature, film, and video games (specifically action/adventure games, RPGs, and MMORPGs). I will then build off of Burke's foundational theory to articulate a clearly defined spectrum of identification as it occurs in art, emphasizing that identification through video games is the most immediate and powerful. To conclude, I'll consider how video games—a young and stigmatized art form—can formulate our identities and increase our ability to identify with others in real life, where we cannot inhabit each other's bodies.

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Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is a Tabletop Roleplaying Game (TRPG) which offers playersthe chance to create and inhabit a fantastical hero in an equally fantastical world, creating ashared experience with their other players and the Game Master (GM) who facilitates play.Much research has examined D&D as an artifact, highlighting its problematic aspects and thepotential of the worlds and rules it presents as reinforcing real world hegemony orshortcoming such as male domination and racism. While building upon these ideas, thisresearch explores how players’ experiences in D&D interact with notions of heroism, how thegame presents what it means to be a hero and how it truly is experienced within my longtimeD&D playgroup. It does this through semi-structured interviews, to examine how the playersexperience the game, including my own reflections and input as GM for this group for anextended period of time. It utilizes the concepts of coloniality and hegemonic masculinity asframes for understanding the mechanics and narratives of D&D and how they interact withconceptualisations of heroism. Through thematic analysis of the interview data, it highlightswhere the players' experiences line up with conceptualisations of coloniality and hegemonicmasculinity, yet also highlights where players' experiences break with or undermine theseconcepts, highlighting alternatives that move away from colonial and masculine heroism.Ultimately determining that while these players understand heroism in D&D in ways whichreinforce or echo coloniality and hegemonic masculinity such as imperial violence, theiractual experiences with heroism are often removed from this, focusing more on collaborationand problem solving devoid of violence.

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Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T18:23:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MARCIA REGINA BOSCARIOL-BERTOLINO.pdf: 7688545 bytes, checksum: 8aba6cbcb5c0c2e20ad3f15d29e474ee (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-12-01 / Secretaria da Educação do Estado de São Paulo / The present interdisciplinary research is aimed at analyzing the most frequent verbs, its collocates and lexical patterns found in the texts of videogames, specifically the Digital Role Playing Games. It is proposed based in the results of the research, a material using the patterns for English Teaching using the patterns found in study corpus. There are many researches about characterization though there isn t any that make a description of the language of Digital RPGs following the theories of Corpus Linguistics and linked it to English teaching. The present aims fill in such gap. The research is based on the Corpus Linguistics theoretical frame. We use Task Based Learning how pedagogocal support. Two corpora were applied in this research : 1- the study corpus made of Digital RPGs texts with a total of about 600.000 words and the Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA) with a total of 360 million tokens as the reference corpus used to help preparing the teaching materials. The research questions guiding the present study were: (1) what are the most frequent verbs found in the study corpus? (2) what are the typical lexicogrammar patterns found in the Digital RPG genre? (3) how is it possible to apply the patterns found in the texts to prepare task based activities? The results show many lexico-grammatical patterns that characterize the games and can be useful in English learning as foreign language, in Private and public schools, in different grade levels / O trabalho aqui desenvolvido é interdisciplinar e teve como objetivo a análise dos verbos mais freqüentes no corpus de estudo, seus colocados e os padrões lexicais que aparecem nos textos de videogames, especificamente os Role Playing Games Digitais (RPGs). Propomos, com base nos resultado, um material didático para o ensino de inglês utilizando os padrões encontrados no corpus de estudo. Embora haja uma série de pesquisas sobre caracterização de linguagem, e jogos e educação, não se conhece até o momento nenhuma que trate exatamente da descrição da linguagem dos RPGs Digitais sob a ótica da lingüística de Corpus e a alie ao ensino de Inglês. A presente pesquisa pretende colaborar para preencher essa lacuna. O arcabouço teórico da pesquisa se baseia em Lingüística de Corpus. Como suporte pedagógico utilizamos Task Based Learning. Dois corpora foram empregados na pesquisa: o corpus de estudo, que é composto por textos de RPGs Digitais, totaliza mais de 600 palavras, e o de referência, o Contemporary Corpus of American English (COCA), com mais de 360 milhões de palavras, foi usado como auxiliar na elaboração do material didático. Foram propostas as seguintes questões de pesquisa: (1) Quais são os verbos mais freqüentes no corpus de estudo? (2) Quais padrões léxico-gramaticais são típicos no gênero RPG Digitais? (3) De que forma é possível aplicar os padrões encontrados nos textos na elaboração das atividades baseadas em tarefas? Os resultados mostraram diversos padrões léxicogramaticais que caracterizam os jogos e que podem ser úteis no aprendizado de inglês como língua estrangeira, na escola pública, em vários níveis

Este trabalho propoe a definicao de uma arquitetura para incorporar jogadores virtuais em uma classe de Sistemas de Apoio a Decisao em Grupos (SADs-G), baseados na utilizacao conjunta de Simulacao Baseada em Multiagentes (MABS) e Jogos de Papeis (RPGs). Estas duas tecnicas, MABS e RPGs, vem sendo utilizadas de forma integrada ha alguns anos devido a capacidade de discussao e aprendizado dos RPG e da capacidade dinamica de MABS. Os jogadores virtuais definidos devem ter a capacidade de tomada de decisao e de comunicacao entre si e com os jogadores reais durante as negociacoes. Os principais aspectos discutidos neste trabalho sao: i) se os jogadores virtuais definidos possuem comportamentos nao-triviais perante aos jogadores reais; ii) se continua ocorrendo o processo de negociacao entre os jogadores, sejam eles reais ou virtuais; iii) se a realizacao de um jogo de forma eletronica (via computador) dificulta a interacao entre os jogadores. De forma a discutir estes aspectos, duas instancias de SADs-G foram implementadas no contexto da Gestao de Recursos Naturais, pois neste dominio o processo de negociacao e extremamente importante e complexo. / This thesis proposes the definition of an architecture to insert virtual players in a particular subclass of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), that uses Multi-Agent-Based Simulation (MABS) and Role-Playing Games (RPGs) techniques in an integrated way. These techniques can bring interesting results, since it is possible to join the dynamic capacity of MABS with the discussion and learning capacity of RPGs. The defined virtual players must make decisions and communicate with each other and with the real players during the negotiation process. In this work, the main aspects discussed are the following: i) can virtual players have no-trivial behavior in the face of real players? ii) is the negotiation process between all players (virtual or real) still happening when virtual players are inserted? iii) do electronic games make more difficult the interaction between players? In order to discuss these aspects, two instances of GDSSs were developed in the natural resources management domain. This domain was chosen because its negotiation process is both very important and complex.

Este trabalho propoe a definicao de uma arquitetura para incorporar jogadores virtuais em uma classe de Sistemas de Apoio a Decisao em Grupos (SADs-G), baseados na utilizacao conjunta de Simulacao Baseada em Multiagentes (MABS) e Jogos de Papeis (RPGs). Estas duas tecnicas, MABS e RPGs, vem sendo utilizadas de forma integrada ha alguns anos devido a capacidade de discussao e aprendizado dos RPG e da capacidade dinamica de MABS. Os jogadores virtuais definidos devem ter a capacidade de tomada de decisao e de comunicacao entre si e com os jogadores reais durante as negociacoes. Os principais aspectos discutidos neste trabalho sao: i) se os jogadores virtuais definidos possuem comportamentos nao-triviais perante aos jogadores reais; ii) se continua ocorrendo o processo de negociacao entre os jogadores, sejam eles reais ou virtuais; iii) se a realizacao de um jogo de forma eletronica (via computador) dificulta a interacao entre os jogadores. De forma a discutir estes aspectos, duas instancias de SADs-G foram implementadas no contexto da Gestao de Recursos Naturais, pois neste dominio o processo de negociacao e extremamente importante e complexo. / This thesis proposes the definition of an architecture to insert virtual players in a particular subclass of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS), that uses Multi-Agent-Based Simulation (MABS) and Role-Playing Games (RPGs) techniques in an integrated way. These techniques can bring interesting results, since it is possible to join the dynamic capacity of MABS with the discussion and learning capacity of RPGs. The defined virtual players must make decisions and communicate with each other and with the real players during the negotiation process. In this work, the main aspects discussed are the following: i) can virtual players have no-trivial behavior in the face of real players? ii) is the negotiation process between all players (virtual or real) still happening when virtual players are inserted? iii) do electronic games make more difficult the interaction between players? In order to discuss these aspects, two instances of GDSSs were developed in the natural resources management domain. This domain was chosen because its negotiation process is both very important and complex.