What Have I Gotten Myself Into?

Role-playing games aren't simple, but the human brain is wired for language and telling stories, making them intuitive. Following that logic, all you need to learn are the rules. Ease of play means easy study, right?

You'd be wrong. It does not.

Let's start with studying language, which is used both during play and in the rules. Language can be studied in a multitude of ways, from grammatology (word order), semiotics (signs), rhetoric (arguments), genres (social patterns), and many more.

Add the game parts onto that, for example game theory (math/psychology) and economics, and you start to see just how many fields can go into a single role-playing game.

But even that's not the end of it because all these systems work together, resulting in emergence. Emergence is the bane of my academic career.

Fortunately, Bakhtin convinced me to shift focus onto ideas (rhetoric, genres). Nonetheless, despite ruling out constructing language, I'm still trying to figure out what fields are irrelevant. It doesn't help that rhetorical genre studies is linked to cultural studies.

And that's just a glimpse into why role-playing games are a nightmare to study.