All Tomorrow's Cultures

While looking for the European journal, Anthropos , I stumbled across another Anthropos --this one an anthropologically-informed RPG start-up comprised of a PhD student in anthropology (Calvin Johns) and a linguistics/ literature Ph.D. (Travis Rinehart).  It looks like they'll be releasing "Early Dark" soon--although I can't tell whether it will get any kind of distribution or whether it will be strictly print-on-demand (POD).  It's a typical, table-top RPG, but with the anthropological twist. What does it mean to have an anthropologically informed RPG?  In a July interview with Park Cooper (posted on the Comics Bulletin column,  " The Park and Bob Show "),  Rinehart describes their goal as creating "a world that as accurately as possible represents an anthropologically correct vision of human reality (besides magick)," while Johns adds that "We take influence from cultures traditionally demonized, feminized, stereotyped or homogenized i...

Over the past couple of years, a rising trend: ethnographic explorations of gaming and RPG's. The anthropological ones have been interesting: Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life: An anthropologist explores the Virtually Human and the forthcoming ethnography, My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An anthropologists account of World of Warcraft , by Bonnie Nardi. But it's the para-anthropologies that concern me here--Mark Barrowcliffe's blistering (and ultimately depressing) The Elfish Gene and, most recently, Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: an Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms All of them (anthropological and para-anthropological) share certain characteristics: they all approach role-playing games from the perspective of the middle-aged outsider, socially distant from the world of the gamer. This is at least methodologically familiar in the academic anthropology. Stereotypically, the anthropolog...