HISTORY

Starting around 1985 in fits and starts, and then more consistently since 2004, the project has been advancing each year since. The project founder, Hawke Robinson, first began formally researching the educational and social impacts of role playing games in 1985 in response to the barrage of negative press and public misinformation about role playing games popular in the 1980's, especially Dungeons & Dragons. Further development in consideration of broader psychosocial impacts from role playing games resumed with a series of essays written for the Therapeutic Recreation and other departments at Eastern Washington University beginning in 2004, followed by a number of successive documents and publications continuing to develop more detailed hypotheses, theses and series of research projects.

There are scores of existing RPG-related research projects, but most have been just meta research or correlative data or a few individual case studies, with very narrow data-sets, very small in scale, and/or only over a very short time line.