Starker, Steven. “.” Hospital & Community Psychiatry, 30.1 (1979): 25-30. Rather than getting lost in fantasies, psychiatric patients generally suffer from too little fantasy. 6 pages. (1979, January).
Abstract. Johnson, David Quinlan, Donald
Collins, Arthur W. (1980, September).
Sampson, Judith (1982, September). Adventuring with shaky hands.
Sutton, Roger (1984, November). D&D phenomenon, "In the YA Corner" column, from SLJ School Library Journal, page 82.
Role Playing Games allow users to impersonate characters whose skills are managed through rules and game mechanics.
Below is the current CAR-PGa Literature List in web format. If you would prefer to download and/or print the Literature List, you can do so at the links below. To save these files on Windows machines, right click the link and choose SAVE AS from the menu that appears
Originally published in The Bulletin of Bibliography, Vol. 58, No. 2 June 2001, pages 101-108, this reprint is meant to take advantage of the electronic medium, allowing readers to hyperlink from one aspect of "geek culture" to another, while also allowing the author, William Svitavsky, the opportunity to expand the bibliography as additional scholarship on related subjects is unearthed. Similarly, as new areas of "geek culture" are created, studies of such will also be included within the bibliography. As such, and to our knowledge, Mr. Svitavsky has authored the first "living" bibliography, which will constantly evolve and change as our knowledge of that culture changes and expands. Interested readers are thus encourage to consult the bibliography regularly, as it will be in the process of constant growth.
Throughout this document I am constantly referring to "Immersion" and "Flow" (state) as related experiences. They are on a continuum of subjective experience questionnaires, and externally observed behaviors.
Psychological Studies on Role-Playing Games This is a reference to some psychological studies that have been done on the effects of role-playing. There is a more complete and international list of studies at the German site www.rpgstudies.net. This list has capsule descriptions of the results for many of the studies, however. See also the bibliography at Geek Culture: An Annotated Interdisciplinary Bibliography Many of the references were provided by Jennifer Wilkes of the CAR-PGa organization. Some mass-media sources have suggested a link between role-playing games and suicides, criminal behavior, or social withdrawal. However, I cannot find any psychological studies which substantiate this. There have been individual cases of role-playing gamers who have committed suicide or crimes, certainly. Given any large number of gamers, however, this is to be expected. However, no study has found any increase in suicide or criminal behavior in gamers compared with the average population.
Studies About Fantasy Role-Playing Games Studien über Fantasy-Rollenspiele From time to time there were attacks on role-playing games, so our role-playing club started in 1994 to collect scientific studies about RPGs that can be provided for research for your master thesis or problems with the boulevard press or authorities (if it isn’t too inconvenient to send the stuff by snail mail). If you know of a study we haven't got yet, please mail me. Likewise we are interested in more newspaper articles, tv or radio reports for our archive. We try to make more resources available online to ease research -- but it depends on permissions for re-print by the copyright owners. Also the e-mail addresses of many authors have been provided to create a forum for the exchange of ideas with this site.
