Toward a Polyvocal Semantic Infrastructure for Tabletop Role-Playing Game Research: A Scoping Review of Multimedia Play Data
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) research increasingly produces complex multimodal and multimedia evidence, including speech, audiovisual recordings, character sheets, maps, platform traces, session notes, game-state data, and retrospective documentation. However, the field lacks a stable methodological infrastructure for organizing, comparing, retrieving, and reusing these heterogeneous forms of play-derived evidence. This article presents a scoping review of computational, multimodal, multimedia, and knowledge-organization approaches used to analyze TTRPG-derived data. The review followed PRISMA-informed transparency practices, used SPIDER to define the review scope, and synthesized 35 included sources through an extraction matrix, a research-question alignment matrix, and keyword co-occurrence analysis. The findings show that TTRPG research is distributed across publication ecosystems, data types, analytical purposes, and levels of formalization. Existing studies use qualitative interpretation, discourse and conversation analysis, player-experience evaluation, structured datasets, natural language processing, named entity recognition, semantic annotation, AI-assisted generation, and controlled vocabularies. However, these approaches remain weakly coordinated across disciplinary vocabularies, data models, and formalization practices. To address this gap, the article proposes a Polyvocal Semantic Infrastructure that responds to a double ontological problem in TTRPG research: the same object is named in multiple ways, and the same term is used for different objects across communities, systems, and disciplines. Operationalized through a semantic atlas and scope ladder, this infrastructure preserves interpretive plurality while supporting comparison, retrieval, provenance tracking, and future AI-assisted analysis of TTRPG-derived Multimedia Play Data.
Source: Multimedia
Authors: Cristo Leon, Julian Marcone
Institution: New Jersey Institute of Technology
Language: English
Topic: Digital Games and Media
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,207
OpenAlex ID: W7212626393