Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2006, Psychology

This study was a critical, archetypal, feminist ethnography and psychological inquiry into the experiences of women in tabletop role-playing gaming and its culture. Informed by performance ethnographic practice and the spirit of these games, it is written as an adventurous journey into and encounter with these experiences based on participant observation, interviews with gaming professionals, an online questionnaire of 428 gamers, and series of interviews with female gamers. Ethnographically, this study documents the history and experiences of women in the culture of gaming. It presents profiles of a diversity of female gamers and explores historically the ways that women have established themselves as members of this culture and shaped this traditionally male dominated hobby. It also examines a multiplicity of opinions about and experiences of sexism, prejudice, and discrimination of women in gaming. While demonstrating the progress in the games and their culture to become more inclusive and welcoming to women, it shows there is still far to go. It also demonstrates how despite the possibility and creative potential for gaming and its culture to imagine completely new social worlds, the same power dynamics and social structures are recreated in the games, groups, and culture. Psychologically, the study uses archetypal, relational, and pluralistic models of the self to demonstrate the complex imaginal relationship between self and character and the notion that role-playing games can be transformational liminoid spaces. The study explored the multiplicity of three participants, through a series of interviews, one series with the player, one interacting with each participant in role as one of their characters, and then a final series reflecting on the experience of the two previous interviews, the process, and the themes that were discussed. These interviews demonstrate three different relationships between self and character, as well as the ways that those imaginal r (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Roger Knudson (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology, Clinical

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Wright State University, 2022, Computer Science and Engineering PhD

Inadequate professional training and practices related to health care may result in severe complications to care experiences and outcomes. Moreover, healthcare professionals are as susceptible to the possibility of implicit biases as any other group. Importantly, the health care training is critical and challenging as minor prejudicial beliefs have an adverse influence or serious consequences on patients' health outcomes. Thus, facilitating serious role-playing virtual care practices along with raising awareness of healthcare professionals about the enduring impact of implicit/explicit biases and Social Determinants of Health (SDH) on health outcomes assist to advance the patient-provider relation, care experiences (e.g., healthcare experience and patient care experience), and promote health equity. In addition, employing the “learning by doing” approach for health care practices directly in real-life is less preferred wherein high-risk care is essential. Thus, there is a high scope and demand for the utilization of alternative ways which can facilitate a self-driven and self-motivational digital experiential learning approach with the integration of innovative computer technology that encourages learners to acquire professional development skills. The primary focus of this research is to deliver Computer-Supported Experiential Learning (CSEL) and Computer-Supported Expert-Guided Experiential Learning (CSEGEL) approaches to deliver professional development skills (e.g., healthcare skills). Specifically, this research and development deliver CSEL and CSEGEL approaches-based serious role-playing games or mobile applications as digital experiential learning tools by integrating first-person virtual role-playing scenarios to enhance healthcare skills (e.g., cultural humility, professional communication, awareness of the enduring impact of both social determinants of health and implicit/explicit biases on health outcomes, and compassionate and empathetic attitude) of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Thomas Wischgoll Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Yong Pei Ph.D. (Committee Member); Michael L. Raymer Ph.D. (Committee Member); Paul J. Hershberger Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Education; Educational Software; Health; Health Care; Higher Education; Information Technology; Public Health; Public Health Education; Special Education; Systems Design

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Media and Communication

This dissertation looks to study the potential impacts and influences of media use and consumption on how individuals play Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), a popular tabletop role-playing game. Now enjoying its 7th consecutive year of record profits, D&D has grown alongside a wave of D&D media, with the traditional board game taking on new digital forms that alter how players can now interact with the hobby. Utilizing media theories such as figurations, Medium Theory, the Magic Circle, and the concept of media worlds, this paper looks at both the media objects being consumed and what influences they left with their user. Interpretive focus groups were used to collect testimony from groups that played D&D together, examining individual impacts and how groups as a whole negotiated their media use while playing. When looking at media consumed, it appears that the most common Uses by participants included Entertainment, gathering Information, or finding Tools to use during gameplay. Overall, Tool media were the most frequently utilized, although the physical distancing required by COVID-19 was cited as a factor in this widespread use. Demonstrated by the Engagement-Consumption-Impacts model, the major influences discovered were increases in the user's Game Knowledge and a decrease in the level of Rules-Adhesion, or how strictly the written rules of the game were enforced. Other findings included participants changing the style in which they played D&D, basing changes off the habits of players they watched online or strategies found to become “better” players. This study also suggests further implications of the theories used. In particular, the study of the “alpha media object,” media capable of impacting the user, the other media objects surrounding it, and even the figuration model as a whole, leaves several questions for future scholars to examine. In this study, that alpha media object was the podcast Critical Role (2015), a show so popular that it has begun to i (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Joshua Atkinson PhD. (Committee Chair); Vivian Miller PhD. (Committee Member); Radhika Gajjala PhD. (Committee Member); Laura Lengel PhD. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Popular Culture

Folklore may be transmitted and diffused through many forms of media, adding to pre-established meanings and interpretations. This may be accomplished through the reinterpretation of mythological or legendary figures or stories in popular media, such as video games, novels, or cinema. Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TTRPGs) such as Dungeons & Dragons are often built on a foundation of mythology and folklore, which players use as inspiration to craft their own shared stories and experiences, allowing for endless reinterpretations and transmission of those interpretations. Through forms of subtle performative acts, players may experience different resistances to the narratives of dominant society. These resistances present themselves in different ways but may come as an active choice by the players or because of underlying shifts in framework or perspective. Medusa has become a symbol of feminine rage and resistance against Patriarchal institutions, which has been reflected in the developing resources of TTRPG material. This allows players to engage with that resistance on personal scales through performance in a safe, imaginative space. The types and styles of games that players engage with are varied, but many have correlations with other forms of media. These cross-media genres bring their own motifs and underlying frameworks into the TTRPG medium. Inspired by Dark Souls, the Soulslike subgenre provides a series of rules heavily, and subtly, influenced by European Christian motifs reinterpreted through a Japanese framework in a form of hybridization. The genre conventions that have been translated into TTRPG mechanics allow players to explore these hybridizations which themselves act as a resistance against globalization in a type of cross-pollination of cultural elements. Recent additions to the TTRPG library are also showing a shift in the outlook on accessibility and respectability of the player-base. Older TTRPGs often succumb to Orientalist and insensitive approa (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kristen Rudisill Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Becca Cragin Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Classical Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, Mass Communication (Communication)

Although peace journalism is growing as a field of study, there is only a limited number of empirical studies that have systematically tested its effects. This study attempts to fill this lack by testing the effects of peace journalism interventions. The context for this study comes from Sri Lanka, where the ethnic cleavage between the Sinhala and Tamil people are sustained even after the end of the almost 30-year-long civil war. Media, a political propaganda machine during conflicts continue to hold influence in post-conflict societies with its power to disseminate and sustain narratives. Therefore, this study set out to find whether peace journalism values can help reduce the identity gap, which is operationalized as the distance between in-group and out-group attitudes. This research approaches the question innovatively through a role-playing experiment design. This 2 x 3 (Sinhala and Tamil primes x War, Peace, and Control Treatments) completely between-subjects study primed U.S. participants to take on the role of Sri Lankan ethnic identities. The results show that peace interventions are effective in reducing the identity gap among Tamil-primed participants. Findings suggest that the effectiveness of peace journalism interventions rely on minority-majority relations in ethnic asymmetries with power imbalances. This experiment also advances role-playing experiments as a methodology that opens avenues to explore questions among inaccessible populations and/or volatile environments.

Committee: Jatin Srivastava (Committee Chair); Hans Meyer (Committee Member); Myra Waterbury (Committee Member); Steve Howard (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Ethnic Studies; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Peace Studies; South Asian Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1961, Psychology

Committee: Kurt Haas (Advisor) Subjects: Psychology

Master of Science (MS), Wright State University, 2022, Computer Science

Promoting awareness of social determinants of health (SDoH) among healthcare providers is important to improve the patient care experience and outcome as it helps providers understand their patients in a better way which can facilitate more efficient and effective communication about health conditions. Healthcare professionals are typically educated about SDoH through lectures, questionaries, or role-play-based approaches; but in today's world, it is becoming increasingly possible to leverage modern technology to create more impactful and accessible tools for SDoH education. Wright LIFE (Lifelike Immersion for Equity) is a simulation-based training tool especially created for this purpose. It is a mobile app that would be available on both Google Play and Apple Store for easy access to the providers. This highly realistic, interactive, and captivating app is essential for creating mindfulness about SDoH and generating long-lasting compassion and empathy in health care workers for their real patients and helping them to build a good clinician-patient relationship. An important aspect of this simulation is the realism of the characters and their behavior. This thesis specifically focuses on the strategy and experience of designing and developing realistic human character models and animations so that the players connect naturally and deeply with the virtual characters. This contributes to the generation of a greater level of empathy in the providers and decreases the level of biases. In addition to its contribution to creating efficient design methodologies, this effort also resulted in a portfolio of high-quality, low-memory multi-modal avatars resembling diverse people of various ethnicities, ages, body types, and gender.

Committee: Yong Pei Ph.D. (Advisor); Paul J. Hershberger Ph.D. (Committee Member); Thomas Wischgoll Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Design; Educational Software; Health Care; Information Technology; Systems Design

Bachelor of Science of Media Arts and Studies (BSC), Ohio University, 2022, Media Arts and Studies

Prosocial video games and, by extension, non-player characters are positively associated with empathy and learning prosocial values. Therefore, if designed with believability in mind, persistent non-player characters can create unique player-focused stories that inspire real-life change. Companion is a role-playing game that focuses on cultivating believable relationships between the player and non-player follower characters to increase empathy and teach players prosocial values that will transfer into reality.

Committee: Beth Novak (Advisor); John Bowditch (Advisor) Subjects: Multimedia Communications

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Popular Culture

This thesis seeks to demonstrate how “race” as a concept is utilized in the genre of high fantasy. It examines how race is constructed in fantasy texts utilizing an essentialist framework wherein race is determinative of individual morality, psyche, and aptitude. In imagining race in fantastical worlds, high fantasy texts reproduce the ideas of unabashedly white supremacist race philosophers such as Carl Linnaeus, Arthur de Gobineau, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, applying them to fantastical beings rather than real world groups. The same racial logics that informed Nazism are seen at play in The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, and World of Warcraft. This thesis will examine how the essentialist framework is utilized through the three most common racial groups in high fantasy: Dwarves, Orcs, and Elves. In examining each of these groups in turn, broad patterns of how race is imagined become clear. Stereotypes about real-world groups are imported into fantastical worlds, where they are often combined and remixed over time by successive waves of authors. In comparing different fantasy texts, we see how the characterization of particular races changes with time to reflect the culture of the eras that produce them. In some cases, these re-imaginings are done directly in opposition to previous texts in attempts to correct offensive caricatures. However, even as imagined races themselves have changed with time, the overall concept of “race” in high fantasy remains mired in an essentialist mindset.

Committee: Jeffrey Brown Ph. D. (Committee Member); Esther Clinton Ph. D. (Committee Member); Jeremy Wallach Ph. D. (Advisor) Subjects: Cultural Anthropology; Ethnic Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2021, Communication

This study used semi-structured interviews to examine how players chose to customize their avatars in social video games. Thematic coding of 28 interviews revealed the common threads with which players create and maintain or update their avatars over time in many different game worlds. The effects of different toolsets that players use to construct these avatars is examined, along with the special role that players assign to the gender of their avatars. The behavioral effects of avatars are briefly explored, along with the way players regard the relationship between themselves and their avatars.

Committee: Teresa Lynch Dr. (Committee Member); Jesse Fox Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Communication

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, American Culture Studies

Forum-based role-playing games are a rich, yet barely researched subset of textbased digital gaming. They are a form of storytelling where narratives are created through acts of play by multiple people in an online space, combining collaboration and improvisation. This dissertation acts as a pilot study for exploring these games in their full complexity at the intersection of play, narrative, and fandom. Building on theories of interactivity, digital storytelling, and fan fiction studies, it highlights forum games' most unique features, and proves that they are is in no way liminal or secondary to more popular forms of role-playing. The research is based on data drawn from a large sample of forums of various genres. One hundred sites were explored through close textual analysis in order to outline their most common features. The second phase of the project consisted of nine months of participant observation on select forums, in order to gain a better understanding of how their rules and practices influence the emergent narratives. Participants from various sites contributed their own interpretations of forum gaming through a series of ethnographic interviews. This did not only allow agency to the observed communities to voice their thoughts and explain their practices, but also spoke directly to the key research question of why people are drawn to forum gaming. The main drawing power of forum games is their focus on creative, collaborative writing. Players interested in writing with others in a playful setting, and engaging with their favorite popular culture texts through composition, are drawn to these sites because of the narrative freedom they offer compared to other gaming platforms. In addition, their narratives born from play are consciously, intentionally, and enthusiastically multimodal. Multimodality offers a wide range of creative opportunities for telling stories in a digital space, and it also has connections to older, oral forms of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kristine Blair Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Radhika Gajjala Dr. (Committee Co-Chair); Jeremy Wallach Dr. (Committee Member); Lisa Gruenhagen Dr. (Other) Subjects: Composition

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Home Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Home Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2015, Popular Culture

This thesis is a critical examination of how players of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons use the concept of race, both in and out of the game. The study of race in role-playing games has been neglected, and this is a tragedy, because these games offer a unique space where the concept of race, often a difficult and uncomfortable topic of conversation, is questioned, criticized, and reshaped by the players. Role-playing games are spaces of encounter between the players and a cast of imaginary others, and this requires a degree of empathy on the part of the players that makes role-playing games a space of ideological change, as players are forced to consider the world from viewpoints both familiar and alien. The theoretical framework within combines a phenomenological analysis of roleplaying games that allows non-gamers to understand the practice and importance of these games with critical race theorists such as bell hooks, Paul Gilroy, and Patricia Hill Collins that defines what race is and how it affects all of us on a day-to-day basis. This thesis is also based on interviews with geographically diverse set of gamers who demonstrate the highly personal nature of gaming, and how race takes on a multitude of meanings both within the fictional game settings and around the gaming table.

Committee: Jeremy Wallach (Advisor); Esther Clinton (Committee Member); Marilyn Motz (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Ethnic Studies; Recreation