Spot Check 15: Rules Complexity and Intimidation
How does bringing new players into a group of gamers influence their group identity? How does the complexity of a game shape a new player’s experience? Find out in this installment of Spot Check!
All posts by Nick Mizer
Spot Check Flashback #1: The Mythic Everyday
In this installment of Spot Check Flashbacks we’re going back to the beginning. This is the first episode of the series, recorded when my Kickstarter was in full swing. If you want to skip past the section about the Kickstarter, set a course for 1:50, where you’ll here me talk about the ways that we narrativize our everyday lives and how stories help us with that.
Spot Check 14: Gamer Evangelism
As promised, here is the most recent episode of Spot Check, the video series documenting my dissertation research into tabletop gaming. New episodes will be posted every Thursday. If you’d like to start at the beginning, you can go directly to the Youtube channel, or catch the archived episodes as they go up every Saturday. In this episode I talk about insider anthropology and gamers’ enthusiasm for bringing new people into the hobby.
(Crowd)Funding Like a Geek
After I wrote a post about “vexing” and then disappearing for six months, you could be forgiven for thinking that by “vexing” I mean “troll the blog by never posting.” My absence was not prompted by the lulz, however, but by needing to focus all of my attention on fieldwork for my dissertation on tabletop role-playing games. I still have some fieldwork left to do, but have finally been able to come up for air and share some of how my research has been going and how that relates to geek anthropology.
Just to Vex and Be Vexed in Return
I suppose it’s my turn to introduce myself.
My name is Nick Mizer, and I’m a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Texas A&M University, where I’m working on a dissertation analyzing the historical relationships between story, play, and imagined spaces in Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve been studying D&D since my senior year as an undergraduate, when I came to the topic by way of studies in folklore and mythology. The parallels between ritual and myth on the one hand and play and narrative on the other are the first thing that caught my interest in D&D. Gaining a better understanding of those relationships has been the driving force behind a lot of my research since then. Here on the blog I’ll probably be posting a lot about gaming, but also about other areas of geek culture too.
The Geek Anthropologist 