Toward a Polyvocal Semantic Infrastructure for Tabletop Role-Playing Game Research: A Scoping Review of Multimedia Play Data

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 35 studies on computational, multimodal, multimedia, and knowledge-organization approaches to TTRPG-derived data. The findings show that this research is fragmented across publication venues, data types, analytical aims, and levels of formalization. Existing studies combine qualitative interpretation, discourse and conversation analysis, player-experience evaluation, structured datasets, natural language processing, semantic annotation, AI-assisted generation, and controlled vocabularies, but these approaches remain weakly coordinated across disciplinary vocabularies, data models, and formalization practices. To address this gap, the article proposes a Polyvocal Semantic Infrastructure for TTRPG research. Structured through a semantic atlas and scope ladder, this framework addresses persistent ambiguity in how objects and terms are defined across communities, systems, and disciplines while preserving interpretive plurality and supporting comparison, retrieval, provenance tracking, and future AI-assisted analysis of TTRPG-derived multimedia play data.