New Perspectives on Games in Social Sciences
The sociology of games and play is underdeveloped. Its main works are getting old (j. Huizinga in the 1930s; R. Caillois in the 1950s), and recent approaches as games studies do not contribute to their renewal. In this paper, live action role-playing games (LARPs) are used as a case to update theoretical frames on three levels: social research on games and plays in general; sociological concepts as the social construction of reality and frame analysis (P. Berger et Th. Luckmann; G. Bateson & E. Goffman); cross disciplinary discussion with narratology, focusing on the articulation between game and fiction (J-M. Schaeffer).