I Rolled a One and I'm Dead: Person Reference Across the Multiple Worlds of Table-Top Roleplaying Games

This thesis explores the use of person reference in table-top roleplaying games. These games involve participants portraying characters in a fictional world, often referring to those characters with by the player’s own names or through personal pronouns such as I. Through analysis of natural language data, I investigate current reference theories before creating a model of reference to explain roleplaying reference. The findings of this research suggest that reference is not related to the world external to the speaker, but rather to the internal worlds and mental representations created around their conversation and the activities to which they pertain.