The IRIS* project has been developed as the continuation of the international project "Roaming Anthropology", which is a project that started the scholarly cooperation of ethnology and anthropology clubs from ex-Yugoslavia.
The first seminar was held in the February of 2002 in Belgrade, Serbia. It consisted of lectures and workshops moderated by professors and assistants from the Ethnology and Anthropology Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade and the Ethnology Department of Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. It focused mainly on past and current social problems and on the role of an ethnologist and an anthropologist in contemporary society.
The second seminar was held in the November of 2002 in Ohrid, Macedonia. Its program included introduction to the subculture and minority culture research, and the decision to cooperate on such a research was made. Upon return to their home countries, the conclusions of the Ohrid seminar were presented to the students' clubs and the interested students were invited to choose their research topics. These included the Roma, vegetarians, jugglers and students of ethnology and anthropology.
One of the topics were fantasy games, chosen by Ana Rajner. After coming into contact with Tanja Vuckovic, the idea about the cooperaton on the more comprehensive research on the role-playing games (RPG) subculture came into being. This resarch team was soon joined by Marko Salopek and Zdravko Popovic, and later also by Danijel Lončar and Josip Ević, and the work on the research has began :).
* IRIS is an acronym of the Croatian name of the project: Istraživanje role-playing igračke subkulture (Research of Role-playing gamers' subculture).