One advantage that the low-permanency of roleplaying brings to the table is the same advantage that other low-permanence mediums have. Consider anything that’s about live performance: ballet, live music, theater, etc. Each of them have a sense of uniqueness. A sense that this performance is special and never to be repeated.
There’s this interesting, for lack of a better word, ‘vigor’ to live performances. There’s this interesting energy that comes with live performances. I believe that this is, at least in part, due to the inability to edit. There’s this interesting pressure to get it right the first time because there is no second time.
There’s also a certain intimacy to live performance. No outsider will ever be able to have that experience. This is not the case with recorded mediums like film and text, in which an outsider can come in later and get the same content as any of the participants (though, of course, the context will be different). This is especially true of live creative acts like roleplaying, where it’s difficult to reproduce even a similar performance in terms of content (though, interestingly, the context is easier to recapture).
Tags: Snippet-post, Theory
It has been my experience that this “pressure to get it right” area of live (gaming) performance is detrimental to RPGs, especially for newer players. I think finding ways to allow players to edit previously established decisions is a good thing and may (MAY!) help relieve this pressure.
Also, I believe the context is easier to capture because a similiar artificial environment is created with each re-enactment, and the components of the “performance” are still roughly the same. If anything, it’s the distractions away from the pre-established context that often make games shine in memory — when something cool happens and unexpected happens or someone says that exactly right wrong thing at just the right time.