This is a rather rambly post, I had a bit of a hard time finding my focus for it. I suppose that when you do a weekly post some weeks you just suck. My apologies.
Roleplaying is a complex hobby, one that has defied any attempt to define what, precisely, it is. Roleplaying is an incredible hodgepodge, and individual groups pick and choose various aspects of it in various quantities for their personal use.
Roleplaying consists of various quantities of the following things, but it is important to remember that in some groups the quantity is zero for somethings. Mechanical risk/reward evaluation, tactical/strategic thinking, acting, immersion, story-telling, story-authoring, collaboration, and there are surely some that I have forgotten, or even failed to recognize.
Take a look at that list. Those are fairly complex things. Story-telling, for instance, involves reading your audience and shaping your story to them (at least to some degree); acting involves verbal and non-verbal cues; immersion, man, I am not even going to touch that one at the moment.
Various groups (and schools of roleplaying play and design) tend to favor specific combinations of the various elements that are all lumped in as part of the hobby as the thing they pursue. From this arises the problem often referred to as “one-true-wayism”, or the belief that one’s personal understanding of how the various elements are combined in play is considered the only valid combination.
The fights over whether something is, or is not, “really roleplaying” are ultimately socio-linguistic. They are fights to have the right to an existing sub-cultural niche. There is an entire, likely interesting, article on that subject, probably already written in some other context, but it is beyond the scope of what I plan to discuss here.
The important thing is that it is in this confluence of various activities that we find our fun. The fun is not purely in story-telling, else we would be story-tellers, not roleplayers. Nor is the fun purely in the tactical thinking, nor acting, nor immersion. The fact that we roleplay instead of doing these other things is a very good indicator that there is something enticing in the synergistic combination of these elements. Something that makes us want to roleplay instead of story-telling, and acting, and playing tactical games separately.
None of this is really new. Most people recognize that roleplaying is something of a hodgepodge hobby. Though I think it becomes very easy for us to lose sight of that when we do theory. We get focused on one aspect or another, and though we know intellectually that what we talk about is merely a slice of things, we often act as if it is the entirety.
I do think that all of us doing roleplaying theory stand to benefit significantly from studying the various theories surrounding the discussion and practice of these related fields, especially discussions of motivations to participate in these fields. There is something uniquely compelling about roleplaying, and I have this intuition that whatever it is is present in every permutation of the hobby.
The problem is, of course, that I have no idea what this unifying thing is. It seems that there must be something that drives us to the hobby, and that the core of that something could very well be universal, but I do not even know where to start looking for it.
A lot of the roleplaying theory I discuss is aimed at a very specific branch of roleplaying: narrative generation. It is something that I really enjoy, or at least it synergizes with whatever it is that I really enjoy. Yet I recognize that there is more out there, and much of it is terribly under-explored.
A final admonition: when you do roleplaying theory, remember that roleplaying is big. Probably bigger than whatever it is you are thinking. That does not make your thinking useless, but it does mean you should be careful not to fall into the trap of thinking you are talking about all roleplaying.
Next week: The difference between rules and guidelines, and when you should use one over the other.
Tags: Theory
It might be useful, when playing around with some of the ideas around roleplaying and how different people react to them, to see when people use the “I might as well” construction. As in, “I might as well read [write] a book,” or “I might as well play a board game,” &c.
Elliot,
That’s actually a pretty interesting suggestion. I’m going to try to keep it in mind when I’m watching discussions of this sort of thing.
Thomas