When I was a lad, not only did I have to walk
seven
miles to school (through a snow-storm, uphill...both
ways), but there was only one Role-Playing game, and that
was Dungeons & Dragons, which was three tan
pamphlets, staple-bound, packed in a white cardboard box.
That box changed my life. No,
really. Maybe not in a truly profound way--I didn't vow
then and there to become a game designer, or to dedicate
my life to spreading the joys of Role-Playing to the
unenlightened (although I've certainly done a certain
amount of that)--but it opened up an entirely new world,
a new continuum of worlds, to me.
Role-Playing games are, in my
view, a new mode of experiencing reality (or perhaps a
new mode of experiencing fiction). While there are
aspects of Role-Playing Games (RPGs) which bear
resemblance to other art forms, resemblences of which
much is made when trying to explain RPGs to neophytes,
what's important is the one crucial difference: RPGs
provide you with genuine experiences in fictive settings.
It can be hard to explain exactly
what a RPG is to someone who's never played one--hence
the heavy reliance on analogy. "Role-Playing is like
improvisational theater." "Role-Playing is like
collaborative story-telling." "Game-Mastering
is like writing a story or a play." But the
difference between those analogies and what Role-Playing
actually is, is (to swipe from Twain) the difference
between lightning and a lightning-bug.
What, then, is Role Playing,
really? I mean, obviously Role-Playing involves playing a
role, but so what? Why is that different from
improvisational theater, or even regular old theater?
What is it exactly that Role-Players do?
Role-Playing is a game of
make-believe, with the addition of a specific player
designated to adjudicate the outcome of all the actions
in the game. At its most basic level, think Cowboys &
Indians, or Cops & Robbers, but with a referee whose
job it is to say whether Sagebrush Sam's shot hit Big
Chief Runaround or not. Without the referee, what you
have is a form of improvisational theater (or an
argument "You're dead!" "No, you
missed!") if the results are adjudicated by consent
of the players, or a game of laser-tag or paint-ball if
the results are determined by technology and real-world
physics.
Why does the addition of a
referee make such a difference? Because when you add a
referee to the mix, you give up a measure of control; it
is the loss of that control that changes the essence of
the experience; it becomes an actual experience of a
world with rules (as determined by the game or the whim
of the referee) slightly different from our own. You have
as little choice about obeying those rules, short of
quitting the game (or otherwise breaking the experience,
say by coercing the referee) as you do of choosing to
disobey the laws of physics in our own world. If the law
of gravity says you fall, you fall; if the rules of the
game-world that simulate gravity say your character
falls, your character falls.
My contention is that this forces
you to experience the fictive world in much the same way
that you actually experience our own. You make decisions
based on your understanding of the world, and then you
wait to see what are the consequences. The world is
fictive, but the decision, and the anticipation during
that period of uncertainty are real. So too are the
emotions generated by success or failure.
This, by the way, is the reason
that some people become so caught up in the
experience--occassionally unhealthily so. When the
emotions are real--when the elation and grief you
experience are real to you, are first-hand experiences in
a way that, say, they are not when generated second-hand
by observing what happens to others as in art-forms like
novels or theater, it can be much harder to recognize and
deal with them when they are inappropriate. It's only a
game, while true, is not the whole truth. If you were
capable of treating your character, your "I" in
the game-world, with the same emotional detachment as you
can a piece in checkers, you would be unlikely to regard
RPGs as being any more interesting than checkers. (No
offense to checkers fans intended).
What this means in practice is
that in the context of a Role-Playing game, the players
can experiment with experiencing decision-making and
emotions in contexts that are unvailable to them in the
real-world, either as a practical matter (e.g. playing
characters who are much stronger, or more highly skilled,
or in positions of great responsibility such as national
leaders, or have powers and abilities "far beyond
those of mortal men") or because of logical
impossibility (e.g. experiencing your own
death--something that's happened to me many a time, or
life as a member of an alien race). There can be an
element of wish-fulfillment in this (Role-Playing
certainly seems to attract more than an average share of
the bright but disaffected), but I think that the primary
wish is to see the world through the eyes of another.
Roleplayers are quite likely to play characters who are,
at least in certain respects, either worse off than
themselves--saddled with certain physical or mental
handicaps, or simply different--a member of an alien
race, or of the opposite sex, or just someone whose
personality and outlook on life differs from one's own.
I've often seen players retire characters from play, not
because they are unsuccessful in the game, but because
they've either become too successful to be interesting,
or because of a desire to "try something
different." In essence, they've gotten what they
think that they can out of that experience, and want to
move on to new experiments.
I'd like to think that the
lessons that can be learned from such experimentation,
besides being amusing in an of themselves (something that
I, of all people,would never dream of knocking), can be
of practical value. Not that I think it likely that
having played a character who's an expert paramedic would
actually be of help in an emergency (unless the referee
were a real bear for accurate detail), but because I
think that the qualities of empathy and flexibility of
mind that are most called upon by Role-Playing are
valuable in our day-to-day lives. Certainly there is no
greater spur that I know of to "thinking outside of
the box" than to successfully imagine a way out of a
problem that you imagined yourself being in in the first
place.