I Can Get You to Do Anything
(from a conversation with Brand)
I'd argue that it has come to mean people intentionally and collaboratively creating an experience.
It's merely traditions and context and shared vocabulary that provides form to all this and makes it seem like a collective whole when really it's a host of very different activities. How many different ways can you "create an experience"? How many different kinds of experiences are there?
Our river has run into the ocean.
- I recently began suspecting that the reason I love roleplaying as a medium has a lot to do with the infinite canvas. I can tell roleplayers to do anything, absolutely anything, and they will be game for it as long as it's part of an entertaining "game." That's really astounding.
It's sorta like scripting a piece of performance art. I could write a game for, say, 1 mature female, 1 boy child, a pianist, and a puppeteer. The woman and boy are Mary and Jesus off buying groceries at a market in Egypt (they're still hiding from Herod). The pianist and the puppeteer collaboratively create the people and situations they encounter in the market, based on guidelines I lay out. Jesus and Mary react to these situations.
AND PEOPLE WILL ACTUALLY PLAY THIS! Isn't that nuts?! And that's not even half the things I can get people to do, just by writing a "roleplaying game." And that's SO INCREDIBLY AWESOME.
I'd argue that it has come to mean people intentionally and collaboratively creating an experience.
It's merely traditions and context and shared vocabulary that provides form to all this and makes it seem like a collective whole when really it's a host of very different activities. How many different ways can you "create an experience"? How many different kinds of experiences are there?
Our river has run into the ocean.
posted by Jonathan Walton at 2:30 PM
2 Comments:
You're right that it's missing something. You could certainly consider the experience of going bowling together to be a kind of freeform larp (or write a game that you played while bowling), but that would require a certain brand of intentionality that's not inherant in bowling itself. Hmm...
In any case, this wasn't meant to be a strict definition so much as an arrow pointing towards a vast, empty space waiting to be filled.
This is true. I wonder how long we'll be able to call all of this stuff "roleplaying." Sure, Andy's floating Clinton's term "story games" but I don't think that is clearly distinguished from anything other than wargames ("war games are about war, story games are about stories").
Personally, I plan to enjoy this Golden Age.
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