Episode 27: The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying

[jared]

Are the parts we call "The Game" and which we all agree we are playing together only the collaborative storytelling or board-gaming parts, while the true Roleplaying sits only with each individual participant and can never be truly shared?

 
If anything, I think it's the opposite. We can be moderately confident in at least some parts of the shared imagined world between us, just as we can be moderately confident in the continual [re]definition of the imagined world via agreed-upon hierarchies of character constructs and non-character constructs. We can be pretty sure in our roleplaying, and we can be pretty sure in our not-roleplaying-that-influences-roleplaying. 

But I'm less sure about the game of it: that is, in paraphrased-Suitsian terms, what our goals are, and what our constraints are. While most people are fairly familiar with the idea that each of our imagined worlds are subtly (or unsubtly) different, I think what's less familiar is the idea that that the game(s) we play in/with those imagined worlds are less clearly definable.

I think in general, it's more accurate to describe most RPG sessions as a series of overlapping and interlinked games, rather than one strictly distinct game that we can clearly define. That's true of all games, as I said, but I think if you compare an ordinary RPG session to a match of, say, chess, the latter is far more well-defined and well-understood than an RPG. That doesn't mean we can't play RPGs together, and it certainly doesn't mean that our own individual games don't interact with each other, but rather just that we are all not playing the exact same game. This Player–Designer overlap seems similar: it's still multiple distinct games, they just happen to influence and intersect each other. 

One might be tempted to take an eliminativist position toward "game," in the specific case of role-play, insofar as our colloquial attempts to wrangle play into some systemic shape seem not only to fail, but to some degree close us off to understanding play in-itself. Or, if one were reticent to jettison "game" entirely, one might posit "game" as an emergent property of play, one that appears systemic, but only to the degree that any human activity is systemic (like conversation, or buying a new pair of shoes)—entirely attributable to our specific psycho-biological make-up. In this second arrangement, "game" becomes merely an artifact of the ways players understand their own play, rather than a source of play, or a limiting device upon play, etc. And in both arrangements, the "game designer" becomes entirely irrelevant to play, except perhaps as a chronicler of play (in some specific context, over some specific period of time) from whom we might gain more general insight into other kinds of arbitrarily similar play. As I've said at least once: there are books, and there is play.

Anyway, this is why I tend to talk about "rules" rather than "game," because rules are prima facie merely utterances. They have rhetorical weight, but not ontological weight. I'm not convinced that rules ever congeal (in role-play) into "game," or that they ever could. But none of this is especially relevant to the topic—my apologies—except to point out that game studies, or what I've seen of it, generally leaves me cold.