Episode 27: The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying

[misha]

I agree with both of you, power is power, whether aware or not, but awareness is required to play a game. A game can possess neither foreknowledge nor awareness, thus it must either be disqualified from consideration as a Player-Participant in the Game that is itself, or allocation of power being a determining factor for status as Participant must be reassessed. I tend to favor the latter case, and I believe the reassessment should emphasize power and agency being coequal. If the former is the case, then the Rules cannot apply to all existent Roleplaying Games, and thus either fail totally as an all-encompassing definition, or become needlessly exclusionary.

I guess I can see two ways we can visualize this relationship.

First, we could just claim that only humans can be participants and the book/rules/etc are all just subsets of that 'hierarchy'--they constrain the ways human players can contribute to the fiction. Under this view, the human is still the one creating all of the game-world outside of their character (aka-storytelling, not roleplaying), but they are accepting strong bindings on their ability to do so--any change they make has to either be reading from the book or be mediated by a mechanic. This would fix your issue with awareness detailed above.

Second, we could just admit that the awareness bit is there to split off humans with a lusory attitude (ones knowingly playing) from ones without and update the description slightly to allow for non-conscious participants to play. I think that this actually makes all the forces at play in a RPG session a little easier to visualize, so it's the way I prefer.

While I tend to agree, doesn't this imply that Roleplaying Games are inherently only "Games of One"? Can we never be said to be playing the same Roleplaying Game in the same sense as when we play a game of chess, or badminton? 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?

Where I disagree with you is where you claim that chess and badminton don't have the same split. We can't directly connect our psychic systems (thoughts), so on some level any time we interact with another person there are two versions of that game/conversation/whatever--one in the mind of each participant. We just use various techniques and tools to synchronize everyone's perceptions of reality--chess pieces in chess, clarifying terms in a conversation, asking questions in a RPG.

The difference between chess and a TTRPG, in my mind, is that a chess game contains way less data than an imaginary RPG world, while also recording nearly all of that data onto a persistent physical object (the board and pieces). It's possible for the two players of a chess game to both have the sum total of the chess game's state in their heads as they play, and for those views to be effectively identical. Even before cloture, RPG sessions are just so much bigger than chess boards and lack persistent physical depictions of the total game state (unless, potentially, you're playing via text)--that type of synchronizing isn't different in type, but is different in difficulty. With cloture, perfectly synchronizing player understanding of the game world becomes fully impossible.

I'm not convinced that rules ever congeal (in role-play) into "game," or that they ever could.

How much I agree with you depends almost entirely on how you define game, I think. I definitely see things like RPG rule books as being only a single ingredient of the big mix of forces that create a RPG session, and would argue that basically every table of players is creating their own game on the fly (albeit with assistance from any rulesbooks and modules used). Whether what they're creating is truly a 'game' or not just depends on what definition of game we're using. It feels like you have a specific definition of game in mind here that I haven't entirely picked up on yet

This all feeds at least a little into my hot take that there's only really one RPG system, and that all the books and goals and techniques people use are just plugins being added on top of it.