Episode 27: The Invisible Rules of Roleplaying

[Randalf the Gray]

Sam: "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 agree, and this seems to be approaching a more concise, and less limiting, definition of what Roleplaying is in itself, without concern for the specifics of gamification or structure.

Misha: "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."

Honestly, I'm torn on this. While I tend to prefer the second approach as well, it leaves room for some hard questions: Does a random table have enough agency to be considered a player-participant? The rules of a solo game? An AI player or GM? If my every action and response was randomly determined, do I?

Importantly, any answers to those questions feel like value-statements, and so my gut reaction would be just to say YES so as not to be exclusionary. And yet, there has to be a limit to what is or isn't a Roleplaying Game, so it seems that one's definition is no more or less concrete or valuable than a political stance. There can be no single, formal definition, because that requires a value-statement input of some kind by the definer, which may not hold true for others.

It reminds me of the ongoing debate about OSR. Ultimately, a game is OSR if someone says it is, as the defining factors are variable and divergent between perspectives. And I'm okay with that, so I think I'm okay with acquiescing to the defining of Roleplaying Games as being a matter of personal taste and inquiry.

Misha: "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."

You're right, the same split does exist in those games. I used them as examples because the games themselves are not ordered or structured around that split as Roleplaying Games often are, and they are more or less self-contained in that they have clear beginning and end states. Ordinarily, there are no expected discussions or extrapolations on one's actions and experiences whilst playing the games of chess or badminton, but that is a core fundament to how Roleplaying Games are played. But you're right, I kind of muddied the point with those examples.

Misha:  "...that type of synchronizing isn't different in type, but is different in difficulty. With cloture [sic], perfectly synchronizing player understanding of the game world becomes fully impossible."

I very much agree with this, though as in my response to Hexed Pressman, I would prefer to think of it as "depth" rather than "difficulty". While chess and badminton still contain the synchronization of understanding (psychic rapport) inherent to all human interactions, Roleplaying Games possess, and possibly require, a greater "depth" of this rapport by their very nature. Finding a floor to that hypothetical "threshold of depth" might serve well to differentiate Roleplaying Games as distinct from other games.

In response to jared:

This all reminds me of an old t-shirt I have, which I think about quite often.

Bear with me here.

Years ago, I found a secondhand t-shirt from The Matrix. It's a plain black t-shirt with with white print depicting lines of matrix code scrolling down from the phrase, There Is No Spoon.

But after decades of wear, the print has completely faded and disappeared, and so now, There Is No There Is No Spoon.

And eventually, when all memory has faded that it ever was, then, There Is No "There Is No There Is No Spoon".

Whether the spoon itself is objectively real or not is irrelevant in the sense that it exists in negation. There Is No Spoon creates the spoon to satisfy the logic of the statement, and so it exists in some regard.

From this an ontological hierarchy can be extrapolated: There Is No^x Y (TIN^x Y).

TIN^0 Y, where Y=Spoon, would be the first level of the hierarchy, the Spoon itself.
TIN^1 Y would be the original statement There Is No Spoon.
TIN^2 Y would be "There Is No There Is No Spoon", and so on.

If we consider Y = Play, the Structure of Play as TIN, and the Depth or Complexity of that Structure as the hierarchy (^x), it gets to a close approximation of my (current and tenuous) approach to a definition of Game. It is at once emergent yet integral, even necessary, for Play with Structure.

I don't know if this makes sense at all. I can attempt to clarify if necessary.