Regarding the nature of roleplaying

[clehrich]

"Roleplaying" I'm defining as I did above, essentially to say that I think it is acting in this specific circumstance of the imaginary stage played upon in verbal drama. So I think that roleplaying is a subset of gaming broadly... but of roleplaying gaming I would say that roleplaying is the definitive act in such a pursuit. [emphasis added]

Okay, this definition has a number of parts; it's not a simple proposition.

roleplaying is part of gaming
roleplaying is a form of acting
roleplaying is definitive to RPG-gaming[/list:u]Now I'm not going to challenge that head-on.  The first two seem to me just fine, if you want to define the term so; it's a slightly narrower conception of roleplaying than I think lots of folks here are comfortable with, but it's your thread and your definition.  The third point, however, does not arise naturally from the first two, and for me is where there is a logical problem.

Regarding the question of reductionism, I've never been sure what to do with that term.

These days, it far too often gets used pejoratively: you naughty reductionist, and all.  I don't mean that; I mean that you are quite literally reducing, in the sense that you have a singular foundation element, an "essence," a sine qua non.  Everything else is subordinate to this: if it doesn't have roleplaying, it is not, ipso facto, RPG-gaming.  If you prefer the term "eliminative" I'm fine with that, but really the two are synonymous here.

But perhaps you're right that it lacks a certain utility (or even proportion) when divorced from other context.

It really depends on where you put it in a context.  If you put it at the base of a hierarchical tree, it would certainly make the distinction you want.  For example:

[*]Is it game or not?  YES --> it's a game
[*]If it's a game, does it have roleplaying or not?  YES --> it's an RPG
[*]If it's an RPG, does it have dice or not?  YES --> it's a diced RPG[/list:u]And so on.  But at any rate you'd have to establish first that it is a game in order for roleplaying to define it as an RPG; that is, you couldn't know, just from seeing that it's got roleplaying, that it isn't acting in the sense of on-stage -- but the previous discriminant would eliminate that.

Now you could take this approach, I admit.  But what you're going to find is a total lack of agreement about what order to put the elements in, and I can't see any empirical means by which to establish this.  You've seen this here.  You can certainly define it as you like, but if you want a definition that has broader application than yourself and a few friends, it's got to be more generally accepted.

So the question would be what logic inherent in RPG-gaming as a hobby can we seize upon in order to find the appropriate order for the criteria?  In Linnaeus, it was focused upon an arbitrary choice: he chose to focus on reproductive organs and their structures.  That's fine, and it sure worked well for a while, but in a sense it described the "what" of plants and animals but not the "why."  It didn't explain, it just classified.

Now Goethe came along with his Morphologie, and suggested an organic structure based upon the way plants actually grow.  This helped quite a bit, because it re-founded classification upon a logic interior to plants themselves, but there wasn't any really good way to apply it consistently.  Maybe given time, people would have worked it out, but in the end they dropped it.

Because then Darwin came along, and suggested a new structure: a chronological one, i.e. evolution.  And that meant that you could focus not on simply classifying what plants were like but why they were like that because you could work out how they had gotten that way.

Now I don't see any way to do this in RPG's that anyone's going to be happy with.  You could construct an evolutionary model, going back to wargames or something, and structure from there.  The problem is, people don't actually want scientific classification of this kind.  They want to put their favorite thing at the core, and have everything branch from there.  That's crap, as scientific methodology.  You can't decide that you happen to like spiders and so you're going to explain the entire natural history of all animals by describing how they are and are not like spiders.  Or rather, you can, but nobody's going to listen.

And that's what I see you sliding into -- and I think you're in no way alone.  Not here, not elsewhere.  Everyone wants to say that RPG's have certain core elements, inevitably their favorite ones, and that everything else follows "naturally" from there.  Garbage.  Ron gets away with it because GNS is pretty flexible and is worked out in a much more sophisticated manner than any other system I've seen, but at base he's picked out a small number of structures that he happens to think are super-important and made them into the foundation of a model.

So why did I propose polythetic classification?

As far as the question of a polythetic definition, I see definite advantages in approaching definition as set of various differentiated members or perhaps more colloquially as a 'constellation' of sorts. For one thing, it preserves common usage. But isn't this more suited to a 'folk theory' than something more rigorous?

On the contrary.  The only people who actually do this in a serious way are biologists in certain spheres; folk definitions are never so scrupulous nor so consistent.

Let me explain how this works.

Suppose we make a list of, say, 100 important elements that crop up in RPG's.  Where do we get this list?  We study as many RPG's as we can get our hands on, and we just list them statistically.  The whole idea is to avoid any sense of preference, bias, or anything else; you're trying to come up with a big-ass list of everything as it is.

From this, you have to further define each element extremely precisely, without reference to any others.  Now having abstracted those elements, you make up a huge spreadsheet and you list every game, ticking a box for every element present.  Now you analyze this spreadsheet.  What you're looking for is clustering of the data.

Let's suppose that we find that 87 games all have a cluster of the same 15 elements.

Okay, so we say that that is a common cluster, and we give it a rough name or general description based on what the elements seem to do together.  Now we say that any game that has, let's say, 2/3 of those elements is a member of the class so defined.  Now we check: what games have 2/3 of the elements but not 100%?  Do they seem to fit the class?  Is 2/3 a reasonable number?  Is it too high or too low?  Is one of those elements actually irrelevant, or is there another one (a sixteenth) that keeps cropping up when we add in the games with the 2/3?

So we end up with a fairly large number of clusters, overlapping significantly, which have common principles and elements.

Now let's suppose that "in-character verbal dramatic acting" is an element.  Is it present in every case?  Clearly not.  But there is every reason to believe that it does come up quite a lot.  Isn't that interesting?  No, not by itself.  But let's ask what game-clusters seem to make this element focal, and which eliminate it.  Is there something more that can be said here?

Let's go on a step, and suggest that maybe instead of simply ticking boxes, now that we have some general notion of how elements cluster, we can also have a factor, a degree-to-which.  So we could say that roleplaying (in your definition) is a big deal over here, and is present but not a big deal over there, and is not present at all over in a third place.

All of this has certain advantages:

[*]There is no biased prioritization of elements
[*]What is described is what exists, not hypotheticals
[*]There is no possibility of eliminating valid data on biased grounds
[*]There is the possiblity of including valid data that we wouldn't have expected
[*]When making comparisons to other activities (e.g. RPG-play to acting, art, music, etc.), you have a solid foundation from which to do it[/list:u]I'm not suggesting that you, or anyone else, need to go and do this.  But I do think it's the only possible way to get out of a basic circularity, which is that people put their preferred elements at the top of a hierarchy and then argue about the conclusions.

As a final note, you mention that you seek "something unique" in defining RPG's.  What do you mean by unique?  I really mean that; it's not flame-bait.  William James once remarked that whenever we really care about something, we tend to want to assert that it is unique, that it cannot be classed with other things.  "Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us classify it, without ado or apology, as a crustacean.  'I am no such thing,' it would cry.  'I am MYSELF!  Myself alone!'" (Varieties of Religious Experience, lecture 1)

Just so, in some sense of course RPG's are unique.  But so is everything else.  To seek a strong sense of uniqueness, that RPG's are entirely distinctive as a phenomenon, is to found a definition upon an unprovable and very dubious hypothesis.  It's as though you said, "Given that Americans are fundamentally different from other people, how so?"  But who says they are?

I am basically averse to all this graded classification that everyone's pushing for -- and I mean most of the posts on the thread, not just yours.  To assert that one aspect of the hobby "trumps" others is unprovable unless you can define a fully-acceptable internal logic within the texts and performances of RPG-gaming that allows you to assert your hierarchy as objective and empirical, and I think that's exceedingly unlikely.  All you get is sterile repetitions of, "no, this is the most important thing"; "no it isn't, you dummy, that is."

[BPetroff93]

Hi Philomousos and welcome to forge.   While I support your reaction against the trend at RPG.net I disagree with your assumption.  You are identifying character immersion, not "roleplaying."   You are essentially saying that the group of gamers who have been playing since 1982 but never use the "in character" voice acting have NEVER roleplayed.  This may be true from the psychological definition of the term but is most definatly not true from inside our hobby.  Any gamer, whether on the Forge or RPG.net will be able to identify their activity as "roleplaying" and not "storytelling."  Immersion is great, immersion is wonderful but a lack of immersion does not a RPG unmake.

[Alan]

One thought I had: from the standpoint of dictionary definition, roleplaying games _are_ misnamed.  It's too bad that the popular term isn't "storytelling game" or something, but it would be damn hard to convince every RPGer to change their terminology.

[Valamir]

One thought I had: from the standpoint of dictionary definition, roleplaying games _are_ misnamed.  It's too bad that the popular term isn't "storytelling game" or something, but it would be damn hard to convince every RPGer to change their terminology.

Actually, I prefer to think that the dictionary folks just haven't caught up to the definition because the hobby is still too fringe.

If it were a multi billion dollar industry I guarentee you'd see another little number get added under the term with a definition related to RPGs.

Of course what a nightmare that would create given that we hobbiests can't even agree on a definition.

[Walt Freitag]

Misnamed, shmisnamed.

What does a hot dog become when it cools down?

- W

[talysman]

I'm still mulling over the ideas people are presenting in this discussion, and I'm not really ready to speak my own mind on the topic... but I have a question or issue to raise about something in the first post in this thread, an issue I haven't seen anyone mention.

In response to a question about the amount of roleplaying people normally engage in at the game table, I defined roleplaying as in-character dialogue and soliloquy, as well as the movements necessary to properly and proportionally supplement that verbal content. Third-person description of the action in roleplaying games does not in itself constitute roleplaying - such descriptions are a necessary adjunct to roleplaying, however.

In other words, to say "I tell the guards to lay down their arms" is not roleplaying.  That, to me, would be storytelling - recounting imaginary events.  To roleplay, that is, to play a role in a game of verbal drama, is to speak in character.  Sometimes you have to explain what your character is doing out of character, but that again is only an adjunct to actual roleplaying.

the first thing I noted about "I tell the guards to lay down their arms" is NOT third-person description and is NOT speaking out-of-character, but Philomousos is discounting it as role-playing. I am just curious as to why it is considered storytelling; it seems like hair-splitting, to me.

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Jack: If you feel like it, I'd be more than glad to hear your definition. I'll even try not to mouth off if I disagree with you. =)

Since you asked, OK. I should preface this with this is still a work in progress more-or-less. Let's see if I can walk you through my thought process.

First, the words of St Augustine*:

There are few things that we phrase properly; most things we phrase badly: but what we are trying to say is understood.

I recently ran across this passage and I think it is imporatnt for two reasons here:
[list=1][*]In discussion here and elsewhere, it all-to-often degrades into semantics. from this quote it tells me to stop trying so hard to not understand and try harder to understand. I wish this quote had come up years ago, when I would degrade things into semantics. However, knowing me I would probably had just made a smart remark about long-dead Catholic bishops.

[*]It strikes at your definition of roleplaying, to play a role This will take a bit.
[/list:o]
The thing about words is their meanings are not fixed. An example in English is the word "awful." Awful used to mean literally full of all. Somehow, over time, the meaning of the word in usage changed to a negative meaning. As in "these pancakes are awful." The word "awesome" now has the original positive meaning.

I think that "roleplaying" has gone into a similar expansion of meaning in common usage. The concept of roleplaying has outgrown simply playing a role.

Now, we could work out a new term for this instead of roleplaying, but I think that would be futile if we could not get the new term into common usage. Example, the game Universalis does not call itself a roleplaying game. The cover says "Game of Unlimited Stories" instead. This is all well and good, but if they somehow managed to get into a chain bookstore or amazon.com, it would not be filed in the story game section, but the roleplaying game section. You can't fight city hall.

A lot of stuff so far, but no definition yet, which is the point of my reply here. Here it is:

Roleplaying is a social activity where the participants create in a shared imagined space.

This is not so much a definition as the underlying activity of roleplaying. I have gotten static about the social part before, so this isn't perfect or, at least, not very widely accepted.

Also, many point out that this describes many activities that aren't roleplaying. Aside from synecdochy, there are activities but this are readily identifiable in their own right, and as such are separated from roleplaying.

Hope this helps some.

Jack



* The context of the quote is in Augustine's discussion about time. To summarize, he puts forth that the present has no length and the past and future do no exist, so when we measure time, we measure the impression on the mind. He goes further to say there is only the present which can be divided into the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. But he will shorten this to simply past, present and future and the quote above is to cut off any confusion.

I immediately thought of GNS with this, specifically the who "games that supports gamist priorities", "Players with a narrativist preference" deal. So Narrativist player, gamist games and to hell with those who prefer to confuse the issue than understand.

[Tomas HVM]

I defined roleplaying as in-character dialogue and soliloquy, as well as the movements necessary to properly and proportionally supplement that verbal content.

I'd like to see someone take this definition on as the main design goal for a new RPG. I consider the challenge to be great. What would the result be?

[Alan]

I defined roleplaying as in-character dialogue and soliloquy, as well as the movements necessary to properly and proportionally supplement that verbal content.

Does that mean that if my character swings from the chandeleer I have to find some physical way to represent it?  When is the physical action prortional enough?

[clehrich]

Misnamed, shmisnamed.

What does a hot dog become when it cools down?

- W

Considerably wurstasting?

[Sorry Ron, I know, I won't do it again.]

[Philomousos]

Hi again.  So, I'm going to do another big, clunky multiple response thing.  I find it the natural way to approach this sort of "Philomousos contra mundi" (no, I'm not serious...) situation.  If anybody sees an easier way to do it that prevents clutter, I'm all ears.

Just to preface, I've found everything to be thought-provoking so far.  I want to start by saying that I've irresponsibly elided two things which I did not intend to elide... this goes to my cantankerousness about artistic mediocrity and whatnot.  I don't mean to include everybody who disagrees with me or who pursues the playing of roleplaying games (I'll just call them RPGs, like Rich suggested) in a way which my admittedly rarefied definition does not class as roleplaying strictly speaking.  I was still reacting, unfortunately, to things entirely outside the contents of this thread.  It's the people who pursue RPGs for reasons other than artistic excellence that I have no time for - people who just like to hide out in the fantasy worlds which they find more amenable than real life.  I didn't mean to make it seem as if I extend my contempt to those people who pursue RPGs seriously and thoughtfully, even if those folks don't agree with a word I've said and think I'm a total nitwit.  Thinking that I'm a nitwit is certainly no crime in my book, even though it hopefully represents an error in judgment.  =)

Also, since Rich asked but it's really not an issue related only to him, my name is Aaron.  I answer to that, to Philomousos or even just Philo is fine.  The name means, roughly, Muse-lover.  Something which was once true of me.

Again by way of generalities... if I don't respond to a post it doesn't mean I didn't find it illuminating.  But there's other stuff I'm supposed to be doing and all that.

There's one more bit I should clarify, since I think it comes up in a lot of posts:  I'm not saying that roleplaying is the only thing that should happen during an RPG.  I don't think that you can actually have an RPG that includes only roleplaying, as I'm defining it, because what you say and the movements you make won't make sense unless the stage has been set.  So you have to say things like "I go over to the podium and pick up the sheaf of notes sitting on it" to let everyone know what you're character is supposed to be doing.  I just don't think it's actually roleplaying - it is the necessary set up to roleplaying.  Then when you mime thumbing through pages, and say "Hmm... this is the most peculiar handwriting I've ever seen..." or whatever, your audience knows what's going on.  But only the latter is the actual roleplaying, according to my definition.

Rich:  I feel I'm mostly with you on your post.  As to the question of playing a roleplaying game but not roleplaying - this is what I mean to say:  'You can play an RPG without ever roleplaying.  I'm just inclined to point out that roleplaying hasn't taken place.'  And further, a lot of what absolutely must be done during an RPG session is not roleplaying, even if you had a group of Philo-fanatics who are complete idolaters to my definition.  I'm just saying that this specific thing, "acting", is what it means to play a role.  So if you played an RPG without roleplaying, which is entirely possible, you'd be missing the point... you'd be using an RPG for a less than optimum application.  As far as the definition part, I'm going to address that most robustly in my response to Chris, so you might want to check out that part, below.

Pete:  On that one matter... I've started to think of it like this:  I like to go to clubs.  But if there was one club where I always ended up drinking too much, making an ass of myself, getting smacked by women and finally getting ejected for punching another patron in the face... and it was just happening at that one club, then I'd be smart to avoid hanging out there.  Because clearly I couldn't handle myself properly while I was there.  So, I'll try being smart for once.  =)  As to the verbal drama thing, I'm glad that seems useful to you.  Although, part of my Quixotic crusade to advance my acting-based definition is that I'm not sure that my more succinct formulation has the appropriate level of specificity.  It seems like for most people, though, what I've been defending is too specific.  At least I have something non-controversial to fall back on if all else fails.  =)

(still with Pete)  So, on your characterization of my position that acting is the 'point' of RPGs and everything else in them is only good insofar as it supports acting... that's almost what I'm saying.  I'm just trying to say that the acting part *is* the roleplaying part, that acting is what roleplaying really is, and if you're not acting you're not roleplaying.  And I do see it as necessarily the point of RPGs.  Which probably should have a different name besides RPG, because maybe it's misleading.  So, other things which happen (as they do, of necessity) during an RPG that are in themselves not roleplaying are indeed good inasmuch as they support the roleplaying (acting).  However, there could be other things that happen during the playing of an RPG that, while not roleplaying and not specifically supportive of it, are good in some other way that I haven't addressed.  For instance, telling a good story is a fine and worthwhile thing.  I'm just not on board with calling it "roleplaying".  I like to have good stories in my RPGs, though.  I like philosophy in them, too - but raising or exploring philosophical concepts is not roleplaying.  It is something else, which I think sweetens the deal when it is added to roleplaying.

(still with Pete):  If I denigrated storytelling, I didn't mean to and I retract any statement I might have made to that effect.  It's a worthy pursuit.  As I said above, though, I think there are unworthies lousing up our art.  I don't count storytellers among them, surely.  Even if I think that roleplaying and storytelling are different, and for the purposes of roleplaying storytelling is a subordinate activity, storytelling is an art in itself and laudable.  Nor do I intend to treat other, differing styles as my enemies.  Now, I'm willing to treat people who are anti-intellectual or not serious or whatever as enemies... but if I came off sounding like I think anybody who is doing something besides roleplaying is a boob then I apologize.  I'm just trying to be realistic about what roleplaying actually is, and about who's doing it and who's doing something else.

Alan:  Regarding sticking to a script, that strikes me as an interesting proposition.  I think it would still be roleplaying... but it wouldn't be the same sort of "game" we usually think of when we say RPG.  An RPG generally implies creative freedom (within the boundaries of the rules and the GM's interpretation of the imaginary world) for the participants.  So I wouldn't call a scripted game an RPG, though I think it would still be a game that involved roleplaying.  As far as "directing the actions of a role" - that still seems authorial to me.  It still seems like storytelling.  To "play" in roleplaying is synonymous with "portray" - thus, acting.

Valamir:  I'm not sure we're communicating fully.  When I say "roleplaying is art", I *don't* mean playing an RPG is art.  I mean just what I said - roleplaying is art.  It's art whether you do it while playing an RPG or some other time.  Now, I think the point of playing an RPG is to roleplay.  But it's entirely possible to play an RPG and never roleplay.   The mediocrity part comes in when people reject roleplaying because it is difficult, or because they don't want to do something serious with their time.  That's a separate issue in some ways, which maybe I shouldn't have even brought up in the first place.  But what I'm trying to do is define roleplaying, not RPGs.  Now, I am explicitly directing what I say about roleplaying to the question of roleplaying in RPGs, but I don't consider them to be the same thing.  Does that help?  Oh, and what's absurd about part of sentence being roleplaying and part not?  Sentences frequently include several different types of phenomena in them.  I don't see anything that's formally absurd.

quozl:  Yes, as I just said to Valamir, I'm trying to define roleplaying, not RPGs.  Roleplaying in the context of RPGs, of course, but what I'm about is trying to define roleplaying.  Which I still think is in need of defining, because I think a lot of people call stuff roleplaying that isn't technically roleplaying.

Vishanti:  I agree with what you say about RPGs.  They're very flexible and you can explore lots of different things with them.  Though, as I've said, I don't think escapism is a legitimate motivation for being involved with them - but I guess maybe that's a different topic at this point.  And I'm very much an idea-oriented person, too.  But... I do think that the point of RPGs, and what I mean is their optimum usage, is to roleplay.  And so, as I see it, channeling Mifune is what we're after (heh - I'd love to be that good a roleplayer!).  But I look at it like movies... even strong performances, although they are the defining virtue of movies, are not alone enough to have a complete and rewarding film.  You also have to have good content.  Thus, "The Girl With The Pearl Earring", which I consider a contemporary masterpiece, exceeds "Identity", which though it had strong performances as well (though not *as* strong) did not have the same level of content.  Both of which blow "X-Men" out of the water.  Which latter film blows a lot of other films out of the water, and so on.

(still with Vishanti):  On pogroms and bathing and such - this is again a situation, par for the course, when I've thrown everything and the kitchen sink into a point I was trying to make, so that instead of arguing about one thing I've ended up arguing about everything.  This was a mistake on my part.  But since it's out there - I really do think it would be gainful to separate the wheat from the chaff in our hobby.  Don't you agree?  I'm not talking about the people with whom I disagree about the definition of roleplaying, or even the people who play RPGs differently than I do and obstinately insist that they're actually roleplaying.  I'm talking about the people who aren't serious, and who are into RPGs to get away from their real lives.  That not only cramps my own style personally, it's bad for said individuals.  I'd like to be able to say that my main concern is the latter... but, well, it is what it is.

Christopher:  Yes, I think you see what I'm saying.  Though I'm curious... what part of the "snooty shit" do you substantially disagree with?

clehrich:  So, I think that roleplaying is acting, and thus acting is the point of an RPG.  Though you could play an RPG without it and have a good time - that's not the point.  But yes, I do think that roleplaying is synonymous with acting, and that the point of playing an RPG is to roleplay (in that, at least, the RPG is underutilized if you don't).  Now, it could be that I'm being a pure blockhead and I haven't picked up on the substance of your post yet.  But I do maintain that what I've got here is both the correct explanation of the term "to roleplay", and the specifying element of an RPG... that it is for roleplaying.  It may sound arbitrary, but is it really?  The player in an RPG defines a character... a role.  The action of the game is to portray this role, is it not?  And yet, if this "character" is merely used as a playing piece on a battle map, or a set of statistics rolled against in order to ultimately attain a goal - this portrays nothing.  But if a player acts his part... that's what I'm seeing as specifically differentiating the pursuit of RPGs.

(still with clehrich)  Now, maybe the definitional problem is not with "roleplaying" but with RPG.  Maybe where I'm wrong is that RPGs can be used for a hundred different things, all of which are equally legitimate and potentially artistic.  But then isn't it odd for them to focus on characters?  And to be called "roleplaying" games?  Maybe we should call them Verbal Dramatic Games (VDGs... plus the NSA wouldn't have to be bothered reading through all these gaming posts if we stopped calling them RPGs...).  Then I suppose I could sit around and say "I'm a roleplayer" and other people could say "I'm a storytelling gamer" or "I'm a director of imaginary entities" or whatnot.  So perhaps I'm right about what roleplaying is but wrong about what the point of RPGs is... maybe there is no point.  Lemme think about it for a while yet.  (Actually, Alan has suggested the possibility of misnomer also.)

Jack:  Indeed.  Quid ergo est roleplayinggame?  Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio.  =)  On your definition... I don't see how you can divorce "roleplaying" from the portayal of a role.  Now, maybe you've defined RPGs properly, however.

Alan:  On the chandelier swingin' bit... that's not something I think can be roleplayed (at least not in tabletop... no telling what those Larpers do).  I think it is best simply described.  And that description is not roleplaying.  But it is a necessary adjunct to roleplaying.  And there is an art to describing things well.  But I see no point in saying "While he swings on the chandelier, my character gives forth his great barbaric yawp!"  Instead, why not roleplay?  Give a barbaric yawp yourself... I would perhaps hold up my arms in the fashion of swinging, to help convey the scene.  Does that help make it clearer?

[Ben O'Neal]

It almost came up a few posts ago, but I think if we are going to define roleplaying, we must break down the actual word to attempt to establish its inherent meanings.

Role, and Playing.

But what the hell does "playing" mean? Does a definition exist that is inclusive of all activities that are known to be played, and exclusive of all tasks that are known to not be played? Should the definition remain open for things which are not yet known, but which may become known in the future? What about things that are no longer known, but which were known in the past?

And what about "role". Is the definition of a role a "conceptual construct of an individual non-self identity"? Does it mean "a part to act"? If I attempt to play the role of my friend, is that any more of a role than if I were to play the role of a God (an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent non-individual)? What about if I play the role of a group or organization, or even a country? Is that not a role? What about if I play the role of myself?

To get down to brass tacks, no word should ever be defined by any other method than a shared understood meaning developed through use. Someone has already pointed out the words awful and awesome, but all words can be used to demonstrate this point, none moreso than profanities like "fuck" "shit" and even the seemingly specific "dick". The definition of the word must, by necessity and the goal of all language, include all meanings for which it is ever intended and used, and exclude all meanings for which it is intended to not carry meaning.

Dictionary's do not create language, they present it. Why? Because words are abstract subjective concepts tied to visual and auditory cues (and tactile cues for those who can read braille). If someone can't read, do they not have language? If someone cannot move their body, can they not roleplay? Can they not act? What if they are playing the part of a person (not themselves) who cannot move their body?

Fruit.

What? Fruit? Yes, Fruit. How did you interpret this right now? Did you take the meaning of the word as being a large category of plant-grown appendages consisting of seeds and flesh and skin? Or did you take the more abstract meaning of "that which can be obtained", as in "the fruits of her labours". Or did you perhaps interpret it as a slander against you made by me to indicate that I thought you suffered diagnosable mental instability? Is your interpretation of the word more important than my intrended meaning? What if my intended meaning was not that 'fruit' had a meaning, but that "fruit" had many, and thus had the meaning "a word with many connotations".

Can I ask enough rhetorical questions to illustrate the problems with attempting to define a super-ordinate on the basis of a sub-ordinate, especially when excluding necessary parts of the sub-ordinate? :)

I hope I've made my point: the very task you are setting out to achieve cannot be achieved if anyone disagrees with you. For a word to be useful, it must carry meaning that is preserved across individuals, and because of this fact, all words have multiple meanings, but the specifics of exactly which meaning is intended are dealt with through the rules of language and the use of grammar and context.

[M. J. Young]

I must say that Rich's post is excellent; I hesitate to add--but I was already thinking on these points before I read his, so I'm going to proceed. I'm also starting, once again, without the benefit of having read the rest of the thread (I hope it isn't closed--I really hate it when a thread closes the next day after a flurry of activity), but I hope I can contribute something to what's been said.

On the subject of my negative assessment of dabblers, I'd like to point you to the second paragraph of my responses to Valamir - there's no sense repeating myself exactly.  But, in brief, I think that escapists ruin the rigor and excellence of roleplaying.  If I may be so bold, as an Olympic-class roleplayer (not that I'm suggesting it should be a sport!) I'm not only annoyed at all the non-serious practicioners cluttering up the playing field, I feel that they actively reflect poorly on *me* because they're not in the game for the right reasons.  Like the people who bathe only infrequently and try to tell everybody about their characters - these are found frequently at gaming stores.  Perhaps it makes me a mean and arrogant person, but I don't want them around (in roleplaying I mean - I'm not some ogre saying they should be deported or something!).  Yeah, in fact it sounds very arrogant.  But that's how I feel.  As it stands, I would feel ashamed to tell a non-gamer that I roleplay, particularly in a professional or romantic milieu.  But that's not due to anything that *I* do that I'm ashamed of.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Harlan Ellison, role playing gamer.

I'm sorry, but I have heard him go on and on about how some people are writing science fiction and others are writing sci fi, and that these are not the same thing at all--but the only difference between them, really, is that science fiction is the good stuff and sci fi is the schlock. I'm sorry, but you can't define anything based on the quality either of the product or of the producer. Cheap champagne is still champagne. B movies are still movies. Pulp fiction is still fiction. Roleplaying that doesn't come up to your standards is still roleplaying, even if you find that offensive.

But - on the question of the GM in the Aliens-esque of scenario.  I don't think that the GM is roleplaying in that instance.  Which is OK... sometimes, you can't.  He can do some movement, but that's about it (and maybe not even that, if he can't mime the aliens without looking silly).  Just like if I had a character who was bound and gagged, all I can do is bounce around a little bit in my chair and look frustrated (if I can manage a blush to drive it home, so much the better).  I don't think you can be roleplaying all the time in a roleplaying game.  I do think that roleplaying/acting as I've described it is the defining element of roleplaying games.  I like your definition of a roleplaying game as "an activity in which people interact with each other to create characters and events within a shared imaginary space."  But I just don't see that as specific enough.  Unless you're acting, I really don't see how you're playing a role.  If you're not doing that, then whatever the merit of what you are doing, it doesn't seem to be roleplaying.

It seems to me that you have admitted that you can participate in a roleplaying game without yourself doing any roleplaying. You have not denied my assertion that the referee is a participant in the game as I outlined it; you have only said that he is a participant who does not do any role playing. Now let me stretch it.

There was an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which no one said a word for the entire show. I missed it, but I heard it was fabulous. O.K., they're actors--they're doing live action, and they can play their roles without words because we can watch what they're doing. But it brings up an important point--actually two important points.

The second is, isn't it entirely possible that anyone who plays LARP could insist that you can't possibly be role playing, because you're not really playing the role, you're only speaking it? You need to move around, interact physically with the environment, the props, the other characters, to really be playing a role. You're doing radio; you're doing voiceover, for goodness sake. Roleplaying means acting the part, not speaking it, getting up and moving around the stage. If you're sitting at the table, you're not doing it. Thus I think your definition of role playing games as games in which you play the role backfires on you. Your decision to speak in first person but not act the part fully and the "slacker" decision to describe character speech and demeanor while sitting at the table are not different in kind, but only in degree, and once you have made it a difference in degree, it becomes impossible to defend a definition that is not black or white--either you must play the role fully and completely, or you must not hold anyone else to any standard in that regard.

Wow, that was a more significant point than I thought. Oh, but I see Walt has already made it--should have guessed, he's an expert in LARP.

The first point, though, may require an example.

At the end of a play session, the entire party has been turned into animals; it is a curse they must break, but the night is over, and we'll continue this next session.

The next session starts, and one thing that is made clear right up front is that as animals you are unable to speak. Any communication you make must be through limited gestures and actions, which you will have to describe to the satisfaction of the others. The referee is very strict on this; he won't allow you to say that you gesture them to follow you, nor to move your own hands or body parts to try to do it, but says that you must say something like, "I wave my head in jerky movements toward the right three times, and then head that direction," and see if anyone else says, "I follow him." You spend the entire time trying to find the solution to your curse. You find inscriptions that you are able to read, and make a great deal of headway in unraveling this curse. You never talk to anyone, and no one talks to you, nor do you overhear any conversations. At the end of the session, you go home looking forward to the next session, when you hope to undo the curse.

According to your definition, no one at that table did any role playing all night long, because no one spoke in character.

Does that mean that this was not a roleplaying game?

Now, maybe you'll argue that you did speak in the previous session, and will speak in the next session, so this was a role playing game in which no roleplaying occurred.

But what if there is no curse? What if this is a game in which there are no people, only animals, animals who cannot speak or use words to communicate with each other, but who for some reason are on an adventure together? Does this cease to be a role playing game only because the roles we are playing are incapable of expressing themselves in language? If we are the army of mimes invading the land of couch potatoes, and no one speaks, are we not involved in a role playing game?

I don't think your definition works. Even in therapeutic role playing, it is often the case that the participants speak of themselves in a removed sense ("Then I would tell him how I feel about it"). Role playing is not acting, nor even voiceover. It is the creation of a character and the presentation of the actions of that character into the shared imaginary space. First person performance adds greatly to our understanding of how that fits in the shared imaginary space--if you can do it well. Frankly, however, I think it's possible to role play characters who are so alien that any effort on my part to speak like them or move like them or use their facial expressions or inflections would be counter-productive: it would create the wrong image in the shared imaginary space, when I could create the right image by description instead of performance.

I am now going to step away from all this theory and make an argument on history.

I don't think there's too much debate about the original game in the hobby; except for CARPGa's Paul Cardwell, just about everyone would cite Dungeons & Dragons as the first role playing game. I never owned a copy of that (although just yesterday my wife handed me my copy of the Greyhawk supplement for it, which I purchased when I was running original basic and couldn't find where I was supposed to go next). However, I do have the next major version of that original game, by the same author, E. Gary Gygax, (what is now called Original) Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. The Dungeon Master's Guide on my desk at the moment, sans the original cover (it's around here somewhere) and title page (probably forever lost) dates to 1979 (the copyright in my other copy, not an original cover). It is certainly a rather early authority on what role playing games are and how they are conducted, even if we don't do it all that way anymore.

I find in that volume, beginning in the middle of the right-hand column on page 97 and continuing through all of pages 98 and 99 to the middle of the left-hand column on page 100, uninterupted by any artwork, tables, or other layout, an example of play. It is written in dialogue format, indicating three major parts, Dungeon Master, Leader Character, and Other Character (sometimes specified as a particular party member, such as Cleric or Gnome). I have while reviewing the posts on this thread taken the time to read through it once more, something I probably have not done in over twenty years.

Aaron states that role playing games are defined as games in which you play a role, and that playing a role is defined as speaking in character; any description of character action is not role playing.

What strikes me about the passage cited is that not once in 83 entries of player dialogue, as several characters explore several rooms and have multiple encounters, is there even one word presented as uttered in character. There is not even a moment where something might be interpreted as in character (e.g., if the referee said that the spider jumped on a character, and the player said, "ouch!"--although the spider does jump on a character, the player only describes what he does). They talk about talking to each other, but the characters never talk to each other.

Now, I would think that if Aaron is correct in defining role playing games in the manner he does, it would have been so central to what we do that such a seminal work as this would have included at least one such reference in so long a sample of play. As it is, the sample could be taken to suggest that speaking in character is precisely contrary to what we do in role playing games, because the author must have known by this point that people did it, but he did not illustrate it in the text, so he must have thought that was inappropriate.

Playing a role may be everything you think it is, Aaron; but it has nothing to do with role playing games, and never has, except as a technique that emerges in some limited areas of the hobby. It is not and never has been considered definitive of role playing games, and it thus seems that you are attempting to change the definition of the hobby itself to exclude everything it has been for thirty years, because it isn't what you prefer.

--M. J. Young

[pete_darby]

How about I start a campaign to recognize that the "play" in roleplay doesn't mean to play the role like an actor in a play, but to play the role like a player in a poker game would play a card? Since the word "playing" is implicit in the word game, it can be inserted into any form of game to show how it's played. Card playing games are games that you play by using cards. Board palying games are games you play by using a board. miniatures playing games are games you play by using miniatures. Role playing games are games you play using roles.

Aaron (since I checked, and I spelt your username wrong every damn time, sorry): I still think we've got terms for what you're defining as role-play (acting, immersion, first person speech), and to start talking about sessions of role-playing games where no role-playing took place seems as nonsensical as talking about writing sessions where no writing took place, or football matches where football wasn't played.

Also, I think you'll find that Art vs Escapism is a false dichotomy. I find that art vs most things are false dichotomies, apart from art vs art (typified by your artistic effort frustrated by storytellers artistic efforts).

[joshua neff]

On the subject of my negative assessment of dabblers, I'd like to point you to the second paragraph of my responses to Valamir - there's no sense repeating myself exactly.  But, in brief, I think that escapists ruin the rigor and excellence of roleplaying.  If I may be so bold, as an Olympic-class roleplayer (not that I'm suggesting it should be a sport!) I'm not only annoyed at all the non-serious practicioners cluttering up the playing field, I feel that they actively reflect poorly on *me* because they're not in the game for the right reasons.  Like the people who bathe only infrequently and try to tell everybody about their characters - these are found frequently at gaming stores.  Perhaps it makes me a mean and arrogant person, but I don't want them around (in roleplaying I mean - I'm not some ogre saying they should be deported or something!).  Yeah, in fact it sounds very arrogant.  But that's how I feel.  As it stands, I would feel ashamed to tell a non-gamer that I roleplay, particularly in a professional or romantic milieu.  But that's not due to anything that *I* do that I'm ashamed of.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Harlan Ellison, role playing gamer.

I'm sorry, but I have heard him go on and on about how some people are writing science fiction and others are writing sci fi, and that these are not the same thing at all--but the only difference between them, really, is that science fiction is the good stuff and sci fi is the schlock. I'm sorry, but you can't define anything based on the quality either of the product or of the producer. Cheap champagne is still champagne. B movies are still movies. Pulp fiction is still fiction. Roleplaying that doesn't come up to your standards is still roleplaying, even if you find that offensive.

MJ, you rock. That was really good. I couldn't agree more.

Aaron, what makes your reasons for gaming as inherently better, more dedicated, than anyone else's reasons for gaming? How are other people "reflecting badly" on you & you are not, at the same time, reflecting badly on them? You say you think roleplaying is an art. I think it is, too. But the room within an art--the room for motivation, for attitude, for style, for approach, for execution--is vast. There's room for Rembrandt, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollack, Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, Pable Picasso, Francis Bacon, & Viggo Mortensen.

You're also doing a synecdoche here: mistaking "immersion" for "roleplaying game." As others have pointed out, the word "play" doesn't solely mean "acting" when placed with "role." And as MJ pointed out, RPGs aren't based on immersion, they aren't based on "acting out your character." Withing the art of playing a roleplaying game, there is room for all kinds of techniques, and all of them are contained within the category of "playing a roleplaying game."

I believe there have been other threads here (which I or someone else can track down) in which we've argued about the name "roleplaying game" and wondered if maybe there was a better name for it. I seem to remember (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that the conclusion people came to was "roleplaying game" is fine and it implies more than just "acting out a character."