Suspension Of Reality And Playing Odd Characters

[333Chronzon]

[Ron Edwards]

[Paul Czege]

Hey everyone,

One of the things I was trying to say by describing pasty Todd's maleness as "noise" that interferes with communication of the vixen's protagonism is that more often than not I think Todd's real life relationship history, issues with women, and fantasies come blaring through with such intensity during his roleplay that the vixen's protagonism is drowned out. It's less about how hairy Todd is than it is about how he thinks. To Todd, he's roleplaying a woman with the understanding he's developed of them, and from within his personal suspension of disbelief he's unaware of the extent to which his own psychology is creating distortion visible to the audience. Men who know they don't completely understand women can very clearly see similar failings in another man's understanding.

But the real problem, I think, is that a gamer like Todd is actually less interested in rendering the vixen as a protagonist than he is in being able to ask the audience, "Isn't she great?"

Paul

[333Chronzon]

Quote

As a topic, this definitely deserves its own thread. I suggest the Actual Play forum so we are forced to use real-people and real-play examples.

Ok.  Should I formulate a discussion along those lines there or have/will you spark it?  I'm not sure of the forum etiquette in regards to this matter.

******
But back to the real topic of the thread.

All that said, I disagree that a female character for a male player or a fellow human character of another culture require LESS suspension-of-disbelief than playing an elf or a gnarliburr. I think that playing such close-to-home characters demands far, far more "oomph" on the part of the player.

Hmmm... I have been think about that since I wrote it and it occured to me that this issue may be akin to the reason computer generated *monsters* and environments on film are more easily seen as 'real' then computer generated *people.*  We know people too well, we will spot flaws in portrayal more easily.  That's why, for me at least, regular animation 'sells' itself better in 'human' portrayals then does computer animation (at least up to this point - Final Fantasy was passable in this regard, but still not good enough).  

So I guess I actually agree with you on at least this point :smile:  The difficulty in maintaing the SoD of *others* in a portrayal becomed higher the greater *their* knowlege of the thing/person/object, etc. a person is trying to portray.

That I can accept, that seem sto me to be a reasonable position.        

I will clarify. It is easy to play an elf or space-alien or even a cartoon character. It is very hard to play a human character of a gender or distinctive culture different from one's own.

I've occasionally played women characters, the more so lately than previously. That is mainly, in fact only, because I consider myself a competent student of female humans, to the extent that my depiction/performance is going to make sense to those around me. I also have "thematic things to say" regarding women that I like to express through play. I still consider it a stretch, successful about 50% of the time, for my GMing and my character-play alike. I still consider nearly all the women characters played by males (GMs and players alike) to be unbelievable, such that I have to squint a lot during play.

Ok.  It's not 'impossible' to accomplish, just very difficult to pull off successfully.  I agree.

I am not going to be willing to play in a gangsta/street New Jersey scenario, because I do not consider myself a competent author for that material. My characters will be ripoffs and shadows of characters from Clockers or Fresh; no matter how well meant, my depiction (and I don't just mean mannerisms but decisions) will be a pop-culture-derived construct. It will lack the personal judgmental power that I demand from myself in role-playing.

I understand completely.  What is of key importance at this stage of things in addition to the individual player's feelings about their ability to be 'truthfull' to the 'reality' they are rying to portray are tbe expectations of the *other* members of the Play Group and their own commitment to being 'faithful' to the source material/ 'reality' that they are trying to share/create as a part of their roleplaying activity together.

For example:  I would never attempt to portray a person of a different ethnic background then one of which I am completely familiar if there is a person of the ethinic background at the table.  Not only would this be, to my mind, incredibly rude it would never 'fly' considering the knowlege that person would have that I do not have.

I think this also ties into some people's inability to successfully achieve a good SoD under certain Premises.  I can imagine that a Physicist or Engineer *might* (I want to stress *might* here) have diffuculty with 'magical' stuff or - and most probably - difficulty with a game or a premis that presents 'facts' known by them inaccurately or ignores what to them 'should' be pertinent facts.

I have had this issue with a gun/military person in the past.  If the guns as part of a scenerio were just 'zap gun' or 'pistol' level abstraction he had no problem, but as soon as the environment/game began to *detail* features he was 'expert' in in ways he found objectionable he couldn't get his mind off those points long enough to have fun at the game.  

I suppose if the goal is not to generate an original story (by which I mean the most general use of the term, NOT Narrativism), but rather to INVOKE an already-existing story, then that's OK. I'll play the female or gangsta or Malaysian guy or who-knows-who, just how it was portrayed in the source material. I saw "Gallipoli." I can play an Australian conscript in WWI. I'll just remind everyone of Mel Gibson. I saw "Pretty Woman." If I just do Julia Roberts everyone'll know that we MEAN this woman by whatever fumbling portrayal I produce through play. (And if she's supposed to be a "tough woman," I'll do Ripley! All set.)

Once again I agree with your point here.  The social dynamic and the decisions of they Play Group regarding just what they want to accomplish are very important to this issue.

Well, all THAT said, I come down about midway between you and Jared. I won't say that the play of a non-Me human is impossible or prohibitively difficult. I will say that when we gamers try to play such characters (as opposed to Star Trek women or Fantasy-Greyhawk dwarves), we stumble far more than anyone admits, and usually fall back on the "invocation" trick described above.

I agree with this as well.  I *do* think that in some cases it is the result of the varying degrees of 'imaginative investment' on the part of both individuals in a Play Group and of the Play Group itself.  There's no 'good' or 'bad' to the amount of 'imaginatieve investment' in my mind, just differerent amounts of it based on the desires of the people involved and the time and effort they can or desire to commit to the Play Group.

Scott B.

[333Chronzon]

On 2001-11-06 11:24, Paul Czege wrote:
Hey everyone,

One of the things I was trying to say by describing pasty Todd's maleness as "noise" that interferes with communication of the vixen's protagonism is that more often than not I think Todd's real life relationship history, issues with women, and fantasies come blaring through with such intensity during his roleplay that the vixen's protagonism is drowned out. It's less about how hairy Todd is than it is about how he thinks. To Todd, he's roleplaying a woman with the understanding he's developed of them, and from within his personal suspension of disbelief he's unaware of the extent to which his own psychology is creating distortion visible to the audience. Men who know they don't completely understand women can very clearly see similar failings in another man's understanding.

But the real problem, I think, is that a gamer like Todd is actually less interested in rendering the vixen as a protagonist than he is in being able to ask the audience, "Isn't she great?"

Paul

A very good point and one that I think I failed to pick up completely on.  I think that this plays into what Ron says above about 'invoking' and his and my comments about the SoD level of difficulty rising when the player is portraying someone or something *known* to the other players *and* in this case doin so in such a way as to create another whole layer of difficulty to maintaining SoD by a 'poor' (to the minds of the audience) job of it.

At a certain point we have to ask just what the people at the table - the Play Group as a whole - are *looking for* from any individual's portrayal.  For the most part, in the majority of sessions there is a certain level of 'mutual tolerance' of noise that is maintained so as to keep the group together in the first place.  

It's just like any other social environment, we accept various levels of 'BS' as a matter of course in our daly lives and it's only when the 'BS' reaches a personal tolerance level that one usually either confronts the source or gets out of the situation entirely.

How much 'noise' is the Play Group willing to accept and or even give a damn about.  If the Play Group does not care if Hairy Guy's portrayal is 'accurate' regarding  'real women' then to my mind there is no 'noise' at all. If I joined a group and had to play with Hairy guy and discovered felt his portrayal was misogynistic  I would experience a lot of 'noise.'  If no-one else experienced this noise I would have to weigh my options - can I tolerate this level of noise so as to get along with the group, or should I drop out since the fact that the Play Group does not care about it is itself more 'noise' or dissonance for my ability to cooperate with them in the role playing enterprise?

Scott B.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

For me, suspension of disbelief is a non-issue. We're playing let's pretend, whether you believe it or not isn't a concern because we all "don't believe" it and that doesn't matter.

What matters is what Paul said. Most of the time, the guy playing the space vixen is doing so for reasons that are well outside of the game -- without there being any in-game reason for doing so.

Let's take a dungeon-crawl in D&D.

Everyone rolls up their characters. Chuck decides to play a female elf ranger. Okay, why? We're all in game mode...2 of the players haven't named their characters, content to call themselbes "my guy" and "the dwarf," respectively. Now, elf females receive no special penalties or bonuses in this game. Why is Chuck playing an elf? Because they get cool abilities. Why is Chuck playing a ranger? Ditto. Why a female? I think he has issues, myself...but that's just me.

And thankfully, nobody's brought up the "well I wanna feel what it's like to be a woman...this is ROLE playing you big jerk!" argument. To which I respond, playing a female character is going to give you as much insight into the female mind (?) as playing a police officer is going to let you experience what it's like to be a cop. It's a bogus argument.

Oh, and you want disconnect? I ran a LARP where one of the female players insisted on playing a guy. In a LARP. Again, she had some issues there...

- J

[James Holloway]

On 2001-11-06 12:04, Jared A. Sorensen wrote:
For me, suspension of disbelief is a non-issue. We're playing let's pretend, whether you believe it or not isn't a concern because we all "don't believe" it and that doesn't matter.

What matters is what Paul said. Most of the time, the guy playing the space vixen is doing so for reasons that are well outside of the game -- without there being any in-game reason for doing so.

Right, and I think that the big problem with this (and other "controversial" character choices) is that we tend to assume that the player's motivations for playing the character are weird or contemptible - and sometimes they are.

This, I think, is another reason why it's easier to be OK with someone playing a three-headed alien than a woman. Not only is there more leeway with completely imaginary characters, but for the most part we don't form unpleasant opinions about the character's motivation for playing an alien.

Does that make sense? I've always been uncomfortable with certain male players playing female parts, but I've never fully understood why...

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Well, the problem I've always had with male player playing female characters is that usually they just don't play a female very well.  IME then tend to either be total sluts or total prudes, as if that's the complete and sum total of emale behavior or something.

Personally, I don't see why it should be such a problem.  It is if you make it one, I guess.  Sorta like the Dwarven women and beards arguement.

And of course they have issues.  We all have issues.  Even the sane ones are victemized by their sanity.  It ain't easy not being crazy, you know.  It's so lonely being normal.

Personally, that's where I am on the issue.  I've some a guy who could play a female fairly well and it was no big deal.  I've know a guy who tried to play a heroic character and failed miserably at it.  The guy just didn't know how to act heroic.  Sadistic, yes, but not heroic.

It's sort of like character actors.  find out what you play well and play it.  Harrison Ford couldn't play a wussy little nerd if he wanted to.  Not at this stage, anyway.

[Laurel]

The conversation has taken a really interesting turn.  To me, Iis all about atmosphere, not necessarily about the IC roleplay or even necessarily the metagame.  If you ~look~ at
Ralph, this big beefy 6'2 dude gulping a beer and scratching his beard, if you ~listen~ to his deep voice, then maybe its difficult to imagine him being a 4'2 elfin ranger babe and having your character react accordingly.

But I'm still surprised to hear that it requires a greater suspension of disbelief for some people than if he's playing a green skinned half orc, or a 4'2 Asian assassin.  Ralph is Ralph.  His character could be a hundred different things, including a dog, or a female ranger, and I would have the same satisfaction level, provided the character fits the context of the game.  Granted, he might be better at portraying a post-modern 20 something computer geek that a geisha in 16th century Japan.

But its not going to disrupt my fun, if he makes a geisha, as long as his geisha is appropriate to the overall story and his character acts in ways that affirm the concept. I'm
not going to say its "impossible" or "bad" for a guy
to successfully role-play a women, or a dog, or even a purple Venusian wombat... as long as the character concept embraces the game's Premise, and is role-played with honest intention towards promoting that concept in both show and tell.

[Jared A. Sorensen]

I'm not going to say its "impossible" or "bad" for a guy
to successfully role-play a women, or a dog, or even a purple Venusian wombat... as long as the character concept embraces the game's Premise, and is role-played with honest intention towards promoting that concept in both show and tell.

Squint a little (okay, a lot) and picture me as Tommy Lee Jones from "The Fugitive."

Now picture me standing near the drainpipe of a dam.

"I don't care."

Really, I don't care how good/bad the player is. If Marlon Brando was across the table from me and he wanted to play a female character, I'd say no.

Again, this has nothing to do with quality of the "performance." It has everything to do with the fact that once you put up enough walls between you and the character, a performance is all it is.

[Ron Edwards]

Hey,

A couple of points here ... I'm pretty sure that no one is talking about "impossible" or "bad." Nor are we talking about the degree of imagination necessary to visualize a character who simply LOOKS different from the player.

The key point of disagreement seems to be that Laurel (for instance) is satisfied if, say, the geisha character WORKS in the context of the story; whereas Jared is satisfied if he, as a human, sees a genuine emotional commitment on the part of other humans in role-playing that, he says, is only reliable if the character has some direct "honest source" in the player. These are both paraphrases, and I hope I'm not damaging either person's point.

I see both sides on this one. I just do. My point above about playing a gangsta, a soldier at Gallipoli, or a woman still applies. I pretty much agree with Jared in SUBSTANCE, but perceive a broader RANGE for a given player's "acceptable characters," such that Laurel's example of the geisha could well apply.

[Might I add that Laurel is a veteran of on-line role-playing? Or that Jared has spent a lot of time in Narrativist or semi-Narrativist LARPs (a rare phenomenon but it does exist)? The medium might be playing a big role. It might help to specify.]

Best,
Ron

[contracycle]

I'm always baffled to find people who can believe in FTL travel, but not magic. Or vice versa. There are about equal amounts of evidence for the existene of each (i.e. none).

Ah, but the distinction is that FTL occurs in a bounded, rational space, while magic does not, unless you go out of your way to define the bounded space in which magic exists, which some games do.  Others just whack "magic" in the sapce where there should be explanatory text.

[contracycle]

in CLAWs (my local gaming society) the issue is referred to

Are you in UCT, perchance?

[contracycle]

I am often unhappy with male players taking female roles, to the extent that I am not sure I can say I have ever seen such a character well played, IME and IMO.  I think there is an important distinction between playing a dog or Bug Eyed Monster and playing another, specific, human.  And this is the lattitude the Audience has for suspending disbelief as against their library of facts.

If a BEM character does something which might, for arguments sake, be SOD-challenging, it may well be written off to their *in game* BEM-ness.  Because we have so few cues as to how a BEM would behave, forgiveness for minor slipups is easy.  By contrast, a player running a cross-gender character is faced with huge huge quantitites of data, expectations, possessed by the rest of the group.  Nothing they do or say exists without a reference point, while the BEM has very few reference points at all.  I think the "burden of proof", to bend a concept slightly, is higher the more familiar the audience is with the subject.

A player using a Dog character has a much easier time, I would think.  They don't necessarily need to think like a dog to pull this off; they merely need not to contravene the audiences expectations of appropriate Dog behaviour.  Dogs licking there own testicles - Fine.  Dogs telepathically asking vampires to fondle their testicles - Not Fine.  The real problem with playing a dog is the lack of verbal communication; even with all the portrayal in the world, the *player* will become frustrated at this major constriction of their ability to communicate.  And I suspect that the whole exercise in rationalising the telepathy in the above example is to get around that restriction.

There have been a couple of Sim computer games featuring critters - Wolf and Lion, IIRC.  Never played them myself, but I can get the idea, and think it might work well.  So as a thought experiment: would a dog work as a single player game?  I think it probably would.

So heres an interesting one: Dolphin, the RPG.  I and others could make a pretty good case for the intelligence of dolphins; could we author a playable dolphin RPG?  I sincerely doubt it, because its i not merely a mentality which is different in some abstract sense, it is different by virtue of being adapted to a wholly different environment, which requires (probably) wholly different thought processes.  I would love to be able to do this, but I am not convinced it is doable.

But: at the Free Willy level, do we care?  Nah - but then the dolphins are really just props or metaphors.  Any game which features aliens in the way that Star Trek does is not REALLY playing aliens - just as we can see that they are humans with superficial modifications, so the ideas, beliefs and motivations of these beings will be human with superficial modifications.  In which case the "accuracy" is rather a moot point, becuase the point of playing a Klingon is to be legitimised in being violent and using "target" as the collective noun for everything.  Its not really about "being" Klingon.

I often feel that much the same process occurs in men playing women, but here I am displaying my feminist credentials.  I don't think those players were interested in playing women so much as, in their opinion anyway, this acted as the legitimiser of certain behaviours.  I fear exactly the same issue with the gangsta, and I agree that there is a strong, powerful tendency for this sort of play to produce behaviours which either reinforce or diametrically oppose the prevailing stereotypes.  

Interestingly, I have experienced much less difficulty with women playing male characters.  I think this is for several practical reasons: the game world is usually a mans world, full of battlefields and plunder and might of arms.  Sometimes the exercise of rationalising a female character, for players of either gender, in such a world is not worth the effort.  Secondly, I think becuase the real world is also largely a mans world, the psychological distance for women to cross is smaller than that for men; many women already adopt and exhiboty "pseudo-masculine" behaviours in the real world, to do so with the reinforcement of a male physique in the game world is arguably easier.  And lastly, because patricarchal/sexist behaviour primarily operates by imposing behavioural expectations on women by men, mens expectations of women are heavily dominated by these socially validated behaviours, while the female experience of masculinity is much more dominated by their practical experience of men.  Id onlt want to get carried away with this one, however; the line is pretty fine.  But I think, fropm my experience to date, that women carry fewer stereotypes about men then men carry about women, and thet their roleplay is more accurate accordingly.

[lumpley]

Playing women is easy.  You think of a person.  You give that person a life, history, attitudes, opinions, feelings, a social context, a slant on the world, a voice.  Sooner or later that person becomes gendered in you head.  Sometimes it's a woman.

It helps, of course, to know lots of women and men and to watch them all the time as they interact and go about their business.  It helps to be as conscious as possible of your own stupid stereotypes and blind-sides.  It helps to be skeptical of gender to begin with.

But all this talk of how Women Are Not Understandable To Us is absurd.  Talk to one.  You'll find that you have lots in common.

-lumpley Vincent

Boy, I'm just in a ranting mood, aren't I?