Ron and Ben were interested, so here's a quote I posted to my blog, Shards, about the three rules that I use to classify role-playing.

I'm finalizing my paper proposal for the role-playing book by Bryn Neuenschwander and Ben Aldred. I've earlier said that I'm never going to do this, but now I've grabbed the hot potato right by the balls: I'm trying to define role-playing. I'm going to state aloud the rules of role-playing, which is the thing that is always explained allegorically in the obligatory "this is how you role-play" chapters of role-playing books. Quite different rules compared to the gibberish Gary and Dave put out in their original 1974 white box Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.

Here's what I'm proposing, a bit of gibberish of my own:

1. Role-playing is an interactive process of defining and re-defining the state, properties and contents of an imaginary game world.
2. The power to define the game world is allocated to participants of the game. The participants recognize the existence of this power hierarchy.
3. Player-participants define game world through personified character constructs, conforming to the state, properties and contents of the game world.

All gaming according to the rules above is role-playing. All activities lacking one of those is not.

The plan is to publish the full explanations and rationales to that in the book, but I'll just point out that interaction refers to social interaction, and that this is supposed to include tabletop role-playing, larping, online role-playing, freeform role-playing and so on, but also supposed to exclude single-player activities. Role-playing requires two participants, and one of them has to participate in a player position.

Feel free to mail me or catch me in a bar if you want to beat them until they bleed.

Oh, a clarification.

I'm not talking about role-playing games.

I'm talking about the social process of role-playing which is often -- even usually -- done utilizing one of such role-playing games. I'm wondering here what kind of rules govern that process.

- Markus

Two comments:

A. In your point 2 - can a game text or process define the game world? If I roll on "Character Race" table and get "You're an elf", where does that fit in?

B. You seem to say the world comes first, and characters conform to the world. What of play that springs forth from the character, where the world is secondary, ephemeral and mutable?

Actually, three:

C. I loved "now I've grabbed the hot potato right by the balls".

matthijs wrote: Two comments:

A. In your point 2 - can a game text or process define the game world? If I roll on "Character Race" table and get "You're an elf", where does that fit in?

B. You seem to say the world comes first, and characters conform to the world. What of play that springs forth from the character, where the world is secondary, ephemeral and mutable?

Montola wrote:
I actually say that it is an iterative (or even recursive) process, where the world is perpetually recreated (or updated) according to it's present state and the player intentions.

I believe your definition includes a lot more than role play games. Skirmish war games, miniatures games where players take on the role of commanders, even some board games like Advance Squad Leader where you personally identify with one of your cardbard officers would all fit.

I think what your definition does is cover playing games where participants imagine a world and are able to change it by play.

D+D as it existed in those little white boxes (BTW the first printing were in brown boxes) was really a small step away from miniatures gaming. Players brought in a lot of assumed proceedures of play - that were not actually written in the book. For instance, going around the table and saying what you do - is what happens in war games. Using a referee to ajudicate outcomes was also normal game play. What D+D did that war games didn't was to open up the door to spending more play time exploring non-combat events. That pandora's box has lead us to where we are now.

I started gaming in 76, with a bunch of older guys (wargamers) who were part of the first wave of D+D buyers. They played it in 74-75 and were leaving it behind when I came along because the game was moving away from it's war game roots. I think it was the high level of silliness that D+D allowed that turned them off. In Forge terms they were gamist players.

Which leads me here. "If the definition lumps these guys into role playing when they don't see themselves as doing that then maybe the definition is too broad."

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

Intentions or actions?  Or is intention defined through actions?

I believe your definition includes a lot more than role play games. Skirmish war games, miniatures games where players take on the role of commanders, even some board games like Advance Squad Leader where you personally identify with one of your cardbard officers would all fit.

Which leads me here. "If the definition lumps these guys into role playing when they don't see themselves as doing that then maybe the definition is too broad."

Montola wrote: 3. Player-participants define game world through personified character constructs, conforming to the state, properties and contents of the game world.

MatrixGamer wrote:
Which leads me here. "If the definition lumps these guys into role playing when they don't see themselves as doing that then maybe the definition is too broad."

Joshua wrote:
This is a relatively minor nitpick, but you're assuming that player-characters (or equivalents) are a necessary element of roleplaying?  Your definition here does not assume one PC per player (so Troupe Play is still in), and does not assume that there must be a GM (so GMless play is still in) -- am I reading this right?  I suppose it's not really "roleplaying" if there is no role to play, but there's something about this that strikes me as problematic.

I'm talking about the social process of role-playing

1. Role-playing is an interactive process of defining and re-defining the state, properties and contents of an imaginary game world.
2. The power to define the game world is allocated to participants of the game. The participants recognize the existence of this power hierarchy.
3. Player-participants define game world through personified character constructs, conforming to the state, properties and contents of the game world.

Now if you are going for a very broad definition I still think the definition falls down. The social process of role playing in general goes way beyond the gaming community.

For example:

A little girl playing tea party with her dolls.
Cowboys and Indians "Bang Bang you're dead." "No I'm not."
A person putting themselves in someone elses shoes to see what it feels like (either on their own or when asked to do it by a psychotherapist.)

The social act of role playing isn't always hierarchical, can be individual (to kids those imaginary friends are often more important and influential than real people) and isn't necessarily about a character, let alone a story. Often role playing is a fragment of a piece of life.

Now your definition does work for role play games and wargames as well (since they are just a short jump from D+D) but as the Hadith says "Actions are judged by intentions." I don't think we can accidentally role play.

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

Chris,

I should let Markus articulate his thesis since his views may be contradictory to mine, but I did want to address some points.

First, instead of "I'm talking about the social process of role-playing".  I read it as a the "place of social process in role-playing games."

Therefore, a little girl playing tea party with her dolls and a person putting themselves in someone elses shoes to see what it feels like is not a role playing game since it is only one person and does not involve a ludological system.  Cowboys and Indians would not be one unless the players themselves arrived at some way to distribute authority -- either by imparting authority formally and objectively through ludological constructs (rules - "to kill another player you must tag them with a plastic ball) or informally and subjectively through to the players ("Fred is the referee.  What he says goes.").  Both of these are determined through social contract.  But if there is a conflict of opinion and it is consistently functionaly resolved, I don't see how there isn't a hierarchy -- even if the authority is just consensus.

Finally, if actions are reflective of intentions then, through parsimony, there is really no need to discuss intentions.

Thanks,
Mark J.

(BTW Chris, I have long thought that Matrix Games are a brilliant piece of design.  The transparency of the distribution of subjective authority combined with objective, but simple, probabilistic ludological mechanics makes for a very effective game engine.  I think that Markus would be well advised to look at it in actual play since its transparency seems to expose the issues he is interested in directly.)

I should clarify what I mean about intentionality. I tend to take a very behavioral approach in analyzing behavior since it is hard to measure intention but in this case it seems vital.

Consider a Miniatures game - say a WWI fighter combat game. Look at two players. One is given a plane with Baron Munchausen written on it. The other gets a plane with John Bull written on it. The first player - who we will call Killcrazy - looks at the plane and says "Cool! An Albatross D3." The second player - who we will call Thespian - looks at the plane and says "John Bull, I'm an English aristocrat. I went to Eden and Oxford and I stand for fair play and decency."

They start to play. They follow the rules of the game. From the outside what they are doing is identical. But Thespian fore goes "unfair" shots while Killcrazy takes every shot he gets.

Thespian is role playing. Killcrazy is playing a tactical game.

Given that their behavior looks identical the only thing that separates them are their intentions. We can guess at their intentions only indirectly (by how they play) but that is the only difference between them. If you tell Killcrazy "No you are role playing a dirty Hun." aside from being culturally insensitive, you are wrong. He's playing a tactical game.

Thus "Actions are judged by intentions."

Chris Engle
Hamster Press = Engle Matrix Games

Ron is going to kill me here, but one an alternate analysis for this as a role playing game is  that regardless of Killcrazy's intentions, actual play has generated a thematic question... "What is the price of fair play and decency?"  The question will probably be answered in this scenario as "death with honor."  None of this has been addressed mechanically and one of the players isn't addressing the concept at all, but the interactions between the players and the system as whole has created a (very limited) role playing game regardless.

Another analysis is that it isn't actually a role playing game because the power to define and redefine the game world is NOT allocated to participants of the game.

In the example at hand I would say that as soon as one player identifies the miniature as an airplane flying through an imaginary sky, and not a piece of plastic sitting on a table, he's fulfilled Markus's requirement #1. That is: he's constructing a diegesis and updating it through interaction with another player. As long as the rules are laid out and followed, requirement #2 is fulfilled. Where Killcrazy fails to roleplay, arguably, is that he doesn't appear to have a "personified character construct" as required under #3.

Thespian is roleplaying per #3 (he's got a character in mind), but not because there's a Premise: that's only needed for Narrativist play.

However, there's a different kind of ambiguity if Killcrazy insists that he's playing "a dirty hun" even though "Baron Munchausen" was chosen by a GM, who says that "Baron Munchausen may be a scoundrel, but he's not a pig." If this happens, I don't know if the power hierarchy, which tells us who can say what about the game world, is being recognized or not. I still wouldn't be able to tell, even if Killcrazy had intuitively used the GM's characterization. That's because I don't know what exactly counts as "the power to define the game world".

I sent a PM to Markus basically saying that "power to define" and "game world" are troublingly ambiguous terms. But since his earlier essays focused quite carefully on these issues, I bet he'll be a lot clearer in his final paper. We're back to an argument over the Lumpley Principle and the SIS.

The important thing in my mind for a formal definition of role-playing is about where it draws the lines, and what that emphasizes.  For example, some people will define role-playing to exclude things like Tunnels and Trolls solo adventures, and/or computer-moderated solo dungeons.  This de-emphasizes role-playing games which are similar to those (i.e. mechanics-heavy dungeon crawls, say).  I think it's best to get these biases out in the open, though. 

I have an old page on Borderline RPG Cases, and I'd be curious where it stands on these.  It seems to me that condition #3 is roughly equivalent to my own definition of "role-playing game" (where #1 and #2 are implicit in the understanding of "game").   My definition is this: Hypothetically, a person watching the game looks over your shoulder and suggests a move, and your reply is "No, my character wouldn't do that."  If this happens, or is capable of happening, then at some level you are playing a role-playing game.   Now, in Markus' definition, a "personified character construct" could imply that at least some actions are taken on the basis of that understood personality.  If so, I think my definition and #3 are roughly equivalent. 

By comparison, though, there are a number of people on the Forge who don't define RPGs as requiring identification with a player-character.  i.e. So games like Once Upon a Time are still RPGs.  Again, this is a matter of emphasis, which avoids marginalizing games like Universalis which sometimes have limited character identification.  I hope it

Mark wrote:
Ron is going to kill me here, but one an alternate analysis for this as a role playing game is  that regardless of Killcrazy's intentions, actual play has generated a thematic question... "What is the price of fair play and decency?"   The question will probably be answered in this scenario as "death with honor."   None of this has been addressed mechanically and one of the players isn't addressing the concept at all, but the interactions between the players and the system as whole has created a (very limited) role playing game regardless.

Another analysis is that it isn't actually a role playing game because the power to define and redefine the game world is NOT allocated to participants of the game.

Thanks for the huge number of comments. Let me address some points under debate.

Joshua wrote: This is a relatively minor nitpick, but you're assuming that player-characters (or equivalents) are a necessary element of roleplaying?  Your definition here does not assume one PC per player (so Troupe Play is still in), and does not assume that there must be a GM (so GMless play is still in) -- am I reading this right?  I suppose it's not really "roleplaying" if there is no role to play, but there's something about this that strikes me as problematic.

Chris wrote: Now your definition does work for role play games and wargames as well (since they are just a short jump from D+D) but as the Hadith says "Actions are judged by intentions." I don't think we can accidentally role play.

Good discussion.

of course these personalities are always anthropomorphic in a sense -- you can play a stone or a teapot if you wish, but then you end up creating an anthropomorphic personality for that teapot.

I think the essence of what Markus is trying to convey through "anthropomorphize" is not that one thinks of a thing as literally human, but that one views it as something capable of thought or feeling. In logic this sort of thinking is called the "pathetic fallacy", although I wouldn't see it as fallacious in the case of animals (many of them), let alone hypothetical space aliens.

Another way of phrasing this would be that the universe of "things" contains a subgroup of things that one can imagine what it is to be like. Within the context of roleplaying, we often allow ourselves to enlarge this subgroup. I don't ordinarily find it worthwhile to imagine what's it's like to be an electron, but if I do, then an electron could be a personality for the sake of roleplaying.

The idea is that because we are human, our brain works like human brain. And human brain can't simulate a lion, only emulate -- i.e. it can act credibly, but it can't be the same. Hence, all characters are by necessity mentally anthropomorphic.

The reason why I emphasize this is probably that I come from a pretty immersionist culture [no, all Nordics are not immersionists, but the people I play with usually immerse more or less], and in some point immersionism was criticized of the fact that it is actually impossible to immerse into a 2000-year old vampire character (for instance), since we have no possibility to understand how one of those would think. But this anthropomorphization applies on other playing styles as well, I believe.

Electron is a good example. You could role-play an anthropomorphic electron if you wanted.

The only thing I'm still considering here is the fact that some of my friends said a couple of years ago that they "role-played VGA-Planets", by playing entire nations (like ambassadors, parliaments and everything, so that every player played one nation 100% and sent messages to other players according to what was happening in that nation). I'm not sure if they really role-played, if these nations constituted characters -- they didn't have personalities I think, or they may have had 50 billion personalities each -- and hence I'm wondering if they were anthropomorphic whatevers or not.

(But hey, every definition needs borderline cases).

That is, I think everyone here is thinking that if X = Role-playing, and Game X includes Role-playing, then it's automatically a Role-playing Game. Markus is that your intent? Or are you not implying anything of the sort? I think that we're jumping the gun on making that association. By this sort of logic, the old-schoolers who say that a RPG like Over the Edge is not a RPG, because it in no way fits the definition of "game." So we'd be forced to term it "Role-playing Diegesis" or some such to replace the missing term. Rather, the definition of RPG is at this point a traditional one, and not based on the definitions of role-playing, nor of game.

Thanks for the clarifications.

Can you play a non-anthropomorphized electron? Really two questions - if I'm playing an electron are you saying that I must be anthropomorphizing it? Or is there some level at which I'm only emulating it? For an easier example, if I said I was playing a rock, and said that the rock just continued to stay at rest for the remainder of the game, have I played the role of the rock? Or am I just describing an inanimate object and the effects of inertia? What if I narrate it cracking due to the stress on it's bonds of changes in temerature and water seepage?

So are you saying that one cannot "play" certain things? Or that in playing something that we anthropomorphize it? If the latter, it seems that anything can be a role.

Mike

Mike,

the way of playing under the study, role-playing requires characters to have such personalities, that those personalities are by necessary always anthropomorphic.

(Within my conceptual and theoretical framework)

Best,

- Markus

Montola wrote: So I'm not saying that any game ruleset enabling role-playing is a role-playing game; actually I'm saying that you can scrap the rulesets and it's still role-playing.

In that case I'm wondering about the second of your three criteria. If role-playing occurs outside of a "game" do the participants necessarily "recognize the existence of a power hierarchy"?

I do think there's something important there, in the sense that "to roleplay" one must allow oneself to be subject to some externalized authority, or be implicated in some structure, which constrains one's contributions to the process. Perhaps "recognize" is too strong a word?

Maybe the active voice is the problem? I'm partial to my "constrained by/implicated in" language, though I'm sure the body of your text will clarify your intent in any case. :)