I couldn't decide if this belonged in the tar baby immersion thread, or over in player vs. character in GNS, or somewhere else, so . . . I'm starting a new thread.

I had an insight - not a new one, I'm sure, but it was particularly strong for some reason - at a game session last night. But first of all, I should say that I knew and had gamed previously with only one person in this group, and last night was only my second session with 'em, so my opinions are still a bit shaky. But that said - one of the goals openly stated by many members of this group is "in character" play.

And what I really saw last night is how the idea of "in character" is every bit as fuzzy as the notion of immersion, and thus (on its own) it may also be pretty useless. As I think others at the Forge have said (Ron?), the usual easy clues for "in character" (talking with an accent, holding conversations with other characters, etc.) are not really sufficient. E.g., within this group, a particular action - say, stating "I cast heal on George" - could be seen as either in character or out of character. When the statement is made on its own, and/or directly in response to a numeric damage assessment, and/or by a player everyone thinks "doesn't roleplay enough," it's seen as out of character. When it's said in midst of some inter-character conversation, and/or after a prayer to a named god, and/or by a player who has dramatically engaged the others with descriptive narration, it's in character. After all, it is the character casting the spell, isn't it?

As far as I can tell, this group has been trying to get the player who "doesn't roleplay enough" to play more in character for a long time now, with little or no success. As far as I can tell, he's not opposed to the idea (i.e., he's not looking for a wargame experience amidst a more character-focused group), but he's not really understanding what they're saying.

My thought is, that's (partly) because what they're saying actually isn't all that clear. "In character" is a code, and we'd be better off NOT using it, but rather replacing it with . . . "interact with the other players, not the rules." And "wait until there's no character-to-character conversation happening before asking a rules question." And "don't worry about whether or not YOU can generate an internal-to-the-character logic for an action, look to see if the other players are responding to you as your character." And probably lots more, that I haven't figured out yet.

I'll leave it at that for now - in some ways, this is an obvious insight, though it clearly affected me strongly enough to inspire a post. We'll see what anyone else makes of it,

Gordon

Gordon,

I completely agree. Another example is the Simulationist[Character]/Narrativist issue. This also bleeds out into other media such as watching a movie or reading a book.

For example, let's say I create a forensic scientist whom I describe as "detached, methodical and dispassionate." I play 3 sessions perfectly with all this. Then all of a sudden I'm assigned to a case where a 10 year old girl was raped and murdered and all of a sudden I start playing my character as an obessessed madman who won't rest until this case is solved. All of sudden, I'm no longer acting "in character", I've somehow allowed my real world feelings interfere with how my character is "supposed" to be played. Certain gamers fail to see this as character revelation or evolution. Obviously, my character is detached, methodical and dispassionate except when it comes to sex crimes against little girls but because that wasn't stated up front durring character creation, I've somehow violated the character concept.

Jesse

Gordon C. Landis wrote: "In character" is a code, and we'd be better off NOT using it, but rather replacing it with . . . "interact with the other players, not the rules."

Yeah, this is a can of worms; and as I understand Zymurgy's Law of Evolving Dynamic Systems, if you want to close it, you're going to need a bigger can.

I'm immediately thinking of actors. Dustin Hoffman and Robert Hardy are both brilliant at their craft. They have the ability to disappear into a roll so completely that you are likely to be wondering why the voice sounds familiar--and sometimes even then not. Although Tootsie was something of a gimmick, when Hoffman put that on he became that woman quite convincingly on the screen. Similarly, I saw a PBS piece in which Winston Churchill was brought to life on the screen, and was stunned to discover that Hardy had played the lead roll when the credits ran.

I think that Hoffman is a "method actor"; I think that Hardy is not.

The method actor, as I understand it, tries to feel what the character feels by relating it to moments in his own life and capturing that feeling. Thus if he wants to feel the loss of the character's mother, he remembers the death of a family member or close friend or even a pet, and recalls that feeling in the scene so that he actually does feel as the character feels, and so looks the part. The other sort doesn't do this. He studies the body language of people who have these feelings, including his own, and attempts to faithfully reproduce the appearance of the emotion without actually feeling it.

Now, some would say that the method actor is "in character" and the other is not. But assuming comparable facility, you can't tell the difference from the outside.

You're right; they should tell him what they want. But I think what they want is for him to play the character by the method--they want him to feel what the character feels, portray things from the character perspective, and to some degree forget that he is a player at a table playing a game instead of the character in the story that is unfolding. If, as you suggest, they tell him the details of what he should do, he will probably prove to be the other sort of actor, reproducing the expected conduct with ever more precise accuracy, but not actually "getting into" his character the way they mean.

I don't know if that will matter to play; but it might matter to his level of enjoyment.

--M. J. Young

Gordon C. Landis wrote: "In character" is a code, and we'd be better off NOT using it, but rather replacing it with . . . "interact with the other players, not the rules." And "wait until there's no character-to-character conversation happening before asking a rules question." And "don't worry about whether or not YOU can generate an internal-to-the-character logic for an action, look to see if the other players are responding to you as your character." And probably lots more, that I haven't figured out yet.

Hello,

I think all the examples do a good job of showing that "in character" is not a useful term all by itself, or most especially, when it's assumed to mean a specific thing just because it's been used.

PART ONE
I can see a way in which it might be employed more clearly: as an adjective alone. Therefore we might talk about ...

- in-character knowledge, meaning things that the character knows as a sub-set of all of the stuff the player knows

- in-character dialogue, meaning the player employs acting-style speech patterns, gestures, etc

[Note that neither of the above two implies the other.]

- in-character decision-making, meaning that the character's actions are made understandable (to everyone else at the table) as a function of in-character knowledge

[The above may be employed as an optional part of Author stance, or as a necessary part of Actor stance.]

- in-character feeling, meaning that the player experiences a personal "takeover" or no-deliberation knowledge of what the character does or "wants"

[Some people call the above feeling "immersion," which is currently under some analysis in the thoughts on why immersion is a tar baby thread.]

[Counter-intuitively, the "feeling" does not necessarily imply in-character decision-making.]

There're probably some other adjectival uses that I'm not flashing on at the moment.

PART TWO
Aside from the above adjectival use, which itself is apparently so diverse as to be barely useful, I don't see much point to using the term. It seems frequently to be couched as an accusation toward others, and I think it might be in the same undefined-trump-phrase bag as "realistic," "balance," or "role-playing right."

Best,
Ron

Hello,

Good observations, Gordon and everyone.

IC seems to wear several hats, suggested by Ron's 4 uses of it as an adjective:

Ron Edwards wrote: - in-character knowledge, meaning things that the character knows as a sub-set of all of the stuff the player knows

Ron wrote: - in-character dialogue, meaning the player employs acting-style speech patterns, gestures, etc

Ron wrote: - in-character decision-making, meaning that the character's actions are made understandable (to everyone else at the table) as a function of in-character knowledge

Ron Edwards wrote: - in-character feeling, meaning that the player experiences a personal "takeover" or no-deliberation knowledge of what the character does or "wants"

Reading this post by Ron, I realised that three of the four functions of IC I described in my last post aligned, at least somewhat, with GNS:

Ron Edwards wrote: Gamism - the player has committed to accomplishing win/loss conditions ("performing") using a specified range of options. Character creation is all about establishing the parameters of the options for a given character, regardless of how they are generated (randomly, point-allocation, etc).

Simulationism - the player has committed to a given set of plausible relationships among the modelled variables within the imagined game-world, expressed as "this character can do this much, this well," as a function of the character's previous history. I think of character creation in this mode of play as actually playing before the group begins, which is not the case in the other two modes, because the points/rolls/etc of Simulationist character creation are considered to be the game world in action.

Narrativism - the player has committed to expressing a specific set of passions regarding a specific set of issues (note: this can develop through play and to a certain extent almost always does, rather than being set in stone from the outset), entirely at the metagame/social level of play. The character, his or her abilities, his or her behaviors, anything about the character, express the range of the issue; that's what the character is for.

Thanks all. Great comments! I think Emily's last bit (as triggered by Ron) is immediately useful for me - I can ask "WHY is in-character play [ignoring for the moment figuring out exactly what that means] important?" "Why" questions are always a bit problematic, but I think it'll be a good conversation starter with this group.

So again, thanks.

Gordon

I could add one more to Ron's list, but it's a tricky one.

What I'd add is in-character action as distinct from in-character decision-making.

I've used the example of a humorous character slipping on a banana peel before. It's not an in-character decision -- the character has no desire to slip on the banana peel and doesn't make any decision to do so (or else it's not funny) -- but when it happens we say it's "in character" for such a thing to happen. So what I'm really talking about here is "in-character outcome." Another example of the same principle: suppose a James Bond character is played with consistently in-character knowledge, dialoge, decision-making and feeling, but there is no villain with an evil plan to blackmail the world. From an outcome point of view, this character never has a chance to be "in-character" regardless of how played, unless the system allows the player to invent the necessary villain and evil plan. In that case, as in the banana peel example, it would seem to require out-of-character decision making and/or knowledge (and probably OOC feeling and dialog as well) to bring about an in-character outcome.

This sometime association between "in-character" and an abstract quality of outcome might be a large part of the reason for the abstruseness of "in-character" as a term. Outcome qualities in general appear to be indigestible to GNS theory, so terms that can (but don't always) denote an outcome quality (including "story") seem to be the ones that are deemed too slippery to handle. ("Immersion" appears to be an exception, as it appears on its face to be a quality of the instant of play, not of the outcome. But I wonder if it's not really an outcome quality in disguise.)

- Walt

Gordon C. Landis wrote: I can ask "WHY is in-character play [ignoring for the moment figuring out exactly what that means] important?" "Why" questions are always a bit problematic, but I think it'll be a good conversation starter with this group.

bluegargantua wrote:

This is where I was going to jump in.

I was going to ask a big-picture question i.e. Why do you feel the need to find a definition for "in character" and what do you hope to gain by doing so?

I don't want to sound flip here, I seriously wanted to elicit some of the reasons behind starting the thread. You started the thread asking about "in character", but it seemed like there was a deeper question embedded within it. That came out when you were discussing your group's dynamics.