I've come to believe that human beings cannot help themselves role-playing under certain conditions. Yes, I know that in a broad sense we are all always inescapably playing various roles - father, mother, husband, wife, teacher, plumber, professional snooker player, etc. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking specifically about games.
There are certain types of games - war games, board games and computer games - in which players naturally start to associate themselves with a certain role or character such that at a phenomenological level they begin to think "as" somebody else, somebody who they are not.
The most obvious example of this from my experience is the computer game Football Manager and its earlier iteration Championship Manager. Here, the player notionally takes on the persona of the manager of a football club somewhere in the world, and the game simulates the decisions that a manager supposedly takes - buying/selling players, picking the team before matches, carrying out training, coming up with tactics, and so on. It would be entirely possible to play Football Manager in the manner of chess - just doing what is necessary to win as an abstract challenge. But the actual experience of playing Football Manager is nothing like this. In fact it is an emotional rollercoaster in which every last outcome is keenly felt and in which one comes to identify so strongly with one's abstract "manager" that one can quite readily come to hate opposing managers, clubs, and even one's own players for frustrating one's wishes in-game. (One of the reasons I stopped playing the game in around 2013 was because it was making me so angry and stressed that I thought it was no longer worth the inescapable emotional investment. I would be better off with the real-life stresses of actually managing a football club, and being paid for it.) Football Manager is not just a computer game. It's actually a role-playing game. It just isn't thought of in that way.
Other examples which may be more pertinent to your experience are strategy games like Civilization and those in the Paradox Interactive stable. I don't think anybody plays Civilization as though it is just an abstract challenge like Scrabble or Go. Instead, they quickly take on the personas of all-powerful Gods, bossing their little Egyptians/Mayans/Mongols around and taking against those dastardly Persians while looking favourably on the sexy Carthaginians (or whatever). They may not take it as far as writing Crusader Kings II After Action Reports in the first or third person, which thousands of people do. But they certainly, to some extent or other, come to feel as though they occupy a "role" - and become emotionally involved in the decisions and activities associated with it.
Some board games - the best examples I can think of being Monopoly and Diplomacy - also have this character. Play a game of Monopoly and you'll quickly find that the players will begin to act as though they are real-estate entrepreneurs, threatening each other with bankruptcy and bargaining ferociously once all the locations are bought. It's not as though their entire personality changes for four hours. But there's slippage from the role of player into the role of character. They aren't just rolling the dice and trying to amass money as though they are just a stand-in for abstract points. They are trying to amass money because, briefly and conditionally, they want money.
What, then, are the conditions in which "role playing" takes place? I'd suggest:
- There's a game
- The game is one which has at least some connection to a concrete reality, typically the real world but perhaps a made-up one (from Football Manager, which is about the real world right down to accurately modelling the abilities and actions of tens of thousands of living professional footballers, to Civilization V, which isn't about the real world at all)
- The game conceals its mechanics behind an interface (like Crusader Kings II), or a fake set of tokens or other realia (like Monopoly) and isn't based on abstracted or notional items like cards (poker)
These conditions may simply be ideal ones. Chess probably doesn't meet them, and yet it is possible to think of oneself as "being" the King when playing (although most players likely don't do this).
Thought of in these terms, there are hundreds of millions of us - maybe billions - around the world.
I've long thought that football management sims and computer rpgs -- in particular the Japanese variety -- are basically the same genre, just with different subject matter.
ReplyDeleteThis was confirmed when Inazuma Eleven was released.
There was an old football management game for the Amiga which did something similar - I can't remember the title of it now though.
DeleteJapanese culture is weird in that high school sport is the setting for most books/manga/games/films of that nature, rather than the professional variety.
Was it "On the Ball"?
DeleteYes! It was.
DeleteI'd add that games that the more active interaction you have between players/characters, the more role-playing you get. In your Football Manager example, the players and other managers in the game act as foils for your character. Your feelings about them give a life to your own character. The same goes for Crusader Kings, that rare strategy game where I often make "suboptimal" choices because it is just what my character would do.
ReplyDeleteWith board games, Monopoly, a game that lets you wheel and deal with other players is going to bring out a lot more role-playing than The Game of Life, where there are much fewer opportunities to affect the other players.
You need multiple roles bouncing off one another for satisfying role-playing to happen.
Yes, that's probably true. Another condition might be a certain level of complexity. You can't really role play (I think) with Snakes and Ladders.
DeleteWhen my son was 4 or 5 he most cwrtainly role played when we played Snakes and Ladders. He had some interesting color commentary when we played.
DeleteAlthough our board has all of these 19th C. style morality play illustrations for each snake and ladder, so that may have affected him to do that, now that I think of it.
But he would come up with his own justifications for success and failure in the game.
What were the justifications??
DeleteGood observations.
ReplyDeleteI've made a related point (in the comments of this very blog, I think): it's virtually impossible to distinguish a one-miniature-per-person skirmish wargame from an RPG. And the same's largely true of a small-warband skirmish game. Give one player a band of orcs and the other a squad of dwarfs, and you'll have in-character dialogue within minutes.
A lot of the European board games seem to discourage that sort of thing deliberately - as with Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne having colours rather than tribal or dynastic names. But they don't stop it.
In contrast, some wargames actively encourage the roleplaying element - Lion and Dragon Rampant, for example, with their boasts and leader characteristics.
If the king were the queen in chess, I think you'd get more RPGish identification. It's the weediness of the king, in part, that keeps things abstract.
Also, in wargames and boardgames, you very often get players behaving in character rather than simply speaking in character. I'd reckon that a player running a barbarian or monstrous army is much more likely to commit to a reckless charge than they would if they were playing a 'civilised' army. In part, that's because well-designed games reward "in-character" actions. But it's also because players feel that it's appropriate to act in character, whether or not those decisions are tactically astute. And that's really the essence of roleplaying.
Yep, I am sure that last paragraph is true. Although it is complicated by the fact that the rules often encourage that sort of behaviour too (giving Orks very melee-heavy abilities, etc., or giving charge bonuses to barbarians or whatever it might be). It would be interesting to see if that kind of thing had an effect on player behaviour if it was just fluff and no mechanics.
DeleteI'd swear blind that I've seen it in 'mechanically neutral' games like Hordes fo the Things (where all armies run off the same list).
DeleteThere's probably a sort of loop effect: if you have orcs, you'll be drawn into talking like an orc. But that means you have to say orcish things - which leads to you playing orcishly.
//It would be interesting to see if that kind of thing had an effect on player behaviour if it was just fluff and no mechanics.//
DeleteThe best psychology experiment ever.
Somebody should do a PhD on it.
DeleteIt's a very interesting point. I think games draw people in to "roleplaying" by encouraging a certain mindset, as JC notes, which encourages us to play the role in a certain way. To be successful at Football Manager or Monopoly we adopt one of those "classes" as a framework for how we should be acting and a reference point for what makes us successful, just the same as a D&D class.
ReplyDeleteYeah, good point. Never thought about it that way before but I suppose a D&D class is really just a kind of heuristic for a certain play style.
DeleteOnce, when when playing Axis and Allies, one of my buddies was Germany and stayed in character as Dr. Strangelove for the whole game. Not sure if this relates, but it needs to be said.
ReplyDeleteWhen playing Saga, my son insists that we adopt appropriate accents (Scandinavian, Northumbrian, Welsh, etc. - my Pecheneg's a bit rusty). What makes it especially surreal is that we play the game with fantasy miniatures - so that the Vikings are often beastmen and the Anglo-Danes orcs, and so on.
DeleteI hope he managed to get the "I can walk!" line in there somehow.
DeleteYour experience with football managers reminds me of the way I get into XCOM (the original and the 2012 reboot). Controlling a squad of soldiers is a bit like being a player and a DM at the same time, you get to roleplay, but also determine the interactions/relationships between each character for yourself.
ReplyDeleteGiven the popularity of board/video games that let you "people manage" like that, I'm surprised domain level play isn't more popular. WOTC or whoever could probably revive interest in that style of high-level D&D if they framed it right.
I have not played that game in years (when I had it back in the day it was called "UFO: Enemy Unknown", which I loved). The second one, "Terror from the Deep", was fantastic, but too hard for me to ever defeat.
DeleteHuh. Although I thoroughly enjoy Civilization and Monopoly, I can't say I've ever felt emotionally invested in them (other than the joy of making a good move, or winning). They aren't like D&D at all for me, they are more like sports, but the challenge is intellectual.
ReplyDeleteWhat helps bring out the RP element in these kind of games is to have a lot of elbow room. What I mean by that is a whole slew of different ways of approaching a problem at are at least functional. Lets you feel like you're choosing what the character would do more than when your choices are more constrained. Also games that repy VERY heavily on interacting with other people can bring this out (Diplomacy for example) since human interaction results in open-ended metagames (like treaty-style agreements in Diplomacy) that are an important part of the game despite having no rules.
ReplyDeleteWhat sets tabletop RPG apart from board games the most is how open-ended they are so other games that approach this can tap into some of the same behaviors.
Yes, that's an important point. In Go or Snakes and Ladders you can only really do one thing.
Delete