Role-playing (oh gawd, again)

Addendum to the last post.  It was argued, reasonably, by a reader that I should define the difference between the role-playing I was speaking of, which I described as "performative," and the alternative, the "basic roleplaying," that is normally undertaken through game play, with the players "taking the role" of the characters.  I agree, this distinction has to be made.  But...

When the players make decisions based on their abilities and in-game circumstances, the issue at hand is navigating the game world, solving problems and interacting with the non-player character element.  For example, my character has a discussion with the dockhand to determine when the ship we were after left; I'm obtaining information.  But I'm not "playing a role" when I ask the "dockhand" about this.  I'm asking the DM directly in the framework of the game, and it is the DM that answers.  No role is being played, except within the understanding that the "character" is on the dock, not actual me, and the "dockhand" is speaking, not the actual DM.

Now, this appears to fit into the actor framework, in that if I'm playing Leonid in the Cherry Orchard, I'm still Alexis, I'm not Leonid, though I'm speaking words that Leonid says, to other actors who are playing Trofimov and Anya.  But note, in doing this, I'm performing.  This is performative role-playing.

I'm fully capable of saying to the DM, in gaming, "My character asks the dockhand when the ship left," and the DM is fully capable of answering, "The dockhand says the ship left an hour ago."  We're not performing our characters, we're not "assuming" the roles of our characters, we're not "storytelling," we're discussing what our characters do in the same manner that we would move pieces on the board of a game, though there is no board.

If I say, "My knight takes your bishop," this is not role-playing.  There is no language difference between this and saying, "My fighter attacks that orc."  We're moving pieces on a board.

We are not assuming the role of a character in any deep, immersive way.  This doesn't keep us, as humans gathered around a table, from being immersed in a game, any more than the manner in which chess is played ceases to be immersive because the players aren't actually down on the board being physically threatened by the opponent's queen.  We're quite able to be fully immersed in a game without it having an attachment to the character.  Likewise, our capacity for being inventive, imaginative or innovative is not stymied because we treat the character as a game piece, either.  All sorts of game players of all sorts of games are fully capable of being inventive and so on without this requirement.  D&D is NOT more immersive than chess or scrabble or poker... it just happens to be immersive in a different way that appeals to a different sort of person.

This is an extremely common bit of propaganda about D&D, which was fabricated early on to propitiate the game as "earthshaking" and "unique."  There is no solid evidence that deep immersion in D&D requires a kind of performative attachment to the character — and, in fact, I believe that the vast balance of D&D players would rather there wasn't, and that this trope would just die.  Immersion results from decisions being made and challenges being navigated, not from assuming a personality.

Yet we continue to be saddled with this definition of "role-playing" where we are, in fact, moving pieces on a board, because... wait for it...

A bunch of college-students without any experience in game design or game marketing, and without any foresight regarding how really destructive choosing the wrong appellation would be after a fifty-year haul, chose the psychological buzz word that seemed closest in reflecting something they themselves couldn't explain to someone who had never actually participated in D&D.  "Role-playing" stuck because it seemed like the best fit at the time, and it has been exacerbated because the human tendency is to create a bunch of bullshit conflab interpretive language to justify things that don't make sense, rather than just accepting that, hm, maybe that was the wrong word for the thing and now its too late to fucking fix it.

"Car" is an awful name for an automobile, as the word is a shortening of "carriage," which sort of seems accurate but is in fact not descriptive of what a car does. "Television" is a grossly inaccurate name for what a "tele-vision" does, but we're stuck with it. "Role-playing" falls into the same category, not because it’s particularly accurate, but because it was a convenient grab-ass word for something that no one could properly define at the time. And it sort of sounded cool, especially in a 1974 world where pop-psychology and treatment-based role-playing were all the rage.  Thank gawd the boobs that invented the game didn't call it primal screaming.

And so, I was wrong not to make this clear in the previous post.  I have a tendency, far too often, to assume that everyone else understands what I just explained pedantically, but that's really not a reasonable presupposition on my part.