On Role Playing, Literature, and Acting

[benlehman]

This was an essay, but I realized that it can be trimmed to one line:

The only similarity between acting, literature, and role-playing games is that they all use words and, sometimes, plot arcs.

Relvevant Forge thread:
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=12711&highlight=

Anyone else have thoughts?

Comments

[arianhwyvar.livejournal.com]

Also, each of them has a participatory/creator and an observer aspect.

In the creator aspect, each of them has the quality of starting from an initial seed or collection of basic information and expanding into something much richer. And in all three, some measure of worth is based on the degree, complexity, and delicacy of the expansion.

I suppose these things could be summed up by saying 'they are all art', though.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Yup. That's one I definitely forgot. They are all artforms.

I would like to note that this participatory/creator aspect and observer aspect are so tightly linked in RPG that distinguishing between the two is vanishingly difficult, and I think that that is a big source of what makes RPGs cool.

In fact, the only other form of human expression where creator, participant, and observer are so closely linked may well be Myth.

yrs--
--Ben

[russiandude.livejournal.com]

Back to the acting - process dramas have that same kind of link.

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Well, I've never participated in a process drama, so I have no clue. Could you describe how you go about doing a process drama?

yrs--
--Ben

[russiandude.livejournal.com]

minervaish organized it and may be more able to describe it, but here is a basic idea. A few people in the room get up and improv a scene (trying to define the setting and name some of the people). The someone, say the person organizing it, sums up what information was gleamed from the scene and some other people generate a new scene, all the while trying to form an actual story.
It is a lot like filming a movie out of order.