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, character development isn't necessarily about a character changing. It can be just as easily and just as powerfully about revealing previously hidden aspects of the character.

It sounds like you're talking about character development in a literature sense: giving the character depth in the view of outsiders, including by making clearer what was already there. I was actually thinking specifically of character development in a forward direction, i.e character change throughout the course of a story.

I do think there are 'plot arcs' to a game or story which do not necessarily include every way in which a character changes, or at least, that do not include those details as central to the plot arc of the story as a whole. One issue, I think, is that there really are a great many arcs and stories within a single game. In a LARP, that's very obvious; in a tabletop, maybe less so, but still true. From my perspective, the story I play out in a game may be about how my character came to trust other people and let go her delusions until she turned into something quite different. For me, major plot changes in the scenario may actually be incidental to the story arc I care about. My character development may also be incidental to the stories played out by most other people. Whatever perspective someone has, it is likely that the best story for them will be something that includes aspects of character change, world change, drama and excitement, relationships with a variety of other characters, etc. But people's desired ratio of various aspects may
differ.

[wirednavi.livejournal.com]

I think where I'm coming from with that is that I get a lot of joy from creating new aspects of a character, as well as changing old aspects. For instance, there's a sardine-eating plot in Aralis. Until then, I hadn't thought that Marric had any opinion one way or another about sardines, but now I decide that to make things more interesting he really, really hates sardines.

Obviously, this is a deliberately stupid example, but that kind of thing happens, and I have a lot of fun with it. You can say on the one hand that that aspect of Marric's character was 'already there', and that I'm revealing it, but at least to me it _is_ character development. In fact, I can work backwards from it and create entire chunks of backstory, other personality traits, etc. etc. I'm not sure quite where the divide is in roleplaying between 'changing a character' and 'creating new facets of the character', as long as neither one contradicts events which have been shared with others and thus can't be redacted. They seem like aspects of the same thing.