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

[relevance.livejournal.com]

Well, for one thing, they utilize overlapping skillsets: improvisational acting skills will make you a better roleplayer; writing coherently will make your NPCs and gamebooks better; doing any of the three will exercise your imagination, which will improve your abilities at the other two; etc.

[arianhwyvar.livejournal.com]

I would also not say that character development or depth is the same thing as words or plot arcs. And yet I think that is something which benefit all three, and to at least some people seems necessary to all three.

[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.

[wirednavi.livejournal.com]

A lot of the comments people are making are coming from the idea that 'roleplaying' is at least in most respects equivalent to 'acting out what a given character would do'. I think that while this is a big part of roleplaying, that's not what it is - or perhaps it is but what I'm thinking of when I say 'roleplaying' needs a new term.
It seems to me that roleplaying (in whatever definition) has a lot superficially in common with acting or writing, but that the most useful point of overlap between writing, acting, and roleplaying is an appreciation for and understanding of what makes a good story. Of course, you can have an RPG without worrying about that; lots of D&D campaigns do that. And one thing that makes a good story is a consistent world with consistent characters - otherwise, your 'story' isn't a story at all, just a series of scenes, so when people worry about the validity of their knowledge of the world and their characters they hav a valid point.
Roleplaying hits some sort of middle ground between scripted acting and improv acting, I think. In stage acting, you know your character's actions, statements, and world, and so the emphasis is on delivering these actions and statements in the way that best emphasizes that character's part in the action. In most improv, the 'shared imagined space' is pretty much based, and the rules for adding to it are based more on aesthetic judgements of 'what would be a fun/interesting/meaningful thing to do here' and 'how can I disrupt the flow of this scene the least'. With most roleplaying, though, a player will know _some_ things about the world, and _some_ things about their character's actions, but have to balance going along with the world with a similar aesthetic judgement about story and meaning. The skills do overlap, but obviously training in one thing makes it harder to separate out the relevant skills - a trained actor may find it difficult to work without a script, for instance.

(As an aside, it's interesting to me that I just used 'RPG' while referring to D&D, but that 'roleplaying game' seems to have different connotations in my head...)