I share this as a memo to myself, because I don't have time to explore it right now -- but I have a feeling this is...

I share this as a memo to myself, because I don't have time to explore it right now -- but I have a feeling this is significant, so I share publicly.

Originally shared by Ben Lehman

So, Sarah Lynne Bowman wrote this article [1], and posted in a comment on my post [2] about comparing tabletop role-playing and improv, namely that they are not the same thing, and thus borrowing improv theory to describe role-playing is an intellectual dead-end.

It's worth reading Tim Koppang's comment as well [3].

I think this is a very good article. I enjoyed reading it a great deal, and I think that there's some good insight there. That said, I'm going to start out by talking about some of my frustrations with the article.

My first frustration, which I gotta imagine is shared by the author and also basically everyone involved in studying role-playing, is the incredibly narrow range of literature on the topic, which results in a pretty myopic view of role-playing. Props for including more than just the standard set of Nordic LARP books, but, really, there's very little coherent theory work done outside of Nordic and Nordesque LARP circles. (The Forge [4], while it produced a lot of good theory about tabletop RPG, is neither coherent nor navigable.) This is frustrating to me simply because the article ends up discussing only one aesthetic of roleplaying games -- maximal immersion -- but, honestly, what other literature is there? Nonetheless, I think that this is the aesthetic of role-playing which overlaps the most with Johnstone's aesthetic of theater, and that creates an illusion of more overlap between the fields (role-playing games, acting) than actually exists.

I am also skeptical of the claim that LARPers are reporting their experience without being familiar with acting theory, particularly Johnstone. Johnstone has a ton of currency in LARP circles, and his ideology has already shaped a lot of the immersive ideals of LARP play. Even if a particular player hasn't read Impro, it seems very likely that someone in the non-Vampire, non-NERO based LARP community will be familiar with the ideals of his work, if by another name. Ultimately, the comparison is still pretty interesting, I'm just not sure if they can be claimed to be separate origins of the same thing.

I think the best insight of the article, at least to me, comes right at the end, from the discussion of dissociation and immersion. I think this is very insightful, and it strongly agrees with my personal experiences of both medicalized, psychologically disabled dissociation and also recreational, characterized, ludic dissociation. But I wonder if the category might be applied more broadly? It seems to me like all creative activity is dissociative, by which I mean, represents a cognitive break from reality. The exact nature of the break, and its purpose, and its relationship to the audience, are where the forms begin to differ.

Also, reading this made me very conscious of the aesthetic departures that most but not all tabletop roleplaying games have from the total immersion aesthetics of much LARP. I think the article does a very good job of drawing this distinction, even if, for whatever reasons, it really only investigates the total immersion aesthetic. It's sent me off on my own flight of fancy about aesthetics and games, which really belongs in another post.

Anyway, it's an extremely thought-provoking article and you all should read it and then write your own responses.

[1] http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/05/connecting-role-playing-stage-acting-and-improvisation/
[2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/117301572585814320386/posts/HSd2oWa6gNv
[3] https://plus.google.com/u/0/113060679603173178673/posts/gvGKZwMHLYw
[4] http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php
http://analoggamestudies.org/2015/05/connecting-role-playing-stage-acting-and-improvisation