RP: role play or collaborative storytelling
Originally published at The Preternatural Post. Please leave any comments there.
“What are you doing?”
An innocent question that can be harder to answer than it seems. Setting aside the stigma, real or imagined, that is often associated with role playing, is it really fair to call the activity dozens, hundreds even thousands engage in online every day “role playing”?And if what we’re doing isn’t role playing, what is it?
Role Play
Role playing is defined as changing one’s behavior to fit a role. The changes can be made subconsciously or consciously. The roles can be adopted in real life for practical reasons or simply for amusement. Some roles are adopted only within the confines of a particular space, such as a theater, game or other performance space. Role playing also occurs in educational and training settings.
By that definition the RP taking place on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and other online venues qualifies as role play. But then so does acting, historic re-enactment and even simulation training. Even though the definition fits, role playing isn’t the only way to define RP. It may not even be the best way although that’s what we commonly use.
Collaborative Storytelling
Another way to define RP is as collaborative storytelling. When two or more people are engaged in telling a story, as most of us are when we RP online, we are engaged in collaborative storytelling. Though this is similar to role play, there are some distinguishing features including the possibility for a narrator (not often seen on Twitter but they do pop up in blogs) and of a single person telling the story from the point of view of multiple characters.
The collaborative storytelling model is ideally suited to text-based and story-based RP because platforms like Twitter and blogs are primarily text-based as well. Sure you can post images, audio and video to these sites but they are supplements to the text, the words, of the tweet or the blog entry. The only reason RP might not generally be considered collaborative storytelling rather than role play is that participants tend to take on the personas of their characters thus emphasizing, or placing more importance on the characters than on the story itself.
Story Playing?
Obviously RP as it is practiced on Twitter and in blogs, is a blend of both classic role playing and collaborative storytelling. Some might say it is a subgenre of both while others would contend it is the evolution of both and deserves to be recognized as a unique creative endeavor.
At its core, however, RP is probably among the purest online expressions of our story instincts.To borrow from Clay Morgan, an English professor at Boise State University:
“Story simulates human life, inside the human mind, by engaging senses, triggering emotions and creating awareness of consequences and meaning. Story is share, experiential, chronological thinking. I t is the most primal, the most powerful and the most subtle system of logic, persuasion and communication. Story is how humans inhabit Time, how cultures and individuals remembers, and how we plan and dream.”
If that’s not RP, what is?