Theory of Mind, books branch

[sartorias]

This was one of the panel topics at the recent Fourth Street Fantasy con in Minneapolis. The panel went really well, I thought, bouncing between all the various branches of TOM study. Not surprising as it is so very fundamental to human existence

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[whswhs]

Quite some years ago now, I ran a series of RPGs set in Steve Jackson Games's Transhuman Space setting, a moderately realistic world of the year 2100. The player characters were partners in a small private investigative agency: a forensic analyst, a hacker, a street-smart ex-cop, and a "face." And the player for the hacker didn't roleplay much, but occasionally had his character do strange things that didn't seem well motivated. Then eventually he wrote a short piece online (on LiveJournal, if I recall correctly!) that discussed how his character saw events, which was nothing like any of the rest of us had guessed. He was doing what is called "immersive play," where the player's whole goal is to experience the game world as the character does and to assign meanings to what happens. So I talked with him privately and explained that there was no problem with that, but that as a co-creator of the narrative, he needed to enable the audience (the other players and me, the GM) to have some sense of what his character was thinking, feeling,

[sartorias]

Oh, that's interesting!