Still waiting to see where the Story Games thread about this will go. I wanted to pull out a thing I said there (which I originally said on Vincent's blog):
Roleplaying is a really intimate, intense, vulnerable act. It's kinda sexy, even. But for a lot of us we learnt to play, and most of our experiences of play are with groups of just men (or boys) often during adolescence, a time of incredible insecurity, messed up interpersonal relationships, and frequntly homophobia (and the attendant hatred of the feminine, and anything that makes you vulnerable). Basically, roleplaying is kinda gay, so we butch it up with swords and guns and fighting and shit.
I think we also inherit from that tradition a stringent divide between players and characters. I think a lot of games really strictly police that boundary, maintaining the fiction that it's just a game, that it's not personal.
I think there's fertile ground for design in breaking down that barrier - play that's more personal, more intimate, more dangerous. Whether people want to play those games is another question. To be honest, I'm not sure if I'm even ready for that, or who I'd play with.
It's kind of where I'd like my most recent project, Dungeonfuckers, to go.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Yeah man. In my thinking about the general cultural space for interactive experience, of which story games is a subset, I can totally envisage a sphere of activity that is based around social risk, with the sexy baked right in. Midnight play. Dare to take the person you're flirting with.
ReplyDelete(I also note that sexual energy is a major driving force for much LARP activity. Has been so since the dawn of LARP activity, but the Vampire LARP era made it super-explicit.)
LARPs, eh? Interesting.
ReplyDeleteI guess basically going out dancing and drinking is about enjoying a social space where it's ok to transgress boundaries and risk and sex is implicit.
But yes! Midnight play!
"Roleplaying is a really intimate, intense, vulnerable act. It's kinda sexy, even. But for a lot of us we learnt to play, and most of our experiences of play are with groups of just men (or boys) often during adolescence, a time of incredible insecurity, messed up interpersonal relationships, and frequntly homophobia (and the attendant hatred of the feminine, and anything that makes you vulnerable). Basically, roleplaying is kinda gay, so we butch it up with swords and guns and fighting and shit."
ReplyDeleteTotally love. Brilliant.