Mericot Finweth
Gallente
Swords to Plowshares
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Posted - 2007.12.15 12:16:00 -
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In my opinion, role-playing is a form of acting. As in acting there are genres and different styles of acting. Unlike acting, there is less presence of scripts and directors.
Now, one way to emulate acting is by taking your cue from film or theatre productions like Rome, Battlestar Galactica or Napoleon. I'll call this epic style role-playing. You basically have a storyline where the actions that the characters take are important. f. ex. "Julius Caesar has to conquer Gaul. Oidipus has to kill his father and marry his mother.". Careful planning and pre-scripting (by talking to other role-players before or after the event)helps this approach a lot. Monologues and long speeches are common, and it seems a form very appropriate for Galnet. One problem with this approach is that epic often is a tragic genre, meaning if not everyone dies at the end, it might feel like it went wrong. Still it seems viable for role-playing and fits well with the unwritten rule that your actions in-game should agree with your forum presence. It is also fairly easy to keep OOC and IC comments apart. You don't think you're Julius Caesar, do you?
Another way to emulate acting is by focusing on the internal processes of your character's psychological profile. Here the inspiration could be the drama genre of film or theatre. Here your actions are less important since it is what your character makes out of being left out at a dinner session or what he makes out of losing 10000 crew members on his battleship that is important. The focus is on the psychological reaction. Think of a Cassavetes movie for example. Tools for this approach is more dialogue than monologue and corp chat windows or specially created chat windows are probably easier to get this going in than on Galnet. Improvisation is much more important than pre-scripting and it seems to work best when you don't pre-script or talk to other characters beforehand. The surprise factor is part of the deal. To do this, you have to, as an actor does, draw from your personal psychological experience, in order to become your character for a short moment in order to be able to improvise in character. This is very hard and there are acting schools dedicated to this process (I think some guy named Stanislavskij started this type of thinking). It is also very hard to keep IC and OOC comments apart and it probably helps if the people you are interacting with knows this and gives themselves and you some lee-way. Think of theatre improvisation back in school, if you ever did such. Sometimes it goes awry. This tends to put a focus on your character's actions being IC to a very high degree and puts a severe psychological pressure on anyone trying to keep immersion qualities.
A third way to see it, which would be specific for role-playing in a game universe like EVE, would be the genre of the absurd. Think of Beckett plays, Mel Brooks "Spaceballs" or "Star Wreck". This enables you to see the various comments in the LOCAL chat window as part of some absurd play that is being played out and it also enables epic characters to be seen in a comic and hopefully funny way. The style is full of OOC comments and references while at the same time maintaining (in absurdum) IC representation. Paraphrasing and ironic commentary are useful tools for this. The Super Bowl game or Harry Potter book being discussed in a chat window is really a code for Mind Clash games and the new bestseller by a famous writer from The Scope. This style of role-playing however can make people a bit uneasy unless they understand what you are doing or trying to do. It is probably best to at least let people know that you are attempting this style with people OOC. However, that's no guarantee that it will work. People have very different senses of humor.
In all of the above, it helps if you are interacting with people that understand what you are trying to do, explicitly or implicitly.
It is even better if you understand it yourself.
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