Drawing based on Dave Gray's original at www.gogamestorm.com
All good games have power, to inspire, to captivate, and change your behavior. The best way that I’ve found to understand why is to imagine each game as its own world; the process of playing that game involves finding or creating this world, understanding or defining it to some extent, entering it, exploring it, and then leaving it and taking something out of it with you, back into real life.
It’s an exciting process I learned from Dave Gray’s Gamestorming blog, which is mostly concerned with games as tools you can use in the workplace, as focus points for meetings or other activities. The way I think it makes the most sense, however, is in the context of tabletop roleplaying games, which are not only the best example of the power games can have, in my opinion, yet also one of the least understood types of games known today.
A roleplaying games (or “RPG”) seems at first to be an ancestor of the modern computer roleplaying game (“CRPG”), only without the speed and beauty that computer graphics and processing engines can provide. In fact, however,it is a dynamic framework of social interaction that reorders the way we talk, think, and imagine for a time. It is an activity you engage in with real people instead of machines, and if the game is a good one, it can help you see any aspect of human life, from adventure to morality, in a new light.
One of my favorite roleplaying games is called Apocalypse World, by Vincent Baker. In it, the first thing you do is get together with a small group of friends and decide what sort of apocalypse seems most interesting to you; this is the first stage in the process I mentioned above: imagining the world. Next, you create characters who survived the apocalypse, and are trying to pick up the pieces; and this is stage two, creating the world. Then, in the third stage, your group enters the world and starts to describe your characters in action, deciding who they know, how they go about life, and so on, as you would during the outset of a book or movie. Then, for many more sessions to come, you enjoy the 4th stage, exploring the world; here we trace our way through unfolding conflicts and problems that your characters must deal with, and along the way your characters grow and change just like real people do. No one can predict what happens next — we simply say what our characters want to do, and see where they bump into challenges, dangers, or each other. Dice help us to resolve conflicts easily and fairly, and the rules help ramp up the tension and develop the situation more deeply. Finally, in the fifth stage, you leave the world, finishing this game and moving on to something else, with a unique experience living on in your memory.
This process is not specific to Apocalypse World — all games express these elements in different ways, from just wanting to play at first, through explaining the rules to someone and setting up the game, to making starting choices, following through and exploring the possibilities, and finally coming to the end somewhat changed from before. In a roleplaying game, however, the field of play is not a playing field or a board — it is in your mind, and the changes happen there as well. After you play Apocalypse World, for example, you may have a better appreciation of your friends and their creativity, a deeper sense of what’s most important in life once all the shiny things have been stripped away, or something else — your experience is bound to be quite different from anyone else’s because you bring your imagination into it.
But in the end, all games are worlds in your imagination, because the rules you agree to are not laws of physics, and whatever boundaries the game sets up could easily be crossed, yet you do not do so. You do not break the rules because you agreed to follow them when you entered play. To cheat is to break that agreement and leave the game before its proper end, without attaining any real purpose. That is the invisible line we cannot cross: the boundary of honesty and a trustworthiness that is so central to being human. And that invisible world at the core of being human is what roleplaying games are all about.
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