RPGing and imagination: a fundamental point

[FrogReaver]

I’m not making it personal. I’m describing how your posts seem.

IMO, that’s a very fine line.

I don’t believe that you are bonkers. The idea that imagination isn’t central to RPGs is bonkers. I do dismiss that idea.

Pray tell, what would you call someone with bonkers ideas?

 

[hawkeyefan]

IMO, that’s a very fine line.


Pray tell, what would you call someone with bonkers ideas?

Why would I need to call them anything? We all say or do things that are bonkers sometimes. It’s part of being human.

 

[FrogReaver]

Why would I need to call them anything? We all say or do things that are bonkers sometimes. It’s part of being human.

Good. So I think the clearest way to say this is - I find the idea that it’s generally acceptable to call others ideas bonkers to be bonkers. As you masterfully said, you don’t actually have to call someone or their ideas anything.

IMO, doing so is just a way to be dismissive toward others without furthering the discussion in any way. Furthering the discussion requires finding the words that explain why a position doesn’t make sense to you.

*Note: My Hypocrisy in this post is intentional.

 

[FrogReaver]

If shared imagination is not at the core of game play, then I'm not sure how it's a RPG (as opposed to, say, a flavour-heavy board game).

I think the terms here are doing all the heavy lifting.

What is shared imagination?
What is game play?
What is an RPG?
What is a board game?

Also how do you determine whether something is core or flavor-heavy?

Going a bit deeper, my initial analysis is that you are just making a circular claim -

‘An RPG is game that cannot be played without shared imagination’.
‘Shared Imagination is the core game play of an RPG’.

 

[MGibster]

Picture if you will, you're a carpenter with your latest work in hand, a chair, you're delivering to your customer, an ugly philosopher whose upturned nose, bulging eyes, and round stomach gave him all the appearance of a pig. Standing in what was once an olive grove and sacred to the Attic hero Academus, you listen to your patron, Socrates, pontificate about the essence of a chair, the perfect ideal of what a chair is, to a slew of students who wouldn't know how to build a chair if you spotted them four legs and the seat. After delivering your work, you wonder at the wisdom of Atheniums who pay to have their sons learn about ideal chairs without being able to build one.

In all my life, I never thought I'd see a conversation go on this long about imagination and RPGs. When I was younger, RPGs were often described as being similar to "Cops 'n Robbers," except with rules. The idea that imagination might not be a core aspect of RPGs is new to me.

 

[FrogReaver]

One interesting thing @Umbran brought up is that most games, if not all, can be played in a completely imaginative space without the need for any kind of physical tokens. Though I think more accurately this would be called an abstract space instead of imaginative space - but there’s some question for me as to whether an abstract game space and an imaginative game space or the same thing.

I think maybe the true difference between an RPG and a game like chess isn’t that one is imagined or not (chess can be fully imagined/abstract as well). I think the true difference lies in what is being imagined. An RPG is about an imagined fictional world and controlling an imagined character in that fictional world. Obviously if we are playing with other people we all need to stay on the same page about the happenings in that imagined world - which is where the notion of shared imagination comes from. However, similar to chess which is usually played on a physical or digital board but can be imagined, RPG’s can also be played with physical or digital tokens to represent the world and characters in it. This is why computer rpg’s are still rpg’s.

So I think I’m at the point that I disagree with the notion that RPGs core is a shared imaginative space. The core of an RPG is a game about a fictional world where players control a fictional character where the players choices for the character drive the gameplay.

And even this is a bit broad because it would include games like tomb raider or call of duty - but in some sense those kinds of games might should technically be classified as RPGs - even if they differ greatly from what traditionally gets thought of as RPGs.

 

[FrogReaver]

Picture if you will, you're a carpenter with your latest work in hand, a chair, you're delivering to your customer, an ugly philosopher whose upturned nose, bulging eyes, and round stomach gave him all the appearance of a pig. Standing in what was once an olive grove and sacred to the Attic hero Academus, you listen to your patron, Socrates, pontificate about the essence of a chair, the perfect ideal of what a chair is, to a slew of students who wouldn't know how to build a chair if you spotted them four legs and the seat. After delivering your work, you wonder at the wisdom of Atheniums who pay to have their sons learn about ideal chairs without being able to build one.

In all my life, I never thought I'd see a conversation go on this long about imagination and RPGs. When I was younger, RPGs were often described as being similar to "Cops 'n Robbers," except with rules. The idea that imagination might not be a core aspect of RPGs is new to me.

I get it - first take is it’s all about the imagination, the imagined space - but the more I contemplate the more I think that’s just an artifact of how these games have traditionally been played.

IMO, any game can be tokenized. Any tokenized game can be played solely in the abstract without tokens. And if this is accepted then being tokenized or abstract isn’t a core differentiator of any game type.

 

[Jagga Spikes]

If you remove everything from rpg but shared imagination is it still rpg? Would chess be still chess?

 

[Hriston]

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say if all you’re imagining is tokens moving on a board then you’re probably not playing an RPG. I hope I haven’t excluded anyone.

 

[niklinna]

It can be worthwhile to examine the extreme edge cases of a proposition. But just tossing out a "well what about X, huh?" doesn't do much except ask somebody else to do the examining. Sure, I'll bite.

If you remove everything from an RPG except shared imagination, it is probably not an RPG. The "game" part remains to be accounted for, and so for that matter does the "roleplaying"—it's the whole phrase and its total central concept that have to be borne in mind. See @pemerton's several quotations of Vincent Baker's essays on the subject of why we need rules in roleplaying games.

Chess has no shared imagination (by default), so chess would pretty clearly still be chess. I know there are people who do play chess without a shared board, each having their own copy for example, and even without a board at all, hence necessitating they both imagine theiri board. But now we are getting into the territory of semantic theory and prototype vs. category models of concepts. Feel free to dig that deep if you want, but it's below my level of concern on the actual topic at hand.

Similarly, if all you're imagining is tokens moving on a board, well then, that's just playing chess (for example) and imagining the pieces on the board. The OP plainly stated as much. How does this particular statement illuminate the proposition at hand, or what can you infer from the statement that does? This, I'm not going to bother biting on, and you can elaborate if you like.