TalonComics writes,
That's just silly to even suggest unless your idea of "immersive roleplaying" is exploring the steam tunnels under a university somewhere. The problem isn't immersive roleplaying but the players who are involved. Some people just have problems separating reality from fiction and it doesn't matter what genre of entertainment they're involved in. It could be comics, RPGs, anime, video games or even movies. Saying that "immersive roleplaying" somehow warps individuals harkens to the Jack Chick tract that goes on about how roleplaying can make you worship the devil.
Have you listened to interviews with actors about how they get into a role? Virtually every good actor will talk about the degree to which they themselves have to experience some or all of the emotions of the character they are seeking to portray. Good acting is, inherently, an emotional experience. It's like making a ring of power: you have to put part of yourself into the ring in order for it to be really powerful.
You also seem to think that unless people's behaviour is outright delusional, it is not dysfunctional. My idea of dysfunctional behaviour is people being mad in real life about what happened to their character in-game. That suggests to me that the person is over-investing emotionally in the character and that creates problems. If things that happen in the game affect social interactions outside the game, there's a problem and the game is doing the opposite of what it is supposed to -- ie. making my social life better.
I find that perfectly normal people can get caught up in an immersive RPG dynamic by over-identifying with their characters. As some people have observed in the girl gamers thread, emotions are an everyday thing -- they're not a special thing that people only sometimes have. Thus, you actually have to work to counter potential emotional entanglements between people and their characters because such entanglements are, to a degree, natural.
The trick is to realize what you're doing and see why it's happening at all. Usually the end result is someone realizing that they're very unfulfilled in their real life and they need to work on themselves and their self esteem. It is afterall, only a game. Sure, people can get attached to their characters and, in my opinion, *should* be attached to them. If roleplaying is causing problems it's just a symptom of a larger problem.
Yeah -- but most people in life, and hence in RPGs, have real problems in their real lives. Almost everyone in this civilization, in fact, "needs to work on their self-esteem." It's not a matter of ferreting out the small minority of dysfunctional people who can't keep roleplaying in balance; it's a matter of not creating a dynamic that causes otherwise sane people to over-identify with their characters.
For instance, there is an over-identification problem in the campaign I'm running now -- the player who is over-identifying has no idea he is even doing it because in my many years of gaming with him, this has never happened to him before. Normally, he puts certain parts of himself into a character and manages that just fine -- this time, he made a character who had different things in common with him.
And I'm with Teflon Billy on the stupid accents. And if you have to do an accent, at least do one you can keep up.
Thanks for voting. Cheers !!!
