Expanding my thoughts a little. Right now I’m thinking of Skyrim. Is a person playing a roleplaying game if they create a persona for their character and then make their decisions on what to do by imagining what that persona would do. Obviously they’ve accepted skyrims premise of play and so they are constrained to creating a personality to imagine that can complete the game.
Contrast that with if the player never imagines a character persona and just treats the PC as a piece on the game board, and the choices presented solely as strategic concerns. Is this person roleplaying?
To fit the category, play must traverse through
[imagine]. That can be as output - a mechanic compels [imagine] - or input - a mechanic is invoked by [imagine] and its parameters are possibly set by [imagine].
This does not happen in Skyrim. If one chose to resolutely avoid [imagine] while using a TTRPG text, then yes, one would be using game-as-artifact in a way that removes that instance of use from the category. To remind of an earlier description I gave
Games as Artifacts are Tools
An ambiguity between game as artifact and game as process has been noted by scholars like Bjork and Juul (2012), and Aarseth and Grabarczyk (2018). I think that ambiguity may be resolved by asserting that games as artifacts are tools. As they are grasped by players – tool users – they fabricate mechanisms comprising some number of parts that produce play phenomena. Knowledge about game tool use is formed via sampled, prospective and projected play, and narratives of play. It might appear at times that the tools amount to the play, but that is false. It is the tools as grasped by players, fabricating mechanisms, that amounts to the play. Tool users may grasp tools in dissimilar ways and wield them with dissimilar intents, including as to ends and methods.
To say that a thing is a tool is to say that there is a tool-user who knows the use of that tool and will use that tool, and to imply a purpose that is not solely the wielding, but the product of the wielding. It is to suppose an ability to obey and to interpret a proper use, without ruling out improper use. The function of a tool is contingent on how a tool-user uses that tool. As players wield game artifacts – tools – to fabricate mechanisms, they may determine properties of those mechanisms. The extent of such determination is variable, for example where some functions are handed over to computers.
Perforce, Tools are Wielded with Intent. Players are those who have entered-into a game, and in obeying and interpreting its mechanisms are meeting the lusory expectations of other players. According to their grasp of the tools, they fabricate parts including goal-contexts for forming and ranking decisions. Players normally grasp that they are enjoined, but not guaranteed, to achieve such goals. As Reiner Knizia points out (2011), it is having goals, not achieving them, that is important: a matter of intent.
In summary, a tool can be used in many ways, including in ways that remove it from its original category in that instance. I once used a Fowlers guide to usage to hammer in a nail. While used that way, it stepped outside its normal categorisation as a guide to English language usage. The use injured the copy, lamentably, showing that we can sometimes be disappointed with the results of forays off-piste.
Tabletop or TT and computer or C are mediums though. As such, I don’t think you can reference those labels even with RPG at the end without referencing those mediums.
Just to reiterate that I was using those labels to indicate games that fell within the salient categories. Not really to restrict by medium; in which regard I agree with
@Thomas Shey's comment above.
I don’t mind limiting discussion to just ttrpgs but I think conclusions based on just games in that medium leave open the definitional questions of whether the medium and properties derived from that medium are necessary for roleplaying games as a whole or whether we are just defining how some higher level properties associated with role playing games across all mediums appear within that particular medium.
So if I had to rephrase my question - is the necessity ‘to imagine’ in ttrpg’s a specific medium based characteristic that is derived from a more generally applicable medium agnostic characteristic, such that the general characteristic applies to all RPGs but becomes something other than ‘to imagine’ in other mediums.
The requirement that until now has not been medium agnostic, is the requirement for [imagine] to occur in a human brain. I suspect what we're going to find is that [imagine] is not some ineffably mystical phenomena, and could talk about games like Skyrim as requiring
[strategize] in a similar light. Seeing as Skyrim takes input from [strategize] occurring in the human brain. That's why up-thread I advocated turning from resistance of the possibility a category of games could work this way, to looking at the features of the cognitive act(s) involved.
