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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8842349" data-attributes="member: 42582"><p>It's quite common for native English speakers to use "game" just as you have - eg my daughter, who is a native English speaker, calls the sort of play you describe "imagination games". </p><p></p><p>I think there are features of RPGs, as a special case of imagination game, that make rules more important than for children's play.</p><p></p><p>RPGs typically involve asymmetric roles: at a typical moment of play, one participant is framing a situation which poses some sort of challenge or adversity to an imaginary character; and another character has the role of deciding how that imaginary character responds, and their "moves" in the game are typically connected in some fashion (spatial, causal, relationally, etc) to that character.</p><p></p><p>This allocation of roles can change from moment to moment, although it need not (in D&D, for instance, it is often fairly static). But for it to work it does rely on rules that allocate authority to the participant roles - roughly, how does the person playing the "GM" role go about framing adversity? and what counts as a permissible move for the person in the "player" role?</p><p></p><p>This is why the same sorts of reasons that apply in the case of competition - that you mentioned in your post - also apply in RPGs, even though RPGs are not typically competitive in their play.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8842349, member: 42582"] It's quite common for native English speakers to use "game" just as you have - eg my daughter, who is a native English speaker, calls the sort of play you describe "imagination games". I think there are features of RPGs, as a special case of imagination game, that make rules more important than for children's play. RPGs typically involve asymmetric roles: at a typical moment of play, one participant is framing a situation which poses some sort of challenge or adversity to an imaginary character; and another character has the role of deciding how that imaginary character responds, and their "moves" in the game are typically connected in some fashion (spatial, causal, relationally, etc) to that character. This allocation of roles can change from moment to moment, although it need not (in D&D, for instance, it is often fairly static). But for it to work it does rely on rules that allocate authority to the participant roles - roughly, how does the person playing the "GM" role go about framing adversity? and what counts as a permissible move for the person in the "player" role? This is why the same sorts of reasons that apply in the case of competition - that you mentioned in your post - also apply in RPGs, even though RPGs are not typically competitive in their play. [/QUOTE]
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