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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 7334594" data-attributes="member: 6775031">That's what role-playing is, though: it's pretending to be your character. Everything that happens in the game world, the player has to look at it from the perspective of their character in order to figure out what the character would think about it, and how they would act.The physical process in the brain, by which role-playing occurs, is that one person (the player) pretends they are in the same situation as another person (the character); and whatever your brain spits back as what you would do, that's your best guess for what they would do in that situation. The fact that the character doesn't exist is not actually relevant to the role-playing process. Humans are usually pretty good at modeling other humans and predicting their behavior, as long as they know what's going on with them and they can imagine themselves in that situation; it's a byproduct of an evolutionary arms race where modeling other people gives you a comparative fitness advantage, and all of us are survivors of that competition. (It's also why it can be difficult to play as characters that are substantially not human - you need to re-filter all of your thoughts to correct for your anthro-centric bias.)But it's also the direct cause of one of the major conflicts between role-players and story-tellers. Since story-tellers treat characters like fictional entities in some sort of novel, they don't really care about whatever traumas they inflict upon those characters; having the fighter's loved-one be kidnapped by terrorists and then killed in front of him is just dramatic story-telling that gives him suitable motivation. To a role-player, if you're pretending that your loved-one was kidnapped by terrorists and then killed in front of you, that means your brain has to actually configure itself to replicate that scenario; from a biological perspective, your brain becomes something like the brain of someone who has gone through that horrible experience. Whatever trauma you visit upon the character, it is also directly felt by the player (albeit mitigated somewhat by distance).For the purpose of the player doing the role-playing, the character is a real person in almost every way that matters. The brain which is telling you what Grog the Half-Orc wants to do is the brain of Grog the Half-Orc in a very meaningful way.</blockquote>

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