#10 - Meta-Game Thinking

I was speaking with a friend of mine, one who doesn't participate in RPGs, about my hobby. I began to brainstorm with him what manner of a role-playing experience he might find exciting. We tossed around idea, but ultimately he said that he was turned off by the fact that in the RPG, whoever it was he became for the game, he would know that he would only be assuming, or at the best guessing, what they would think feel and believe, or how they would behave.

This is true. Try as we might, to imagine out lives otherwise, or to create a simulated experience, we will only ever be pretending, playing a game. The levels of complexity to our make believe, the depth, the details, or even the moral of the story, don't cover up the fact that we are participating in a story.

An interactive story, a story were both the actors and the narrators have power to decide what happens. These are aspects that appeal to every role-player.

But it is a game none the less.

We have to recognize the nature of the fiction we create, and we have keep it at arms length.

If you assume the role of another, you are a player acting as someone else, and doing your best not to act like you are acting like someone else.

This is where the magic happens. I haven't any scientific understanding of how to pull this off, it is more poetic.

Still, doubling back to the point that you must recognize you are acting in a game, but not treat it like a game. If you were to treat it like a game, you would be engaging in meta-game thinking. Which is where you as the character in the game know that you are merely in a game.

This would be similar to if you went about in your own life as if it were a simulation and not reality. Certainly this is an interesting thought experiment, but I haven't met a person who takes the idea seriously. Or at least no one has ever bothered to explain that they do believe they are in a facsimile of reality and not actual reality.

If they did they would be engaging in meta-reality thinking, which is meta-game thinking but about our lives out of the game, whereas meta-game thinking is thoughts of the player, having their character behave like the character is in a game.

Now, there is space for a playing a character who does believe that they are in a game, or a simulation and acting like they do know that their surrounding are fictional. But, this still sits with the above problem of only guessing at how they would think feel and believe, without actually having a parallel belief outside of the game.

That is unless you yourself actually believe your reality is a simulation.

If I have lost you, please don't feel bad. Again, I don't know of anybody who takes these ideas seriously in the “real” world. Taking it seriously in the game world is easier to think about, because we are all aware of the illusion, but it is essential not the break it, if you do you stop role-playing.

I will say there is nothing wrong with playing a game and treating it like a game while you are playing that game, but that wouldn't be role-playing. You would merely be playing a game.

Not role-playing in a role-playing game is like watching a movie and treating all the characters like the actors that portray them. Interesting perhaps, but please don't interrupt the shared fiction by treating it as only fiction.

The unique nature of role-playing allows people to create fiction together, and to interact with at the characters they wish to be. What comes out of it will always be a work of the imagination, but many imaginary things feel more real to us, that whatever simulation we are all walking around in in “real” life.