I've enjoyed roleplaying games for a long time. They're interesting in a lot of ways, but I'm going to focus on how they create shared imaginary interactive settings, and components of those settings.
For example, a roleplaying game that's heavy on heroic modern action will have different levels of detail regarding technology than a fantasy or romantic campaign probably will. The characters and rules will follow along, with gun skills or magic skills either detailed or even completely inaccessible.
The crossovers with story writing are obvious. Many authors use a small database to hold information about their characters, places, and other setting details, just like a lot of roleplaying gamemasters track information about their campaigns. Authors may develop their own rules for how something works in their settings, such as interstellar travel, or how reliable a certain character's car is.
Roleplaying game rule sets tend to assign ratings to setting components, such as how much damage something can take before it breaks, or how strong a certain type of animal is on average, so that different interactions can be compared against one another. The imaginary interactions in the play space are governed by rule sets that determine probabilities from those ratings, tempered by mutual agreement among the players.
In real life, no one seems to govern those interactions. At least no one we know about. But every roleplayer has thought about what their own character ratings might be, and to do that, they've had to restrict those ratings to whatever roleplaying game system they might be working with.
Roleplaying games tend to simplify the ratings and interactions much more than reality. For example, a character may have an overall rating for their ability to process and recall knowledge. In reality, there are people who are good at some kinds of knowledge processing, and poor at others. Roleplaying games might simulate this based on some advantage or perk on a character sheet that provides a bonus to certain types of knowledge handling, or they might have a disadvantage.
The level of detail required for a "reality" roleplaying game would be insane. We're starting to see computers reach high detail levels with media manipulation, mathematical computations of biological systems, and other similar difficult problems. Fully realized virtual spaces updating in realtime are just a matter of time and energy away.
What if we're all characters in a giant roleplaying game? Every weird itch, every odd decision, every natural disaster, is managed by some massive computational bank?
Just a thought.
For example, a roleplaying game that's heavy on heroic modern action will have different levels of detail regarding technology than a fantasy or romantic campaign probably will. The characters and rules will follow along, with gun skills or magic skills either detailed or even completely inaccessible.
The crossovers with story writing are obvious. Many authors use a small database to hold information about their characters, places, and other setting details, just like a lot of roleplaying gamemasters track information about their campaigns. Authors may develop their own rules for how something works in their settings, such as interstellar travel, or how reliable a certain character's car is.
Roleplaying game rule sets tend to assign ratings to setting components, such as how much damage something can take before it breaks, or how strong a certain type of animal is on average, so that different interactions can be compared against one another. The imaginary interactions in the play space are governed by rule sets that determine probabilities from those ratings, tempered by mutual agreement among the players.
In real life, no one seems to govern those interactions. At least no one we know about. But every roleplayer has thought about what their own character ratings might be, and to do that, they've had to restrict those ratings to whatever roleplaying game system they might be working with.
Roleplaying games tend to simplify the ratings and interactions much more than reality. For example, a character may have an overall rating for their ability to process and recall knowledge. In reality, there are people who are good at some kinds of knowledge processing, and poor at others. Roleplaying games might simulate this based on some advantage or perk on a character sheet that provides a bonus to certain types of knowledge handling, or they might have a disadvantage.
The level of detail required for a "reality" roleplaying game would be insane. We're starting to see computers reach high detail levels with media manipulation, mathematical computations of biological systems, and other similar difficult problems. Fully realized virtual spaces updating in realtime are just a matter of time and energy away.
What if we're all characters in a giant roleplaying game? Every weird itch, every odd decision, every natural disaster, is managed by some massive computational bank?
Just a thought.