Roles
The term role-playing is applied very loosely to games. Not only has it come to mean something completely different when used to describe video games than the pen-and-paper games that originated it, but it has drifted away from its obvious meaning in those games as well. Every game is about playing some sort of role – even when there’s no explicit narrative role (which there usually is), we still take on a role defined by the rules of the game – the role of the intelligence who places the pieces in a jigsaw or who builds the Tetris to eliminate four lines of blocks, the role of pitcher or quarterback or referee. This sort of role-playing is in many ways closer to the sort of play that which early RPGs were meant to capture, tactical miniature play inspired by the battles in the Lord of the Rings books, than what modern enthusiasts of the genre mean by the term, which is more akin to playing a part in a play – and, crucially, a part that one writes for oneself.
This is a topic we could dig deeper into, what role-playing has come to mean in different contexts, but at the moment I’m more interested in the way that playing a role, or choosing not to play a role, appeals to us. One of the core conflicts of my life is my simultaneous desires to have a place in the world and to not be constrained to do any single thing: These desires are flagrantly contradictory, and yet I feel them both frequently. At one moment I wish people would just tell me what they want from me, at one moment I wish I could pursue interests with no regard for what anyone’s expectations of me are. I can even feel both of these at the same time. It’s a sort of talent, I suppose.
Both of these, finding a niche in which we excel or choosing any path for ourselves and having it work out, are sorts of power fantasies, and different sorts of games like to cater to both of them. Whether these games are called “Role-Playing Games” or not has very little bearing on this. Most MMORPGs favor casting the player fairly narrowly, where they pick a class and have to play to the strengths of this class in a very specific way, while games like Skyrim are built to allow the player to do basically anything they want to with no negative consequence of any sort.
If you don’t like the role the game casts you in, you probably won’t like the game. If you don’t feel like the game gives you enough room to perform your role in your own way, you probably won’t like the game – in much the same reason people don’t like jobs that don’t give them any freedom to tackle tasks with their own methods. For a few days I went back to playing Team Fortress 2, and somehow there I have the best of both worlds – probably one reason I played so much of it. I have a list of 9 roles (or perhaps more, with all the ways equipment can change a class’s role) which I can pick at a whim. Maybe today I feel like getting into the thick of things and causing a lot of trouble, so I play Soldier, or I feel like moving around and harrying, so I take Scout, or I feel like being an asshole, in which case I roll Spy.
I usually play Spy.
Out in the world, though, we seldom are afforded the opportunity not to be defined by the roles we are cast in. Usually, in order to survive, we are forced to live the role we are given. Others of us, bereft of such a role, struggle to define ourselves in terms that are understandable to others, socially approachable, economically viable. In the end, we have to either accept a pre-made role, or learn to make our own – and, to make our own, first we have to have some idea of what sort of role could be both desirable and viable.
It’s easy to be led astray. I generally want to be an artist and thinking person, and what are the traits that we have used to define these sorts of people? Lonely. Mentally unstable. Self-destructive. We paint doom on our thinkers and artists, even though there’s no particular reason to believe in any real correlation outside of the feedback loop caused by this stereotype. How have these cues affected the way I live my life? How can I learn to define myself as a creator outside of this toxic worldview?
I can’t help but stand back and look at the motivations behind this toxicity. Who stands to profit from making artists believe they are worth more dead than alive? Who stands to profit when inventors are forced to sell their inventions for pocket change?
Those who have written the roles we are cast in may not have our best interests at heart.
Problem Machine 