Roleplaying is interactive storytelling. It inspires creativity and imagination. You can explore identities not your own, and by so doing learn more about yourself. Each character you play has a shard of your soul within them, inextricably tied to you, connected by a strand of fate, of fiction, of fun.
I encourage you to create, to imagine, to explore, to play, to find a world within yourself, to catalog the chronicles, to tell a tale, to live lives not limited by reality just to see how far you can go.
[The tune of reading rainbow]
You will find
It’s in your mind:
Imagination.
Everyone has a story to tell.
Everyone has a story to tell.
Find yours.
Tell yours.
So am I the gaming geek?
Steeped in story
Enraptured in experience
Am I character?
Author?
Alex Tracy sat down and began writing. His work looked like it was going to be very meta-textual. He had been playing Alan Wake on the Xbox 360, a game something about a writer who wrote himself into a ghost story he had authored to attempt to change the ending. It had perhaps influenced Alex as he tried to conjure another creative outburst and channel it into something productive. This meta-textual “lampshade hanging” bothered the author somewhat. To at least some extent, theatre is intended to entertain, and if the author continued to produce only self-referencing and vaguely philosophical drivel, his senior show would not consist of much more than a series of glances into the mind of Alex Tracy. As interesting or dull as such peeks might be, the audience would be expecting something more broadly definable as “Theatre” and might not take well to a constant barrage of theme and variation on “Look at the actor on stage telling the audience that he is on a stage.”
His concerns aside, Alex felt he must write. A two-year long campaign of Dungeons and Dragons had just come to a close and he had been reflecting on how a character could continue without a storyteller. He needed to tell the story himself, but he didn’t quite know how. Alex was not a writer – he was an actor. He viewed characters as people separate from the works in which they were contained. Before he could act a role, Alex needed to understand the way the character thinks. He would gain this understanding by extrapolating motivations and then ensuring that those motivations made sense within the boundaries established by the character’s actions in the script. The character, independent of and yet constrained by the script, would reveal itself to him.
Alex viewed himself as a conduit, allowing the characters to become visible to the audience through his motions and recitations. But this understanding falls apart without a script, without a structure to support it. Such an acting method was similar to echolocation – if there was nothing for the sound to bounce off of, the sound would not return to the ear, leaving him with an absence of perception. He could not know how far he could reach without a wall to touch. Daunted by the empty blackness, Alex would frequently write himself as the protagonist of his stories, using his experiences in life as a sounding board to provide definition to the character.
Maybe he just needed to sit down and give it a try.
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