Role-Play

The short answer: of course they are! The longer answer? Possibly, see more. ...

Yesterday we drove some nine hours to deliver stuff. Surprisingly it wasn’t few hours of talking and then endless hours of being bored. We got company and one of us promised that he would run a game for us while we were driving. I was a bit sceptical about it, but I also knew that they had done it once before. We created characters (took us almost four hours) and then played. The game master didn’t drive; the rest of us took turns. The game was Shadowrun, which is relatively rules-heavy, and very dependent on dice. (Dice in a car, brilliant.) It didn’t slow us down significantly. ...

I started a game of The Mountain Witch yesterday. I like this game particularly for being so easy to pick up and start with a moments notice. This actually describes the situation I was in very well: only a few hours before our scheduled gaming time somebody reminded me that I own the game, and they would like to play it. An hour before the game I searched for all my game apparels and read through the game quickly, reminding myself what this game was all about. ...

Last Sunday we played the third game in my series of political games. ‘Political’ does not here mean that they included political action by the characters, but that they had in them political situations reflected from history. Basically, I took historical situations and placed them in a hypothetical future realized in a dystopian cyberpunk-setting. The first two games were about Vietnam 2.0. In these games Vietnam was devastated by war and still collecting itself after Chinese occupation. The UN was trying to keep peace in a situation where part of the country was in Chinese and part in Vietnamese rebel control. We watched parts of Full Metal Jacket and Rambo to get to mood for a sweaty journey through a hostile jungle. The characters in the first game were independent contractors trying to rescue American construction workers that had been in Vietnam to aid in its reconstruction. The construction workers had been captured for ransom by Vietnamese rebels, led - ironically - by an ex-Chinese general. The company they worked for decided that the ransom was not worth it, so workers’ families collected enough money to hire some mercenaries. The game ended with a lot of dead rebels, a wounded general and rescued construction workers. ...

A while ago I attended a philosophy seminar where the last presentation was about using science fiction as a tool for research. For researchers interested in culture and society, it may give invaluable possibilities. The idea is to use science fiction as a “what if”-scenario. Most of the elements of society can be kept constant (gender roles, economic structures) while some (ideologies, length of life span) are altered to see what the resulting societies look like. These scenarios are intuitively understandable, as long as they are close enough to our own conception of society. ...

We were sitting in sauna and it was getting late when we decided that it would be a perfect opportunity to play a short game of role-play. Few hours of time, and no idea of what to play. One of us had an idea that we decided to test out: each participating player would decide one element of the game, oblivious of the ideas other players would add. I would then mix them together to form a game. ...