excerpt
Ours is a fabulist species, that is why storytelling and play have developed as a condition of existence in the face of the incessant and unresolved questions that constitute the fact of being human. Amongst a multitude of narratives, our memory is akin to a game; it spends its time assembling, associating, articulating, selecting, forgetting, constructing – in other words, it spends its time fabulating. We don't exist without fiction, without our ability to make up inner worlds, to produce mental representations and to project the latter outwards. Everything in us is real, play, and fiction. So, just as it is logical that we should seek to tell, play out, and represent the fictions that create and structure us, it is no surprise that we have developed, on the premises of fables and games, a mode of collaborative dialogue in which participants take part in a communal story that we partake in orally.
Role-playing, the art of collectively fictionalizing a narrative, is spectacular without being a spectacle, enabling us to change our relationship to the world. By staging alternatives, role-playing allows each participant to take up a position. It is thus a collectively improvised interpretation, free from public scrutiny. Among the players, one person, at once leader and guardian of the game, author and actor, unfolds the scenario and maintains its plot. At the start of the game, they introduce the world.
The latter may or may not be conceived collectively, by third parties, authors or communities of players, or by the players themselves, as a collaborative act. This description defines the frame of reference in which the action takes place. It creates a system of possibilities and enables the elements necessary for the participants to interact within the fictional universe in the making. The definition of this space-time can range from more general (cosmogony, geopolitics, ecosystems, historical period) to more specific considerations: either details about power relations, social or religious rites, geographical, urban or societal characteristics relating to the environment in question. The making of a world thus consists in thinking up coherent universes that can be developed by the participants throughout the game.
Role-playing, by instituting a new reality within the real, can be seen as a metaphysical exercise that enables one to imagine onself within a universe where the relationship to time, space, and power structures that compose it are picked and defined by its author. The parallel history it makes up allows participants to explore uncharted roads. It can also interrogate the conventional character of a commonly accepted narrative – and the ways in which one can emancipate oneself from it. This is how it can be seen as a space of pure potentiality. […]
Julie Marmet
