I can imagine some readers just responding “roleplay, you’re describing roleplay”.
Ray Doraisami brought up ttrpgs, but we agreed that conflict rarely exists in them. My guesses at the reasons were: - Compelling roleplay requires everyone in the room to buy into the same story or else the vibe will shatter? - It’s too difficult for players to keep any sort of secret, because peoples’ interactions with the world are totally mediated by the DM, and everyone can hear the DM. It might be much easier to do if there were more than one DM and people could go into separate rooms sometimes.
I might describe digital cohabitives as a multiplayer roleplaying games but with thematic incentives. Characters and their different incentives wouldn’t just be stories that players are entertaining, they’d be codified in the scoring (leveling?) system, which may in turn be used by the matchmaking system to cohort out bad roleplayers.
I can imagine some readers just responding “roleplay, you’re describing roleplay”.
Ray Doraisami brought up ttrpgs, but we agreed that conflict rarely exists in them. My guesses at the reasons were:
- Compelling roleplay requires everyone in the room to buy into the same story or else the vibe will shatter?
- It’s too difficult for players to keep any sort of secret, because peoples’ interactions with the world are totally mediated by the DM, and everyone can hear the DM. It might be much easier to do if there were more than one DM and people could go into separate rooms sometimes.
I might describe digital cohabitives as a multiplayer roleplaying games but with thematic incentives. Characters and their different incentives wouldn’t just be stories that players are entertaining, they’d be codified in the scoring (leveling?) system, which may in turn be used by the matchmaking system to cohort out bad roleplayers.