Mark Wallace contacted me for conversation about role-playing mechanics and emotions or the resulting content, among many other people. He’s written and published a lot about creative developments just outside or underneath the acknowledged media; see The Mark Wallace Experience for examples and enjoyment.

He began the conversation with a bigger, relevant question: why role-playing games matter. This led me into the discussion of the medium as such, including taking shots at “entertainment,” “control,” and other things I’m sure you’ll recognize, and also framed the finishing points effectively.

For once, I was able really to hit Mark’s intended questions. as he helped me land my points and maintained the outline of what we had come to do. I do try to do this in interviews, but you can’t interview yourself and I’m often frustrated that a lead-in or groundwork doesn’t get completed.

His questions allowed me effectively to lay out the big principles, with examples, for things people are always asking me to present as text:

• Why role-playing matters, which concerns why I think it’s not a form of entertainment or gaming
• How do rules (mechanics, procedures) inform content and the experience (at my request, he reviewed Once again with feeling before the conversation, so we could hit this field running)
• What changed such that role-playing is now widely visible and discussed, which entails of course the change before that, how the grassroots activity became visible in the late 1990s

I’m a bit sad that he requested that I post audio only, as it loses the distinctive way people from our generation communicate nonverbally, and also, his work and study room is pretty cool.

This conversation also informed my eventual post about playing Amerika at the Happening (A light in the past), as it raises the potential tension between focused game design and social engineering. I’d like to keep addressing this across multiple posts, in terms of one’s driving need to express specific things, and front-loading provocative content toward that end, but not knowing fully what will be expressed as a played experienced. It includes opening up to the collective participation as a vulnerable and risky act, knowing that the eventual “message” will certainly not be thoroughly your own and may well be compromised as ultimate fiction, or changed internally through the experience.