Immersive Gameplay – Interview with Emily Care Boss

In honor of the release of Bill White’s and my co-edited volume with McFarland, Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media, I am conducting interviews with some of my talented and erudite contributors.

The second interview is with role-playing designer and theorist Emily Care Boss. She co-authored the article in the volume “Role-Playing Communities, Cultures of Play and the Discourse of Immersion” with Bill White and J. Tuomas Harviainen. In the article, she helps provide a breakthrough analysis of Nordic and American interpretations of role-playing immersion, contrasting emotionally resonant and creative play/design philosophies and advocating for a bottom-up definition of immersion, based on communities’ play experiences.

Here are my follow-up questions:

There is also a deep divide between different communities of play and the various analytical cultures. Players need not be troubled by theory when they enjoy a game, but it would make sense for designers to be aware not only of the discussion and analysis going amongst their colleagues, but also of what’s going on in other related fields. Just as the divide between the Nordic and the independent gaming communities is being bridged, better communication between academics and designers seems necessary.

ECB – Microscope, by Ben Robbins. This is a game that takes many standard assumptions of a role-playing game (participation primarily via the use of an ongoing character, the presence of a Game Master or facilitator, chronological fiction, solitary world creation) and stands them on their head. In the game, the players share the creation of an over-arching storyline of an epic nature. Some examples are the rise and fall of an empire, the mythic beginnings of human culture, or a bloodthirsty war between interstellar species. Using an egalitarian, round-robin structure, the players create eras and specific events that create a timeline. Scenes are played out within events, in a fashion much like that found in any role-playing game. But the scenes’ purposes are to clarify and define the specifics of the overall sweep of events by answering a specific question about the event, rather than for the purposes of developing the characters or gaining mechanical advantage. It’s a unique storytelling engine that sweeps away blinders of limits we enforce on the medium, which, I hope, will help us better realize the full potential of this form. There is so much more we could be doing. Microscope is a great start.

ECB – As I have the pleasure of still saying after all of these years, immersion is a broad, broad term that encompasses so many facets of the experience of role-playing that further refinement and further definition and re-definition are always needed. So here we are with our endeavor taking another look at ways people can immerse, feel, experience, revolt from, subsume, identify, over-identify and reframe their view of the world through play.

Looking at participatory media, immersion is a hallmark. Not unique to role-playing and first-person narrative forms like the video game, but certainly it establishes the engagement of the immersive experience in a unique way. By asking the players to make freeform choices that determine the direction of the narrative based on taking the role of a character within the narrative itself. The restrictions of a video game are blown wide open in tabletop and live-action role-playing. (Nearly) the full realm of human choice, negotiation and adjudication are available. There is no other narrative form that allows this. And whether you are looking at the word “immersive” from the point of view of it being the holy grail of gaming experience (i.e., having a full body/mind/spirit experience of “being” the role) or merely taking the stance of the narrative person you’ve been issued to portray, this is the touchstone of role-playing gameplay. Certainly it is not the full complement of what could be done (as the game Microscope so clearly shows) but it takes from the linear path of acting, and adds the sculpting of events that is writing, making a gorgeous new field of expression that is role-play.

Emily Care Boss is a writer, game designer and forester living in western Massachusetts and has independently published games since 2005. Her game Under My Skin won the Player’s Choice Otto award at Fastaval in Denmark. She has been published in Playground Worlds and Push: Volume 1 New Thinking About Role-playing. Her games can be found at Black & Green Games.

Evan Torner is a Ph.D. candidate in German and film studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is finishing his dissertation on representations of race and the global South in East German genre cinema. As co-editor of Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Role-Playing and Participatory Media, he has also written on modernist film, German science-fiction literature and live-action role-playing, and is the official translator of the Filmmuseum Potsdam’s permanent exhibit “The Dream Factory: 100 Years of Babelsberg.”