Acting Games

Some years ago, Walt Freitag, a LARP pioneer, published a short game in a LARP zine, called The Files, Mr. Freitag. He described it as "a game for gamemasters," and it works like this: one of two players begins by saying "The files, Mr. Freitag." The other responds. They must take what each say as established, building a sense of character and setting over time -- both characters may lie, so what is said may not be literally true, but must be accepted in some sense. The dialog continues until some resolution is reached.

Just to give a sense, a dialog might go this way:

A: The files, Mr. Freitag.
B: I don't have them.
A: On your person? I hadn't expected that you did. But we know for certain fact that your agency has them.
B: The last I heard, Zeb Constantine had taken them from our agent in Prague.
A: Hah! You make me laugh. You know full well that Zeb Constantine was an android. The real Zeb Constantine has been in the gulag for the last six years.

...and so on.

This is not a "game" in the sense that we usually use; it has the merest tissue of a rules set, no clear goals, and hardly something you could call a quantifiable conclusion. Freitag's point, and a good one, is that it is useful training for a gamemaster, of either the tabletop or LARP variety, who must be prepared to improvise details of the setting, story, and characters of his game at a moment's notice. Even with comprehensive preparation, players are likely to do the unexpected, and gamemasters must be able to respond.

The Files, Mr. Freitag may be characterized by its author as "a game for gamemasters," but it is also undeniably an acting game.

Acting games, too, typically have the barest tissue of rules, and in fact rarely couch their restrictions as "rules" -- rather, as instructions from the teacher or director. There are rarely clear objectives for the "players," nor a quantifiable outcome. Their purpose is analogous to that of The Files, Mr. Freitag; to give players experience with envisioning a character, playing a role, understanding the use of stance and space and expression, of improvisation, and so on -- in other words, to build specific acting skills.

A game design formalist such as, well, myself, might well say "these are not games at all," but such a claim overlooks an important point: You can draw a virtual continuum from acting games, through games such as the jeepform that rely hugely on improvisational roleplay, through games such as narrativist RPGs that provide more structure but still depend on character and story, through conventional dice-driven RPGs, and on to digital RPGs, which adopt the mechanical conventions of tabletop while virtually eliminating any actual roleplay.

Or to put it another way, acting games are interesting, or should be, to game designers, because they cast light on the intersection between roleplaying games and theater.

Acting games are used mainly in acting classes -- and in a way, this is one of their weaknesses. While they may function as a mechanism for practicing skills, the whole purpose of acting, of any sort, is presentation before an audience; in this, in a way, theater is the antithesis of a roleplaying game, for the only "audience" for the action, dialog, and character expression of an RPG is your fellow players. Because an RPG does have outcomes, and playing it is the end in itself, not a mechanism for skill development, the experience can be emotionally impactful and aesthetically pleasing for the players.

I've previously remarked that I could see jeepforms, in particular, being staged before an audience, and thus expanding the circle of those affected from the players to a wider group; the jeepform is almost a form of improv with a set of guiding rules, and while the participants sometimes "break the fourth wall" by speaking OOC to discuss implementations of the rules, the portion of time they spend doing so is small relative to the time spent roleplaying (the inverse of the usual tabletop experience).

A typical acting game involves a few minutes of improv under some restrictions and guidelines, and if a particular student does not produce anything sublime in the process, well, that's only to be expected, and there is no stigma attached. Low stakes are a positive, since they remove anxiety and free the participants to attempt to be creative; but they also mean that the results are less likely to be powerful.

I would suggest that more sophisticated acting games could fruitfully borrow techniques from the jeepform, and from other games, to produce more impactful experiences for students; the sense that there are outcomes for characters, that a larger experience shapes a strong narrative, that this is something short of a play but something more than a skit, a work of its own with a strong theme, is likely, I suspect, to evoke stronger performance, and better work.

I note in passing that Cassady (author of Acting Games) often calls for "yellow stars" for people who accomplish certain outcomes in his exercises; as a game designer, this immediately suggests to me that he is sensing a lack of motivation, of goals, or quantifiable outcomes at times. Teacher's gold star is unsatisfying stuff, when you could be a winner, and a degree of friendly competition can be motivating to students as well.

Equally, designers of roleplaying games may find it enlightening to spend a few hours with one of these books, to see what kinds of scenarios are used to elicit improvisational performances from acting students, since many of these ideas can be used in a roleplaying scenario as well.