IRL by Chris Stedman

Author:Chris Stedman [Stedman, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781506463513
Publisher: Broadleaf Books
Published: 2020-09-03T05:00:00+00:00

7

The Roles We Play

In the summer of 2018, I went to an LGBTQ variety show to kick off pride weekend. Near the end of the night, after an extraordinary lineup of queer poets, burlesque artists, and punk bands, local illustrator and author Archie Bongiovanni did a live reading of one of their comics. In the strip, two characters are talking when one of them gets a match on the popular dating app Tinder. The person who got the match, Taylor, begins to panic. “How does one translate their personality into the digital world?” Taylor wails, before adding: “Isn’t social media just a GAME?”

In the age of catfishes and clout chasers—people, typically online, whose approach is to “strategically [associate] themselves with the success of a popular person or a current contemporary trend to gain fame and attention,” as rapper Snoop Dogg defined it in a video posted to YouTube in 2018—many of us share Taylor’s fear that the internet is just a game. One in which everyone is trying to score points and level up. But while there’s some truth to this concern, it may also be a bit cynical to say social media is just a game. Or, rather, to say that the games we play online are about being fake.

Yes, people can pretend to be characters online as one does in a game. But our digital games can also teach us something about what it means to be real, if we’re willing to look at them more closely. Like a good game, the internet is essentially a laboratory for identity—one that presents unprecedented opportunities to learn more about what it means to be human, to cooperate, and to belong.

***

On a sunny spring afternoon a few months before that variety show, I pulled into the parking lot of the Saint Paul headquarters for Atlas Games, maker of board, card, and role-playing games (or RPGs).

I walked in and took a seat across the table from Jeff Tidball, Atlas’s chief operating officer and an award-winning game creator. Shortly after, we were joined by Atlas’s warehouse manager, Travis Winter, and RPG director, Cam Banks. Between the three of them, they have over seventy-five years of experience playing and creating games. It was clear—not just because of all the gaming paraphernalia crowding their offices—that they lived and breathed gaming. I was eager to find out why games appealed to them and hoped our conversation might help me better understand how the imaginative impulses we engage in gameplay are (and aren’t) mirrored in our online behaviors.

Playing games, Winter began, is about “taking a break from being in charge.” He has a lot of responsibilities in his day-to-day life, and games give him space to play.

In some ways, the parallels between this and our online lives are obvious. But to explore both spheres, it’s important to be clear about what constitutes a game. In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, game designer Raph Koster explains that most people who study games agree that a game is a voluntary, rule-based “free activity” outside of “ ‘ordinary’ life.

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