20190326.0430

It should come as no surprise that I am involved in another iteration of the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game; I have played since my first year of undergraduate study, and I've come back to the topic time and again in this webspace and in others. My affection for and engagement with the material, then, should be clear. When another opportunity to play in such a game arose, then, I was almost compelled to seize upon it; that it has done so in such a way as the current game, which situates itself in the deep canonical history of the game as a whole, only served as a greater allure. I'm sure I'll have more to say on the matter in the coming weeks, as the game progresses, but there is something that emerges as a point of interest for me in the present moment.
A common feature of the online play in which I've engaged for some time, and which is present in the game I've joined, is out-of-character chat. While tabletop RPGs themselves depend for their effect upon the immersion of the players in the play--hardly unique to them, I know, though such games are notable in that their audiences are their performers in the moments of the performance--it is also the case that any group of people gathered for a common purpose will engage in side-conversations and other activities that are themselves enjoyable but are also distractions from the main game, the unifying purpose. Such things are unavoidable; the online games in which I've played set up places to put them, places which come to function strangely liminally as the games get going and continue.
The specific webspaces are described as out-of-character areas; the players are not obliged to narrate as if in character. Yet most of them will do so. Early on in games' lives, the out-of-character spaces serve as workshops to find and refine characters' voices; in one case, I found that I needed to apply a particular accent to a character to fit the concept, and I am far from the only example to be found of such things. And while the discussion in the out-of-character spaces do not affect those of the in-character spaces, the reverse is not true--and the players tend to discuss outside matters in the voices of their characters. In short, the out-of-character space is a play-space, one that does not affect the main story but does involve the players playing as their characters. That liminality seems an interesting thing to me; I wonder what someone better at looking at such things than I am might make of it.