Shared Imaginary Space

Now and again, debate and discussion ensue about what a roleplaying game even is. Ironically, a lot of this debate actually involves the three motivations we covered a few weeks ago. People playing solely for the story have different definitions of what makes a game an RPG than people who play for the challenge do, for example. And a person focusing mainly on the mechanics might not care about either of those definitions.

For me, however, it all comes down to this: the thing that RPGs offer that nothing else does—the thing that’s kept me playing for 40+ years and working professionally on RPGs for 30+ years—is a shared imaginary space. If a game or activity creates a shared imaginary space that all those involved experience and contribute to, it’s a roleplaying game. Specifically, if you and I are playing a game and we are both imagining the same unreal place, filled with the same unreal people doing things, and we’re both contributing to each other’s vision of all that, we’re playing a roleplaying game.

Does that mean that kids pretending to be pirates on a ship are playing a roleplaying game? Technically, I suppose, although I’d suggest that as games go, it’s a poor one—the lack of any real rules or structure makes it very easy for those kids to actually all imagine a space but not share that space. 

“There’s the island,” one kid shouts. 

“I slam on the brakes,” another replies. 

“There’s no brakes on a pirate ship,” a third says, and an argument breaks out. 

“I’m digging for treasure,” the first one says, imagining being on the beach while in the minds of the other two, the ship is still at sea. (If the kids are having fun, though, who cares?)

Does my definition mean that a game of Warhammer 40,000 is an RPG? Settlers of Catan? Maybe, but it probably depends on the players. Lots of people play those games without thinking too much about the fictional world involved, and I suppose someone could argue that in a Warhammer 40,000 game, the fictional world is so concretely (and beautifully) put there on the table that it’s not really an imaginary space at all. But again, I’m not sure such quibbles really accomplish much as long as everyone’s having a good time.

But for something that’s clearly an RPG, shared imaginary space is vital. Remember when you were playing an RPG and someone asked you, “But where’s the board?” The right answer is to point to your head and then the heads of all the others at the table. And that’s what makes RPGs so magical. We create a medium in which I can imagine something and put it in your head, and then subsequently, you can do the same for me. More to the point, once the scene is set, I can make the people in your head do things and vice versa. You’re giving me a bit of your brain, and I am doing the same to you.

Every RPG designer should think about this activity—this magical process—all the time. When designing mechanics, consider how a rule will affect the shared imaginary space. Does it contribute enough to be worth whatever complexity it adds? The answer depends on how much you are trying to serve the players who engage because of rules. Perhaps a really fun mechanic doesn’t have to contribute to the shared imaginary space at all—but you should always consider the question, and if you care about people engaging with your game for either of the non-mechanical reasons (challenge or story), that really fun mechanic would need to be exceptional. For example, in Invisible Sun, characters called Vances literally store spells in their brain, and so there’s a diagram that physically shows how big this brain space is, and each spell has a shape that you then fit into the space available. It’s a fun mechanic, but does it add to the shared imaginary space? Not really--but players enjoy it, so in that case I deemed it worth the addition anyway.

Certain types of mechanics solely facilitate the shared imaginary space. Think about how a game presents the various aspects: distances, ranges, and areas. Or time. The reason these mechanics are important is that if my character runs across the room in our game, we should be on the same page regarding how big that room is, where the door is, and where the hidden assassin waits. If we’re not, you’re likely to suggest a change to your imaginary space (the assassin leaps out from behind the door and attacks) that doesn’t match up with mine (I wasn’t anywhere near the door!)

The weird thing about space and time mechanics as they relate to shared imaginary spaces is that precision can hurt more often than it can help. Different people have differing abilities to mentally imagine both distance and time passage. For example, many gamers are really quite bad at understanding how much one can get done in exactly 8 seconds. Or judging how hard it is to throw something accurately 20 feet. If you’re in the far corner of the room, 75 feet from the statue, and I’m 35 feet from the statue, and I’ve got to run over to the door that is 20 feet away from me but 30 feet from the statue, and then back to you and reach you before you get to the statue, can I do it? And if so, where in the room do we meet? Can we imagine that? Yes. Is it hard? Yes.

Plus, precision can lead to circumstances that are difficult to actually imagine. When hearing the bomb will explode with a 30-foot-radius, a player can state, “I move 31 feet away.” Really? I’m going to bet most people couldn’t guess within 5-8 feet if they had to estimate 30 feet, given a lot of time. In the middle of a dangerous, time sensitive situation? No way. I’m not saying that’s a bad game, or bad play. I’m saying it strains the shared imaginary space. 

Sometimes, for a game—particularly one that’s never going to get put on the table with miniatures and a grid—vague expressions of distance actually help make things more smooth. To understand why we have to think about the weakness of the shared imaginary space.

The scene in your head is never going to exactly, precisely be the scene in mine. We might both be imagining what the GM described as a rectangular underground chamber with a door, and a statue of an angel in the middle, lit by torches. But is your statue in exactly the same place as mine? Maybe, but maybe not. Does your statue look exa  ctly the same as mine? Almost certainly not. And what about that door? The GM didn’t say where it was, so there’s very little chance that we put it in the same place.

This isn’t a weakness that we can fix, even with laboriously long and dull descriptions of everything. Anything short of some kind of direct mind-to-mind interface isn’t going to truly make the room the same in both our heads. So rather than struggle against this, what if we embrace it?

In the Cypher System (and in fact, pretty much all the games I design), I mostly eschew precise distances and areas in favor of verbal descriptions that most people can understand without effort. Something might be “close” or it might be “far.” The bomb might destroy everything in a “small area.” What does that mean for the room in which it goes off? Well, the room is either a small area or it’s not. We won’t worry about the geometry of how much of a 100 by 80 room an area with a 30 foot radius fills.

The same goes for time. In the Cypher System, a round is about 10 seconds or so. In one of the games I’m working on now, time is expressed not in seconds or minutes but in moments and scenes (which very deliberately draws upon our shared understanding of how time passes in movies and television).

Perhaps non-intuitively, it’s easier to agree on how far apart two “close” things are and how long a “moment or two” is more easily than how far 12 feet is, or how long 8 seconds is in our shared imaginary space. The scenes that play out in our individual imaginations might not be exactly the same, but the meaning within each is. If we played through an encounter with a dragon, and then each participant went off and described what happened to some third party, they’d very likely do so in very similar ways. Even if one person’s imagined courtyard was wide and open and another’s was small with very high walls surrounding it, the important thing was that the dragon flew down into it and threatened everyone there.

Of course, this isn’t going to be appropriate for every game. A more mechanical or tactical game, for example, might need the precision. Or more importantly, the kinds of players who are attracted to a more mechanical or tactical game need the precision. (If I haven’t yet mentioned it, let me state here and probably many times again: there are few strictly right or wrong answers in RPG design; only right or wrong answers for a particular game and particular players.)

There is so much more to say about shared imaginary space that I’m certain I’ll be writing about it for a while. Next time, though, I want to specifically discuss the role of dice in the creation and maintenance of the shared imaginary space.