Part of the previously mentioned cultural shackles involves submitting to a personality lock-down. At the Renaissance Faire, there was one young woman who played the Queen of England, year after year, at Faire after Faire. As she was carried aloft in her traveling palanquin[2] by a dozen young men, all others at the Faire would fall silent and bow when she passed by.
I remember observing this one day, as I stood alongside a cynical news reporter. He leaned over to me and said, "How sad that this woman feels she has to pretend to be a queen." I can still remember my response. "How sad that she lives in a society that doesn't see she has the nobility of a queen." A role that allows a person to take on a beguiling new identity is a role the player will assume quite willingly, of course modified by individual taste. Even at the Renaissance Faire, those who enjoyed playing nobility wouldn't dream of playing a peasant, and visa versa. In a game, we can escape our cultural shackles and become:
Or we can choose hundreds of other roles that normally aren't available to us. |