This is RPG-ology #85: Common, for December 2024.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Common, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
In the thirteenth verse of the tenth chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul wrote, There is no temptation taken you but such as is common to man.
Some of you are probably thinking that I’ve forgotten which column this is; this sounds more like an opening for my monthly Faith and Gaming series for the Christian Gamers Guild than an installment of Game Ideas Unlimited. But I’ve already made the point that our game ideas can come from anywhere if we Pay Attention, and it happens that this particular game idea comes from the Bible. If that’s a problem for you, come back next [week month] when we’ll have something different. It is not a problem for me to draw from my faith in my gaming or my gaming in my faith. This actually isn’t a terribly religious idea, and someone else might come to it from a different direction entirely–it just happens that I came to it from a passage in the Bible.
Actually, I must also credit an author named Jay E. Adams. Decades ago I read a very short booklet of his in which he discussed these words in some depth, and it has stayed with me since then. I do regret that I cannot recall the name of that booklet; but then, I’m not here to recommend reading material. It was Adams who pointed out the critical concept in those words: we all go through the same kinds of things.
Note that this is not saying we all have the same identical experiences. We already talked about Flirting with alternate identities, and [this month’s the concurrent] entry in the Faith and Gaming series, Characters, deals with how we can better understand people by playing characters who are like them in our games. Each of us is as individual as snowflakes; and yet like snowflakes we are patterned from the same materials by the same forces. We are not the same; but we do go through the same kinds of things. I daresay that everyone reading this has at some point tried to break a bad habit; everyone has suffered a disappointment; everyone has failed, and everyone succeeded. We have all known love, fear, rejection. My habits, disappointments, successes, failures, fears, rejections, and loves are not the same as yours in detail, but they are the same in their nature. Our experiences all contain the same kinds of things.
Adams makes several points from this. One is that not one of us goes through something that is different in kind from what everyone else faces; it’s only different in degree. Our problems are not something unique that no one else can understand. We don’t face anything that has not been challenged and overcome by billions of others, and we can draw strength from the knowledge that others have been where we are and come out the other side. He also asserts that we are all able to empathize with each other; even if I have never been through whatever it is you are facing I have been through something enough like it that I can know what you mean, at least vaguely grasp your feelings. No one who has never lost a parent, a child, a sibling, truly knows what that is like, but those who have lost a dog, a cat, a goldfish, even a favorite stuffed toy, have an inkling. Precious few of us will ever win or even work toward an Olympic Gold Medal, but we have all struggled and achieved something at some point in our lives. We have the ability to understand each other’s feelings because we have very similar feelings. The differences lie in details and degrees.
This encourages me in my efforts to play characters. It tells me that if I reflect on what is inside me, I can begin to grasp what is inside them.
There is a popular acting technique known as the method. So-called method actors are taught to do this very thing: find something inside yourself which is analogous to that which your character is facing. If your character has just lost his mother, remember the time your rabbit died; if his child has been kidnapped, try to remember how frantic you were when something important to you vanished. I recall John Pertwee talking about coming to the role of The Doctor in Doctor Who, trying to approach it in much this way–who am I, what are my experiences, where am I from, and how is this character like me? The Doctor, he observed, is an Alien Time Lord from Gallifrey somewhere else in the universe; finding a point of common ground is not easy. Yet within The Doctor we do find common ground. He feels things that we feel, reacts often as we would react–not perhaps at the same times or for the same reasons, but consistent with what we understand about ourselves. The foundation and background for playing an Alien Time Lord from Gallifrey, or an Elf Wizard from Lothlorien, or a Mermaid Princess from the Court of King Triton, may all be very different, but once we have them in place most of what devolves from that is not much different from what we think and how we feel in our own lives.
We have a strong tendency to anthropomorphicize, to attribute human thoughts and feelings to animals. What do you suppose the cat is thinking right now? we ask, to which my brother would answer, It’s not thinking, it doesn’t have a frontal lobe. In seeking the mind of aliens and animals we do need to get outside the box, to create different parameters from which thought flows. At the same time, we recognize that there are connections between us and animals. The cat and I both like to stretch out by a warm fire, eat a good meal, play an absorbing game–even if we disagree on the details. I could play a cat, because there is enough of the cat in me. Andrew Lloyd Weber struck gold getting actors to convincingly play Cats, and they have no more resources to enable them to get in character than I–or than you. I could play an alien, because in some ways we are not so different. We are not the same, but we share some things in common.
Next week, something different.
Previous article: Possibilities.
Next article: Uncertainty.