Supplemental Post #3 - Erin Cooney

I listen to this great podcast called "Friends at the Table", which is basically a group of people recording themselves playing different tabletop roleplaying games (like Dungeons and Dragons, but not actually that specific game). In an episode from last week, they play a game called "Action Movie World", where they each play an actor and each game is based around creating an action movie. The link to the game itself is here and Friends at the Table is here. The part of this episode that was really interesting to me was how they talked about the mechanics around developing the personas of the actors that the players are portraying. I haven't played the game myself, but based on their explanation, as the players move from one game--one movie--to the next, they start to build up the persona, the celebrity, the recognizable traits, etc., of their actors that they can then draw on as the characters develop. The actual episode is available through their Patreon here, but since you have to pay for it, I'm quoting a little of this conversation here, when they're introducing the rules of the game:

From about minute 10:30: “As you level up, it’s almost like you end up being typecast in a really interesting way, where you can take on aspects of the characters you’ve played previously into new roles. So you might start as this anti-authoritarian character in a cop movie and next thing you know we’re doing a sci-fi movie, but you’re still playing, like, that same type of character. In the way that, like, you think about Harrison Ford, who like, oh yeah, Indiana Jones and Han Solo, there’s like an overlap there, and where does that come from, how does that go into who he is as actor.”

“I was gonna say, Schwarzenegger’s a really good touchstone for that too, because like, his big first role was like a bit, but the one people think of is Terminator, where he’s like silent, but then after stuff like Predator he starts doing like the one-liners and shit.”

“Totally, totally, so bit by bit, he ends up adding to what that core kind of, um, what his core personality is, and what people know him for, and like, the way this game plays out is, over the course of, let’s say, five movies, you would end up playing the career out of a person who has grown a bit as an actor or actress, but also, still has that kind of core identity that you can kind of trace back.”

Sorry I can't give a better example of this, but I think it's really interesting to think about how these features of stars are being translated into actual gameplay mechanics like this. It's such a different and interesting application of these ideas around celebrity, and I find the specifics of how this kind of persona development is written into the rules of a game like this to be just so, so fascinating. Also, Friends at the Table is amazing and I highly recommend it, they're making some of my favorite stories at the moment and most of their stuff is totally free, so check them out if you like podcasts!