We talk a lot about immersion and verisimilitude in games at the RPG table, but it’s always amusing when we find it, unexpected, in the wild. That was my experience a few years ago with star baseball player Shohei Ohtani.
This requires some context for those who don’t follow baseball. I’ll try to make the background here as brief as possible on my way to connecting this to RPGs.
Almost all modern baseball players are very specialized either as position players (fielding and hitting), or as pitchers (throwing the ball). Shohei Ohtani is an anomaly; he is excellent in both roles, so he is like two great players in one body. His multifaceted greatness earned him the Most Valuable Player award in 2021, and he is once again vying for the award this year.
Fantasy sports run through websites allow fans to create fictional teams that tally up baseball players’ real-world performances. Each participant in a fantasy league drafts players from across baseball and combines them into a virtual team.
Fantasy baseball teams are neatly divided into hitting and pitching statistical categories. Prior to Ohtani joining the major leagues, there were very rarely players who could both hit and pitch well, so the websites that facilitate fantasy leagues mostly ignored these "two-way" players. When Ohtani joined major league baseball in 2018, most fantasy leagues treated Ohtani as if he were two separate players; the hitter and the pitcher. This was clearly the least complicated solution to the “problem” his unusual profile presented. It made sense to me.
A majority of the participants in the fantasy league I participate in hated this solution. They hated the idea of “splitting” a player into their hitting and pitching statistical performances. If they were going to draft Ohtani for their fantasy team, they wanted to reap the rewards of both his pitching and his hitting, just like his real-world team. Our league implemented a few fairly complicated solutions to facilitate this.
So, what does this have to do with RPGs? Different players in a game community (and a fantasy baseball league is a gaming community as much as a TTRPG group is) have different thresholds for verisimilitude. I shouldn't have been surprised that the standard solution to this unusual player shattered the ludic illusion for others, even if it didn’t bother me.
A huge (but often invisible) part of gaming culture is mediating different expectations of verisimilitude among participants, and we’re often feeling around in the dark to find those limits. Observing them away from them table can help inform that search.
No comments:
Post a Comment