Identity

Last week I started a D&D game with some fellow grad students. Three of them I know and have socialized with before. Two, including the DM, I had never met in person. I was approached by the DM about what type of character I'd like to play. I'm fairly new to D&D, only ever having played a few times with the older version in 2003/4, so I had a vague idea of who I wanted to be. Negotiating that sort of vague and nebulous identity with the DM via facebook prior to the game, while being simultaneously aware that I would be meeting him in person and having to relate with him on that level was really interesting to think about rhetorically, after I stopped panicking about it.


One thing I'd like to read more about is identity. I read a bit about it in Gee's What Video Games have to Teach us about Learning and Literacy, in which he is in a similar RPG situation. He causes his character to act in a way that he doesn't feel fits who she/they is, so he goes back and plays part of the game over again in a way that more closely resembles the character he has in his mind. But what I'm really interested in is how the identity and agency of the players get wrapped up in their characters.

I know it is possible (indeed, necessary) for a player to transcend her own identity in playing an RPG. But the character I developed in my mind had a few similarities to me. Namely, I developed a character that would be a healer and a diplomat rather than a fighter. But I had a hard time conveying that desire to the DM and the rest of the players (we call ourselves the Emerald Legion). This is because of my Megan desire to fit in with the group and my Megan knowledge that a D&D player that does not fit with the group's goals and purpose, in- or extra-game, can bring the whole game down. And this caused my character, Marille, to be shaped partially by the DM, in that she received skills and abilities from him based on what I was able to convey to him.

This isn't to blame the DM. I had a good time, regardless. But I have found myself all week long thinking about how I could more accurately make Marille into the character she is in my mind. Part of the hang-up is that I don't know how to play the game very well, so I am not aware how to make her into the character in my mind, or if that is even possible.

So my Megan skills and knowledge in addition to my personality have created this character that is already out of my hands and becoming something completely different from either Megan or the character I'm trying to be. She's Marille.

All this is going on before the game has even started. Once the game started, I found myself having to be charismatic for Marille. I am responsible for moving her and speaking for her in the world, interacting with the Emerald Legion and NPCs. But when it comes time to encounter a man in the dark woods with a ready crossbow, our identities become hopelessly entangled when the team looks to Marille as the diplomat to talk to the man and stop him from killing us for trespassing.

Marille has high charisma and intelligence. Megan does not. So Megan finds herself stammering through the encounter, "Um. I, uh, we're terribly sorry. Our boat, um, it, um, our boat started leaking and we had, had, had to drag it to shore. We can't get back in the water until we've fixed our boat." Not particularly charismatic. But Megan rolls a diplomacy check, so Marille succeeds in talking to the man, and the man lets us stay on his land until morning. One of the other Emerald Legion characters notices the man says something about a Goblin problem, and we mention we are in the Goblin Solution business and our stay gets extended a few days, if we can clear out the goblins. That exchange was fraught with identity politics for the other players I'm sure, but the point I'm trying to make here is that Megan and Marille bled together in that exchange and every other one, and rather than empowering, Megan (me, I) found it a bit frustrating that I wasn't able to transform into a diplomatic charisma machine like I had hoped.

If I am going to make Marille into a successful diplomat, I am going to need to think up creative solutions to our problems that do not involve charging into battle first. This also means convincing the others and their characters of the same thing, or else I'm going to end up in battle right along with them. And I'm not sure Megan has those skills.

What does this have to do with rhetoric? Well, everything, in a way. It can be a metaphor for the complexity of social identity, which is something that needs to be parsed out into understandable segments of information if people are going to have meaningful agency in a public space. But how this information, or this understanding of the complexity will help me become a better rhetor, a better public administrator, a better anything, I'm not sure. Once again I leave off with the phrase "living with chaos" and hope it holds water for another week.