How can we play far from ourselves?
This page states a research hypothesis that must be confronted with different players and work outside the laboratory. It is not a validated theory of the ability to play otherness.
Part of TTRPG accessibility concerns the distance between a player and the fictional position they are asked to inhabit.
Playing someone close to oneself in a contemporary world may require little translation. Playing someone whose social obligations, conception of the individual, cosmology, or relation to the dead, spirits, territory, or time differs deeply from ours can be difficult even with two rules.
The easiest solution is to reduce that distance: “just play yourself with different dressing.” It lowers entry cost but may erase exactly what the game meant to make perceptible.
Research question
How can a device help a player act from a perspective they could not spontaneously inhabit, without reducing it to familiar categories?
The aim is not perfect anthropological performance. It is to build handles that enable genuine movement.
Four possible responses
Assimilate
Translate otherness into contemporary or familiar categories. Entry is quick, at the risk of erasing difference.
Explain
Provide extensive lore, history, or cosmology and ask players to internalize it before play. Richness is preserved, but entry cost may become very high.
Exoticize
Reduce difference to a few signs, typical behaviors, or clichés that are easy to perform. Otherness becomes immediately playable, at the risk of caricature.
Make operative
Have the device itself lead the player through distinctions, obligations, consequences, and ways of seeing specific to that perspective. The player can act first with partial handles, then build deeper understanding through practice.
This fourth path is what Resonance wants to test.
Rules as cognitive aids
A rule can draw attention to something the player would not notice, make an obligation impossible to ignore, give consequences to a cultural or cosmological distinction, maintain incompatible readings, or make choices thinkable before they become intuitive.
The aim is not to choose for the player but to increase the space of thought available to them.
Prisms as an experimental answer
In Regard, a Prism is a resolution component associated with a particular perspective. When a way of inhabiting the world deserves to affect uncertainty itself, relevant elements attached to that perspective can be processed by a specific procedure before being reintegrated into the resolution. Regard provides a Prism workshop that exposes this design logic.
A Prism is therefore not merely a colorful bonus attached to a belief. In some games it can make a perspective operative: the player encounters its consequences through procedure before fully internalizing its logic.
Glorantha Perspectives is a particularly demanding case. Gloranthan cultures, myths, and cosmologies are not treated as lore alone; different ways of inhabiting the world can change how uncertainty is understood and resolved.
This tests a broader question:
Can players learn to look from within a cosmology by playing its consequences rather than first learning it as a corpus?
Prisms are one possible answer, not a required solution for other Resonance experiments.
Players who are “unable”?
Difficulty playing far from oneself can have many causes: preference, lack of references, fear of doing it wrong, low improvisational confidence, difficulty separating “what I would do” from “what this character would do,” difficulty manipulating a counterfactual world, lack of support, or a genuine individual limit for a particular task.
A more productive experimental question is:
What distance can a device help this person cross that they would not cross without it?
This turns a category of players into a testable design question.
A risk of reduction
A device that claims to “teach a culture” can easily become reductive, essentialist, or authoritarian. Making a perspective playable does not mean claiming it has one essence captured by rules.
We must distinguish opening a shift of perspective from imposing a caricature as the truth of a human group, especially when play draws on historical or living cultures.
Hypotheses to test
- Can procedures increase the fictional distance a player is willing or able to cross?
- Are rules, questions, examples, consequences, relationships, or material constraints better supports?
- Does the player learn to see differently, or merely reproduce a procedure?
- When does cognitive support become behavioral prescription?
- Can incompatible perspectives remain equally playable without a neutral “truth” deciding between them?
Build a practicable passage toward a fictional position that would otherwise remain harder to think and inhabit.