If you’ve ever participated in a high school drama club, you might have heard about “improvisational games”. These games were intended to help actors practice by giving an actor the motivation behind a character, and observing the actor demonstrate flexibility in a particular role. Improvisational games eventually developed into a genre their own. Similarly, while computer role-playing games began as a game to be played by a single person against the computer, with the addition of online components, online games have become a genre all their own. In fact, many of the techniques one would learn in improvisational theatre can also apply to online game role-play.
Once the province of the solo experience, most role playing computer games have become online games. This means that they come with a multi-player component. In turn, this means that every massively multi-player online role playing game (called MMORPG for short)that you could possibly play has an environment or a multi-player campaign that supports role play. Improvisational theatre techniques are also useful on this type of online game environment, as you are not only interacting with an artificial intelligence, but with other people “playing” the parts of the character they have assumed in the game. Whether you play Final Fantasy Online, Marrowhunters, Lord Of The Rings Online or World of Warcraft, you will find an entire culture that revolves around the improvisational theatre ideal of acting in the moment, and utilize many of the ideas behind improvisational acting.
In many online games, a player will first assume a role that is given to them as a player, say, a fighter. The player will then customize that character’s appearance, name, even race or creature type. Many players will then opt to join a “guild”, which is an association of like-minded players created in the game. Then, chiefly through the use of typed dialogue and stage-driven actions, a player will lead his or her character through actions that other players in the online game will then react to. Thus, complex character histories, back-stories, alliances and antagonists will then organically form through this shared improvisational experience. Thus, online games have an unlikely but no less legitimate staging grounds for some of the very foundations of improvisational theatre and culture.