hello,
I was just looking in to the various games that are considered to use the game mechanic of Acting.
I was wondering if any members have information about:
a) the pros and cons of using Acting mechanic in a game
b) ideas about how to use the mechanic in a game.
For those that might not understand what Acting means, it refers to games like Charades, but games like Cranium and those wonderful murder-mystery dinner parties fall into this style of game.
Both my games happen to incorporate Acting. In Coopetition, Acting is one of four possibile elements. The others being Drawing, Talking, and Thinking. And Stumblebum, or newest game which just debut at Toy Fair is in fact a charades based game. So by definition it's all about Acting.
The first thoughts that come to mind when you asked about pros and cons are this:
Pro: forces people to be active. Gets people up and doing something, creates interaction, movement, etc.
Con: forces people to be active. When given a choice between Acting or some other activity such as Drawing, etc, as sometimes happens in Coopetition, people will often times (especially early in a game with people they're perhaps less comfortable with) choose something other than Acting. Acting is often intimidating because you're forced to get up and do something. If you're shy, you're likely in trouble,at least psychologically.
Pro: virtually everyone is familiar with Charades. There's not a lot of explanation that needs to go into it.
Con: some people for whatever reason absolutely hate charades and refuse to play. More than any other activity that could possibly be incorporated into a game, Acting is potentially the most embarassing and thus is why some people refuse to play. They're afraid to be embarassed in a physical sense.
If you have other specific questions, shout 'em out. I can perhaps talk more specifically how and why I used Acting the way I did in our games.
Chip
I have a game I've tested one time that is 100% acting. It was EXTREMELY fun when we played it, but my wife has never been willing to play again, because she is so put off by the idea of having to improvise in front of people. So it does seem that that is a con, people really get nervous about that prospect.
As a quick anecfote about acting, my wife is an astrophysicst, so when we get together with friends, they all tend to have PhDs and so on. Fortunately, they're pretty good gaming partners, and one night we all decided good old fashioned Charades would be just the thing. I'd never actually played the game before, but what the heck, right?
Well, the teams were coming up with the opposition's words, and we had things like "Biosphere", "Energy" and "Ancestor". My first word was "Amorphous".
Talk about a tough crowd!
jjacy1 since you brought it up,
Can anyone tell me how a role playing game would differ from and acting game?
I am not sure about what the real difference is, but if I was to guess I would think that role playing is more structured about what and how the player would act based on that fact that then tend to have mroe rules. While acting might be more open to personal opinion and personal control over how the game gets acted out. For instance role playing when it comes to D&D tends to put many rules in place that would mold what the player might act out. While acting would just allow you to decide yourself, giving yiou must more freedom....
How do Role Playing and Acting differ?
What is good about Role Playing that acting might not offer?
What is bad about role playing?
I think that the most important pro and con of roleplaying is the same: the humongous amount of rules that tell the players what they can and cannot do in the given situation. This offers tight structure and character development a hook which keeps player interest. But at the same time the players could be distracted by these very numbers and statistics, paying more attention to the rules, and not the game itself.
This can be a serious problem, and can make a gaming session fall apart anytime, if the group is made of rule lawyers and munchkins (people who care only about reaching demigod level with their character)
There are few role playing games, who did the necessary step of reducing the role of the rules, and focusing on the acting part instead. Check out the RPGs of White-Wolf publishing (Vampire, Changeling, Ghost). These are wonderful games, with wonderful settings, and a ruleset as simple as possible. Plus, they have mechanics that reward acting and playing the personality of your character well, and also a mechanic that penalize munchkin behaviour quite hard.
So Acting should be the main goal of a good game, but players can Act much better if they have a ground to stand on. That is what a good RPG offers over pure Acting
Normally when one does acting in a game setting (and I'm speaking about party games here), you act 1 thing or one person for a short period of time, then on your next turn you are acting like someone/something else.
Role playing you are constantly the same character.
I think this is the biggest distinction, as a role player, I was never big on the huge volumes on rules/specialties/dice rolling etc. and did focus on the acting elements and problem solving.
Then again, maybe a good acting game would have you be constantly "in character" for the whole game, or subset of characters in the game... (IE you always play a US president, but not necessarily the same one every round, while trying to accomplish another role).
Or maybe a game where you get to be an animal for the whole game, and then get a task each round to act as something else. IE, you are a bear in the game, and in one round you have to act out being a specific person. (thus making the acting that much more absurd)
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Well one con to an acting game, especially one that is like the murder mystery ones, is that people may have to keep track of a lot of information.
The murder mystery games you buy out of the box tend to give you set pamphlet of info, but I think that takes away from the acting part, and turns much more into a "read, ask, deduce" game. Whereas some "games" are more like role playing (or live action role playing), but they need a game master (story teller type person), and a lot more work to give the people the info they need, and the flexibility to improvise the info. that isn't given, without breaking the game.
As a pro, if you get people that are very much into acting and improvising, they can do it well, and it becomes an "event" more than "just a game" and can be very memorable and engaging for all those involved.
I think the scope of acting is important too. Charades doesn't use sounds, but if you have just voice acting, it's different, or if you have limits on the words/sounds they can make, it might make it easier or more difficult depending on the players to have fun with. Look up the game "Moods" on boardgamegeek.com for an example of a great "acting game" that I've found even the "non-actors" liking.
If you think of the TV show (in the US) "Whose Line is it Anyways?", they do a lot of improve "games" that may give you some ideas on the scope of different types of acting activities one could but in a game. Then again, that TV show emphasises that the points are made up and don't matter anyways.
Another positive aspect is that an acting game will likely be seen as a "party game" and therefore mass-marketable. Unless you are looking for a "gamer's game" that is...
Hope that helps some.