Original article publication date: August 1, 1993:
Since I routinely do a two-hour seminar called "Radical Future" on the future of roleplaying, I hardly know where to start in a few hundred words.
Obviously that's not enough room to talk about neural self-programming, or Game Mastering in virtual reality, or even psycho-social simulations. Steve Jackson and the other visionaries can talk about the future of the roleplaying market. For $22.95 (shameless self-promoting plug!) anyone can pick up Amber Diceless Role-Playing, and read about future techniques of roleplaying.
Still, one weird and woolly event might foretell the future of roleplaying . . .
One gaming night, about 600 Thursday sessions into my weekly "Dragonright" fantasy campaign, a 16-year-old player named John Speck started moving through one of my fiendish mazes rather quickly.
"We'll turn left here," he said, his eyes glittering with inspiration. "Past the casket, then right where I dropped the dagger, then straight through the next three rooms, then two right turns . . ."
"Hold it!" He was moving so fast I couldn't keep up.
He was maneuvering by memory, visualizing his path based on about seven weeks of his character's imaginary wanderings, while I moved my finger on the original "map," a flow diagram with hundreds of arrows and boxes.
Over the years I had constantly upgraded the problems facing my players. From conventional mazes I'd progressed to mazes with walls that moved in cycles, through mazes that wandered up and down stairs, shafts and tunnels, to true three-dimensional mazes that packed cubic solids, to 3-D mazes made even more diabolical by the use of "wrap-around" dimensional doors . . .
John was rushing his character through a maze even more challenging: a four-dimensional structure, a tesseract, that appeared to be a series of rooms. Through the eyes of a character, the arrangement of the rooms was bewildering, because I'd arranged them logically, but as if assembled by some four-dimensional creature.
If John were merely retracing his steps, it would have made sense. But he wasn't; he was venturing into areas where his character had never been, just as you can walk quickly through the inside of a strange house after getting a good look at the outside.
You'd think that would be impossible, but there's been at least one guy who claimed to see the world in four dimensions.
Back in the 1880s, there was a particularly bizarre mathematician, Charles Howard Hinton (see The Fourth Dimension by Rudy Rucker). Aside from inventing an automatic baseball pitching machine, Howard was known for being able to visualize things in an interesting way. Howard had decided that we humans really don't see things in three dimensions. Just as you can draw a picture of a cube, or a house, on a piece of paper (a two-dimensional surface), so humans see things in a limited way.
Howard tried an experiment. He used his imagination to build a three-dimensional structure in his mind. Block by block, he visualized a structure of 36 by 36 by 36 cubes, with each of the little cubes colored according to its position, and identified by a Latin name.
After a few years of practice Howard was able to "look" at objects (like chairs) as if they were embedded inside the structure of cubes. Then, using his knowledge of topography, Howard started to experiment with visualizing four-dimensional objects, "drawing" them on (or in) the imaginary cubes, just as you would draw a box on a piece of paper.
As Charles Howard Hinton was able to visualize in four dimensions, I believe that John Speck, caught up in the excitement of a roleplaying game, was able to navigate in four dimensions.
However, the mathematician spent years working at visualizing things in a different way; the roleplayer spent only weeks playing, stretching his imagination.
Which brings us back to the future of roleplaying.
In roleplaying, unlike virtually any other endeavor, we must stretch our imaginations in ways that are not only unbounded, but also structured. We exercise our powers of visualization, with no physical props upon which to focus, but in a way that is controlled by the fact that we must share our vision with the Game Master and fellow roleplayers. At the same time good roleplaying is also synergistic in that the imaginary playground can be expanded and enriched at any time by the consensus of the group, allowing all participants to contribute.
Or, to put it simply, it's more fun to learn a new thing when you're roleplaying. And maybe, just maybe, we'll find out there are things that can only be learned by roleplaying.