What ever happened to free-form roleplaying?

Well, this has been a rather wretched past two weeks.  So, without further ado, let's indulge in a little escapism, shall we?

Me: Jack's lucid green eyes opened perhaps a shade wider, but he made no reply. He simply turned on the hollow heel of his buckled shoe and walked off in the other direction toward his hotel, leaving Zeus to whatever wrathful thoughts might be gripping him.
Aaron: "Fucking Christ," Zeus sighed to himself. With a sip of the last of his coffee and a handful of long, lurching paces more, though, much of the irritation had already faded from his shoulders and his mind. Passing a garbage can on the next corner, Zeus tossed the empty cup into it and with it, all his ties to the airhead. There were more useful things with which he needed to occupy his thoughts; like lunch, perhaps.
Me: Crossing the street towards his hotel, several minutes later, Jack was disturbed.
"I thought you were supposed to be smooth."
"I am smooth! I don't understand what happened."
"You obviously weren't smooth enough." Jack's avatar lounged against the corner of a La-Z-Boy outlet, stretched, and pulled a smoking cigarette from the air. "Face it."
"Great, first I lose my only tech contact in the city, then my own avatar makes fun of me." Jack sulked, puling out a consolation cigarette of his own. "I suck as a person, and at life."
"Nah." The avatar - an utterly androgynous being with long, styled red hair, wearing a black poker dealer's jacket - smiled. "You're just cute and dumb. Zeus obviously isn't an 'opposites attract' kind of guy."
Jack contemplated this, leaning against a lightpost and smoking disconsolately. "That's it, isn't it? It was too much. Christ." He shook his head. That look of fascination in Zeus's eyes...how could he have blown it? "I really am dumb."
"But at least you're cute," the avatar replied. They smoked in silence.  Then the avatar glanced over at the hotel. "You know what I could go for? A game of Yahtzee."
"I'm calling Zeus," Jack announced, and walked to a secluded payphone outside a small, squatty-looking church.
"What?" the avatar squawked. "You don't know his number! And what about Yahtzee?"
"You always want to play that. And you always win." Jack dialed the numbers scribbled on a piece of napkin - his only contact with Zeus.
Aaron: Zeus was ducking down the stairs of the metro station with the tiny phone began to vibrate. Stopping with complete disregard to the stream of passengers he was inconveniencing (though no one seemed to point this out to him), he curled his long white grip around the device and traced the number to a payphone by a church near Jack's hotel. Zeus pocketed the phone and kept walking. Jack's phone went dead, and it didn't give him his money back, either.
Me: Jack dropped the phone, his face completely blank. It swung back and forth on its metal cord, clattering against the graffiti-covered stand.
"Move on," his avatar suggested. "There are plenty of other techies in this city."
Jack shook his head. "No...Eischel...this is..." He didn't finish the thought, not to his avatar, not to himself. Unbuttoning his pea coat he took off running, sprinting three blocks until he found a McDonald's with a pay phone. He dialed the number again.
"You're insane!" Eischel scoffed.
Aaron: The call went through, despite the fact that Zeus was far below the City, hurtling along in a metro car with other fine businessman, and despite the fact that Zeus knew who it was. Jack was looking for trouble now. It kind of made Zeus feel all warm and glowy inside. He said: "If I have to be the one to end this call, Jack, I'm gonna take your identity, shit on it and throw it away."
Me: "Jack's not my real name." Breathing hard but grinning from ear to ear, the blond scoped out the restaurant. A toothless old man was chawing on something that probably used to be french fries. In the corner, teenagers gossiped. Jack cupped one graceful hand around the mouthpiece of the phone. "I'm an idiot, I'm sorry. I want to see you again."
Aaron: "Hang up the phone, Jack."
Me: "Will you meet me? Otherwise I'll have to beg, and you don't want me to do that...it will embarrass both of us."
Aaron: "I said hang up the phone, Jack."
Me: "You can hang up, but I'll run to another phone and try your number again. I've got..." he fished through his pockets, "seven quarters left. All I want is to talk to you."
Aaron: Zeus hung up the phone, and the ensuing silence was horribly foreboding.
Me: "Hey, how about you track him down like a dog in heat!" The avatar was smoking again.
Jack hung up the phone. "If I have to. You don't understand, this is about my pride." He thought. Then without another word he walked out of the McDonald's and back to his hotel.
"Oh boy, Yahtzee!" Eischel cried with androgynous glee.



Exchanges such as the above ended up consuming many, many hours of my misspent youth.  I suppose I could have wasted the time in far worse ways, but I have still had occasion to lament the fact that I prioritized writing fantasy stories about made-up people with magic powers over, you know, learning real stuff.

The real allure of this kind of writing, though, is that it was collaborative.  You might have noticed the two names in the transcript above.  Those were not inserted randomly.  I wrote only half of the above story, in response to what Aaron, my instant message BFF, wrote.  It was a system known as "free-form roleplaying," and for me at least it got its start in the crazy made-up world of RhyDin in the good ole days of AOL 2.5 (for a definition of RhyDin courtesy of Urban Dictionary, click here; for an "example of play," click here).  There were no real rules for this kind of roleplaying (hence the free-form, though RhyDin at least nominally utilized AOL's chat room dice roller to resolve conflicts).  You just created a character, went into a chat room or fired off an instant message, and started writing a story.

But what ever happened to this magical lost art form???  Well, I think a few things happened.

How well does polyamory work?

He has extra love in his beard.

I have been on an Alan Moore kick lately.  I read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen a while back, I just finished Watchmen, and I am now working through V for Vendetta.  Next, I’d love to get my hands on From Hell and Promethea.  Reading all this Alan Moore has made me realize…not only is the man a lion in the field of graphic novels, he is also a big, beardy polyamorist.  He and his first wife lived with another woman for several years, and Wikipedia can tell you how that turned out: wife and girlfriend left Moore, taking his children with them.

Alan Moore is crazy, and so I can imagine that his rendition of polyamory was perhaps not the most stable.  But how well does polyamory work in general?  Can people be satisfied and psychologically healthy in a polyamorous family (or system of polyamorous relationships)?

Before I launch into this, a quick note: by polyamory, I mean specifically “a form of relationship where it is possible, valid and worthwhile to maintain (usually long-term) intimate and sexual relationships with multiple partners simultaneously.” (Haritaworn, 2006, p. 515).  I am not interested here in gay open relationships or swingers (where multiple sexual relationships are allowed but multiple intimate relationships generally are not).  I am also looking only at the psychological functioning of individuals in polyamorous relationships.  I am not concerned with the political status of polyamory, its success or failure as a radical sociosexual movement, or anything of that sort.  I guess a better (though unwieldy) statement of my question would be, “How well does polyamory work in maintaining the psychological well-being of polyamorous partners?”

We love polyamory. And orange juice.

I enjoy a dash of epidemiology, so let’s start by saying that polyamory is not uncommon.  Estimating the prevalence of non-normative sexual behavior is always problematic, but a rough ballpark (by Newsweek, no less) holds that there are more than half a million polyamorous families living in the United States, largely concentrated in “liberal” cities like Seattle, San Francisco, etc.  As another estimate, an online polyamory magazine, Loving More, boasts over 15,000 readers.  Polyamory is certainly far from mainstream, but the idea of “loving more” than one person has taken root in the American (and English-speaking) psyche.  “Polyamory” entered the Oxford English dictionary in 2006, after all, and the past decade has seen an exponential increase in the number of English-speaking researchers and thinkers (and celebrities) who are writing, thinking (and talking) about the subject.  (Will Smith, even!  Who knew!)

But how well do these polyamorous relationships work?  Specifically: 1. How long do they last?  2. How are they constructed?  3. How satisfying are they?  Sadly, well-designed psychological studies of polyamory are few and far between.  I am a quantitative methodologist at heart, and so I am most persuaded by numbers and big sample sizes.  Wosick-Correa (2010) wrangled together 343 surveys from individuals in polyamorous relationships, then followed up by conducting 12 qualitative interviews with polyamorous families.  That’s pretty impressive.  Let’s take a look at what she found.

How can I improvise in a roleplaying game?

Our Thursday night gaming group just finished up The Armitage Files, a “boldly innovative” sandbox campaign structure centered around ten creepily constructed documents.  It was written by the ineffable and prolific Robin Laws, who may or may not ever playtest any of his own works. The idea behind the campaign is…interesting.  It pivots on the ability of the Keeper (that’s the person actually running the game) and the players both to improvise effectively.  As far as I can tell, the basic structure of a session is supposed to go like this:

Keeper: Well kids, what would you like to do tonight?

Players: (poring over creepy documents) Let’s investigate this Diamond Walsh guy!

Keeper: (deciding on the fly whether Diamond Walsh is good, bad, or neutral) Okay then.  Here’s the scene…

And it goes from there.  The Keeper has to be 100% on his/her toes, responding to what the players decide and guiding the scenes toward some sort of satisfying conclusion.  And because the game runs on the Gumshoe engine, the Keeper also has to pepper the scenes with core clues, which guide the players toward the solution to the mystery even as the scenes build toward a climax.

If it sounds like a lot to keep track of, that’s because it is.  Let’s say the players decide to break into Diamond Walsh’s house.  The Keeper has to decide not only what awaits them in the house, but what core clues they will find in the house, where those clues will lead them, and what the clues mean to the larger mystery.  

And then, as though that wasn’t enough of a mind twist, the Keeper also has to think about how each session is going to build toward a conclusion for the campaign.  There are ten documents and each session of gaming will involve investigating just a handful of elements from each document…that could add up to a lot of sessions, by the end of which players are going to want to know what exactly they spent the whole last year doing (in our case, yes, the campaign took over a year, even after skipping four documents). 

This is improvisation on a micro and a macro scale.  And I don’t really know how well it works, given that improvising a whole campaign structure on the fly requires some incredible mental gymnastics.  But then I think back to roleplaying in high school.  We improvised everything!  As a 15-16 year old, I ran a campaign using Everway (another totally improvised system) for months, and never wrote any notes or any sort of campaign outline.  I still think about that game with fondness, as do my high school friends (except for Todd, who hates Everway on principle).  How did we do it?  And how can we recapture that improv magic?

As it turns out, Armitage Files includes an article on improvisation techniques for roleplaying.  Let’s take a look and see how well they worked (or didn’t work) for us.

Why do gay men get sick(er)?

Horror stories about same-sex partners being denied hospital visitation rights have become part of our collective consciousness in the LGBT community. For example, just last year a man in Sonoma County, CA, was denied the right to visit his male partner, who was dying in the hospital.

Such stories, in addition to highlighting ongoing issues of discrimination, make me wonder about access to health care among LGBT individuals. If a same-sex couple is worried about being denied visitation rights, is a same-sex attracted man or woman less likely to seek health care in general for fear of discrimination? Taking a step back from that, are LGBT persons less healthy overall than their heterosexual counterparts? Do health disparities exist based on sexual attraction/behavior/identity? (For more on health disparities, you can nerd out and read this article from the National Institutes of Health.)

The topic of health disparities has been on my mind for several weeks now. Just going off of recent RFAs (that's requests for applications, and I really will try to avoid jargon), disparity seems to be a huge buzzword at NIH these days. There’s been a lot of work on health disparities based on race and ethnicity, a bit based on socioeconomic status, and very little based on sexual minority status.

It’s kind of startling, particularly given that recent estimates hold that same-sex attracted individuals make up a considerable minority of the American populace. Just because I think it’s interesting, I’ll link to this article on estimated numbers of LGBT individuals worldwide.

While not quite the 10% estimated by Kinsey, the more recent projection of 8+ million is nothing to scoff at. Further, those numbers indicate that there are more LGBT persons living in the U.S. than persons of Asian descent.

So there is at least an indication of inequality in health care access and (perhaps) physical health among sexual minorities. There are a lot of LGBT individuals potentially impacted by this inequality. But what do I actually mean when I talk about health disparities? What form might these disparities take? I am thinking of two major areas of physical health disparity that are observable in sexual minority populations:

1. Sexually transmitted infections and HIV. This one’s a gimme. Though rates of HIV infection are rising among other populations, including women and African Americans, same-sex male sexual contact remains the #1 vector for HIV transmission in the U.S., and men who have sex with men (or MSM) remain the group most impacted by the HIV epidemic. Beyond just HIV, MSM are more heavily impacted by syphilis (which has been all but eliminated among other sociosexual groups), Hepatitis C, etc. So you have more same-sex attracted men affected by sexually transmitted infections than heterosexual men. A clear disparity.

2. Cancer. This one is more of a surprise. With HIV, the vector of transmission and the increased incidence rate are tightly linked. HIV in the U.S. has historically been viewed as a “gay disease” (and, in the 80’s, a Haitian/hemophiliac/drug use disease). But cancer can strike anyone, at any time, for any reason! California has signs posted everywhere that entering any building (including our apartment complex!) can expose you to known carcinogenic agents!

There is no immediately apparent reason why LGBT individuals would be more likely to be diagnosed with cancer. And yet, according to Ulrike Boehmer, they are.

Gay men are nearly twice as likely to report a cancer diagnosis as heterosexual men, in fact. And though lesbian women are no more likely to report having cancer than heterosexual women, their health post-cancer is worse. Another clear disparity.

I didn’t know what to make of this finding, and so I acquired my own gigantic population-based dataset (albeit not as big as Boehmer’s). And I replicated the finding: gay men are more likely to report a cancer diagnosis than straight men. They are not more likely to report any other health issue, including hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol…though, of course, they are more likely to report having had an HIV test in the past year.

So what are we to make of this difference? Why would gay men be more likely to report cancer diagnoses than straight men? And what keeps the incidence of HIV infection so disproportionately high among MSM?

What am I going to do with this blog?

It seems like I have been hearing about blogs for weeks now. First Amy mentioned her blog at a canine birthday party, then my husband resurrected his blog, then my sister confessed that she has become a blogger, and then finally the American Psychological Association hosted a video about psychologists-as-bloggers.

This confluence of evidence has convinced me that I too need to start a blog. So here we go. No telling what I will actually use this space for (or if I will even make use of it at all).

EDIT: I love to write, and I love to research.  I think it would be fun to write out my thoughts about the various things I'm researching.  That way even if no one ever reads this blog but me, I will at least be forced to get my thoughts into order as I'm writing the different posts.