Online improv, the offers economy, and lessons from D&D

Last Modified: Sep 1, 2024

Originally published 1st May 2020

Much ink has been spilt on why online improv is weird and difficult. Here’s my two pence:

When we do ‘In Real Life’ improv , we have a lot of offers to potentially draw on to create and develop a scene. Here are just a few examples:

  1. Space: How far apart are we? Who is stood up? Who is onstage? Who is stood next to me off stage? How big is the stage space? What imagined objects are in this shared space?
  2. Body: What’s their body language? What are their mannerisms? What’s their posture? How much of their body is facing me? How did they walk on stage?
  3. Face: Does their facial expression match their body language? What are they looking at? How often do they make eye contact? What expression did they come on with?

And much more than that. And of course, you can apply all those hypotheticals to yourself. The problem I’m seeing at the minute with improv is we have lost a lot of these resources. On videocalls, space is hard to negotiate when you’re stuck in a box with no way to inhabit a physical space together. The body is often cut off from the neck down, and kinesthetic empathy (the embodied feeling of inhabiting a space with another person) is possible to a degree but much harder to trick yourself into experiencing. Faces offer some options, we can notice small details that we would normally only have access to with a great deal of intimacy, or in the cinema. However, when ten people are on the screen, it becomes more difficult. And I haven’t even talked about lag and being out of sync! My point here is that the variety of offers we would normally give and take from each other is depleted. The offer economy is depleted.

So what do we do about it? Well, my instinct is not to try to reinvent the wheel, but look to other media who already work successfully without these resources. I keep banging on about it but for me, online D&D is consistently giving me theatrical experiences that surpass those of online improv.

NOTE: When I say D&D, I really mean any tabletop roleplaying game, but I realise that D&D is the most obvious and familiar one to many.

Synchronous/asynchronous play

A key difference with D&D and improv is that you typically play the same character over a long period of time. In my experience, a typical session is 3 hours, once a week. Most of the time, you prepare a character before the first session you attend. You might literally just fill in your numbers on your character sheet, or you might write a 10,000 word backstory.

Either way, you asynchronously do some creative work before you attend the synchronous session. In improv, we need to immediately read our partners and ourselves in order to find a starting point. We might play twenty characters in twenty minutes! This is much more exhausting when we have to work so much harder to find those resources to create a character, but D&D allows us to create an offer in our own time, at our own pace.

That character will certainly evolve over time. In fact, tabletop roleplay academic Sarah Lynne Bowman points out that after you’ve written your character on paper, that’s the last time you have total creative control over your character. Most D&D players’ character concepts written on paper actually turn into totally different creatures on contact with the game world, the other characters and the emerging plot! (Lynne Bowman, 2010, p.158). The point is, playing characters in D&D is a lot less tiring, and gives you the opportunity to explore one character in an amount of depth that isn’t possible in improv, and especially difficult in online improv.

Scene painting and threshold memory

In my experience, scene painting in improv is a technique where players step out of character to describe the material elements and atmosphere of a scene. A player might, at the beginning of the scene, say:

“We see a chandelier twinkling above an elegant ballroom.”

Or, halfway through a scene,

“A terrible smell emanates from the coffin. A chill fills the air.”

I’ve mainly seen it used to add context to a scene or draw attention to a previously established detail. In D&D, it’s used for those exact reasons, but much more frequently.

D&D play itself typically takes place in a living room or the back of a games shop, and the Games Master must create atmosphere, but also tell the players what is important about a scene, and answer questions about things that exist in the space the characters currently inhabit. Usually, every other sentence is scene painting. Another distinction is that it is expected that players scene paint themselves, and describe how their characters move through space.

“I slam the mug on the table, and glare at Vax’ildan, the half-elf.”

This is done because otherwise, play would be devoid of personality and drama. It would be a tabletop boardgame, and not a tabletop roleplaying game. It also creates a sense of shared space. In D&D, it’s normal to sit around a table with cups of tea, your character sheet and dice in front of you. It doesn’t sound intimate, but it can be, and the lack of intimacy can actually encourage intimacy in a weird way. I’m happy implying my character and another character kiss, have sex and wake up in the same bed, precisely because I know I don’t have to actually mime it! And videocalling makes that even easier. I can access those emotional highs in a safe way, because D&D does not engage the body in as intense a way as improv expects you to.

This is a long section but I do want to bang on about threshold memory because it’s very fucking interesting and I’ve not really seen anyone else talk about it in relation to self-isolation or improv. Big kudos to my friend Sabrina, who is a neuroscientist, for explaining this concept to me.

You may have had the following experience: you’re in your bedroom, you pick up a mug and leave your room to go to the kitchen to wash it. The second you walk into the kitchen, you forget why you went there in the first place. Our brains hierarchically structure memories and tasks based on our physical environment and the current task we are trying to achieve. This is Threshold Memory in action.

When we move to a different room, our brain discards the thing we were thinking about in that room (pick up mug), to focus on the thing we need to do in the next room (go to kitchen), which, ironically, might be related to the thing we picked up in the first room, but our brains can’t always make that distinction (B. Brenner, 2011; Stafford, 2019).

A study done at The University of Notre Dame showed that Threshold Memory even activates in virtual environments. Participants of the study were asked to play a videogame where they picked up an object and moved to another room. After they did this, they were asked what they had picked up in the previous room, and these participants struggled to remember what they had picked up, when compared to participants who were asked the same question after they moved the same distance across the same room. Threshold Memory helps us to focus on tasks which are needed in the present moment in the present location, and this could be linked to why improv is challenging during self-isolation. In self-isolation, we do a lot of different tasks that require different mindsets, but in the same physical place, i.e in front of our computer, probably in our bedroom or office. We might have a meeting in the morning, work for the rest of the day, chat to friends at lunchtime and do improv in the evening, with little change in location to help reset our brains (Jiang, 2020).

Something that I’ve discovered, however, is that threshold memory is possibly activated by scene painting. I’m not a scientist, but me and Sabrina, who has helped me teach online improv recently, agreed that the scene painting workshop we did a few weeks ago was one of the most engaging and memorable sessions we’ve done so far. Scene painting encourages us to visualise being somewhere else, and to explicitly share that visualisation with our scene partner and the audience. We can also set atmosphere and mood, which potentially allows us to engage a different mindset and location simultaneously. This could be a really useful tool to lean into in further online improvisation practice.

Play is expected to be slow

Briiiiiiinging it all the way back to D&D again! Improv requires you to be in sync with the other person. Whether you’re painting a wall together, or deliberately coming on as the other character’s worst nightmare, you’re required to read each other, complement each other, and the quicker that happens, the better. At present, we are at the mercy of lag, and that lack of kinaesthetic empathy. We can never react moment by moment to the other person, and our bodies find it difficult to copy our partner subconsciously. As I mentioned earlier, there is an impetus to incorporate every mistake, to keep things going, to keep the scene afloat and entertaining.

Action and the passing of time in D&D during scenes is fairly different. In the campaign I play on Tuesdays, we’ve been playing since January, but in the game, only a week of time has passed. And it has been so much fun! Obviously, part of this is because there is no audience, but at the same time, there is. Lots of scenes in D&D don’t involve my character, and so I am content to watch scenes play out among the other characters, or a character and a character controlled by the Games Master. These scenes can be gripping to watch, and sometimes more so because my character isn’t there. There is an amazing dramatic irony when your character runs away from a battle, assuming that was everyone’s plan, while in reality, a close teammate is nearly murdered in a fight with a dwarf serial killer. In D&D, you can take time over epic plans, you can spend three hours doing a pub crawl completely irrelevant to the plot, and also, it is expected that the flow of play is frequently interrupted by dice rolls.

To a non-D&D player, the rules might seem like they get in the way of the story. Why stop to roll dice when you could just tell the story of how you defeat the dragon? Now, game mechanics and how they relate to the improvisatory elements of Tabletop Roleplay is a very big topic in Ludology Studies, and I can’t feasibly cover the ins and outs of it here. The reason why rules, and specifically dice rolls are necessary to the drama of D&D in my opinion, is their limitations. For one, they give you strategic options which are fun to co-ordinate and combine with other players (I can drop a fireball on all the bandits, or immediately paralyse their leader, but I have to pick one) but also, the dice are an incredibly important narrative tool, specifically because they can be bastards.

The dice as creative collaborators

There’s a brilliant moment in a livestreamed D&D campaign, Critical Role, where two nasty vampire overlords who routinely torture and abuse their citizens are being chased by the player characters. The vampires jump out of a window, the Game Master rolls to see if they succeed, and one of them fails, and falls on her arse in an unexpectedly hilarious way that totally contrasted with the image that character had built up over the course of the previous games. It was something that struck me as something that wasn’t narratively apt, it wasn’t something I, an improviser would have deliberately done to achieve a certain narrative effect, but the fact it happened by accident was human and believable. That’s what made me appreciate the storytelling that dice give to a game. They break our preconceived notions of how a story ‘should’ go, and force us to look at the alternatives.

Conclusions

Jesus what a long post. A lot of these ideas have been rattling around in my head for a long time, particularly the Threshold Memory thing. I just feel very passionately that we improvisers are craving meaningful characterisation and narratives, and online D&D can give us that with a much smaller amount of mental effort than online improv can.

Some questions to take away for our next improv sessions:

I hope these thoughts are helpful and make sense and, if you haven’t already, encourage you to try D&D! Here’s a really simple space-themed roleplaying game to get you started: http://onesevendesign.com/lasers_and_feelings_rpg.pdf

References

Brenner, C. 2011. Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget – Scientific American. [Accessed 1 May 2020]. Available from: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-walking-through-doorway-makes-you-forget/.

Jiang, M. 2020. The reason Zoom calls drain your energy – BBC Worklife. [Accessed 1 May 2020]. Available from: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200421-why-zoom-video-chats-are-so-exhausting.

Lynne Bowman, S. 2010. The Functions of Role-Playing Games: How Participants Create Community, Solve Problems and Explore Identity. North Carolina.

Stafford, T. 2019. Why does walking through doorways make us forget? – BBC Future. [Accessed 1 May 2020]. Available from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160307-why-does-walking-through-doorways-make-us-forget.