Sensitive young woman

I don't care about being good. I want to be perfect.

“You are encouraged to play dirty,” announced the game master, “and trust no one.”

The Halloween party I attended last week was a roleplaying game—a Roaring-20s-themed murder mystery. Everyone had an assigned character (i.e., mayor, polo player, English aristocrat, bootlegger, stock broker, bookie, and other high-society archetypes). We all had relations (and secrets) with one another.

Aside from finding the murderer, we each had our own subplots—the singer wanted to dethrone the Hollywood starlet, the tabloid reporter wanted dirt on the millionaire, so on. We were even given play money to extort and bribe and silence and corrupt.

What’s funny about roleplaying is that when people are allowed to be someone else, fiction becomes a license to do what they’ve always wanted. The imagination is more like a mirror than a portal: it’s more reflective of what’s already there than generative of some phantom reality that exists without the need for execution.