Aliveness and Role Playing
If
you will
practice being fictional
for a while, you will understand
that fictional creatures are
sometimes more real than
people with bodies
and heartbeats.
-- from the Messiah's Handbook
in "Illusions" by Richard Bach
My interest in role playing was inspired by the aliveness of my children when they role played. They seemed to be more full of life than in the rest of their lives when they were role playing.
But the long process of setting up the game didn't seem to encourage aliveness. And the frequent use of dice and manuals seemed to discourage aliveness. So eventually my son and I created a role playing game (RPG) which eliminated the need for dice and manuals and focused on role playing. We called it FateRole.
In addition to not requiring dice and manuals and generally being really easy to learn and play, FateRole is a character-generated RPG. Among other things, this means that the world is created to fit with the character(s) rather than vice versa. In FateRole, people choose and create their own characters, and so, not surprisingly, they generally play them naturally and with a lot of life.
Playing yourself or a character that is natural to you in unusal circumstances can be very enlivening.