Regaining What Online Play Removes
“This week, we have to move to roll20.” Recently, due to an influx of Covid in my regular gaming group, this quotation made its way into our regular group chat. It brought to mind the months of 2020 and 2021 where vaccines were still far on the horizon, state and national dashboards of infected, hospitalized, and dying were seemingly omnipresent, and the only way to safely play RPGs was online, in my basement, alone. Although, were we actually alone? Social Presence Theory, first developed by Short, Williams, and Christie examines exactly how we come to use some social media and telecommunications technologies to experience a sense of being with one another while physically separated. The space between the persons and the computer interactions, as well as its implications for interpersonal communication, intimacy, and relationship formation, development, and dissolution are integral to understanding our (oftentimes) tech-connected communication.
From the beginnings of military simulation games through its development into other forms of roleplaying, and Dungeons & Dragons, the expectation was of physical co-presence. In general, we tend to feel closer in our interactions with others when we can share immediate nonverbal feedback. A smile shared when a party member rolls a Nat20, handing all your d6s to the sorcerer to roll damage on a Level 5 Fireball, and perceiving the ability to literally reach out and touch your friends on the shoulder all are likely to make you feel closer as a party and comrades.
If you’ve used an online messenger, a text-based chat room, Zoom, Skype, Facetime, a telephone, or text messages, you understand social presence. Between these different channels of communication and their contrast to face-to-face interactions, social presence is the degree of emotional and physical presence we can express and experience. In game, this difference can be likened to the difference between receiving a short letter and receiving a message via the Sending spell. Since you can hear the speaker’s words via Sending, I would rule that you can also hear their tone, inflections, emotion, pauses, and other paralinguistic cues. According to this theory, those cues should communicate a higher degree of social presence, increasing the message’s potential for fostering intimacy. Similarly, we regularly use a host of different techniques in our modern post-covid pandemic telecommunications: emojis, video conferencing, private messaging, Likes, Upvotes, and Support are all available reactions depending on the platform.
Perhaps a better metaphor to think about Social Presence may be the spell Astral Projection. However, unlike the bifurcation which comes from being on a Zoom call from the basement, while answering your partner’s questions about dinner shouted down the stairs, Astral Projection in D&D is almost wholly complete. In the spell, soul and body are separated, connected by “the addition of a silvery cord that extends from between your shoulder blades and trails behind you, fading to invisibility after 1 foot.” In the real world, the degree of separation between physical body and mental or virtual presence is not so distinct. And thankfully, unlike the spell, you can “return to your body” (or at least return attention to your body) in the real world without dropping to zero HP. For social presence theorists and researchers, the emotional connections built between people as they interact in virtual or online spaces testifies to the potentially positive interpersonal interactions and emotional exchanges possible.
One thing we can be fairly confident of is that the feelings of immediacy and co-presence within mediated environments facilitate the feelings of affinity and intimacy we can develop with others. Imagine a scenario where your group is playing online and you've just rolled to slay a particularly tough baddie. The chat lights up with reactions, exclamations of support and a gif of Gandalf “You Shall Not Pass”-ing. Imagine how you’d feel. Now, imagine the same scenario except that the reaction instead is a delayed, brief chat message from one player, “SRY. What happened?” I know that for me, the first set of reactions conveys far less psychological distance between me and the other players than the second. This is due, in part, to the response speed, tone, and other nonverbal cues embedded as part of the other players’ responses.
It should be noted that social presence is not divided cleanly in two, but rather is usually thought about as a continuum. At one end, face-to-face communication stands with the most social presence. A written message, has the least. Face-to-face interactions are considered so rich in their potential for social presence because a number of interpersonal functions are both available and synchronous. A party member’s actions can be supported with eye-contact, gestures, and other nonverbal feedback. Additionally, gestures can be used to help picture objects, illustrate concepts, pantomime, and facial reactions.
For a player and as a dungeonmaster, social presence is instrumental for developing intimacy, cooperation, and coordination in your game. For players, striving to use the available means for increasing social presence will make other players feel both included, and closer to you. This likely means attending to the scenes and gameplay that may not directly impact you, so that you’re not the one apologizing for not following along. Dungeonmasters gaming online can also take some tips from social presence research in order to better engage their players. In low-social presence situations, and without an adventuring party’s sense of community in place, task-oriented communication (i.e., planning a heist or NPC extraction) can easily devolve into boredom and poor communication. However, a gamemaster who has spent time building a shared space, environment, and mental “frame” for their players will probably find player presence to be higher. Offering visual interpretations of characters and being able to see players’ reactions will also likely increase feelings of social presence. It would be overly simplistic to claim that simple frequency of posts, comments, or obvious nonverbal reactions are synonymous with social presence. As with most interpersonal skills, social presence (for players and GMs) is more of a learned social skill than a set of rote behaviors. However, Tu and McIsaac (2002) identified a host of variables that are the metaphoric spell slots for casting social presence:
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