Quote from: Arminius;760123I wonder if you would share your source for these details--particularly the referee and immersive characteristics. While I've seen people cite the Brontës as proto-roleplayers, all the descriptions I've read have seemed far closer to fan fiction or possibly simming. That is they have the characteristics of:

Wholly-invented worlds
Shared authorship
Demarcated authority over different aspects of the sub-creation
and (almost certainly)
Open-ended interactive narrative creation (i.e. building on established narrative facts created by others)

But I'd say this gets you only as far as something "akin to" an RPG, while still having its feet firmly in the storytelling camp. I'd be interested in seeing evidence and argument to the contrary. (Hopefully not just semantic quibbles.)

There are a couple pages on the Bronte "game" in Playing at the World, including Charlotte's description of how one game started, and it does seem more like a collaborative story game, with each sibling adding something to the shared story, later evolving into fabric. There's no dice or randomizer, and although each child focused on one character, they each played the role of a genii who created fortune and misfortune for their character, rather than acting through the character's role. When it reached the fanfic phase, there's an incident where Charlotte git miffed at Branwell killing off a character, suggesting something closer to the Thieves World or Wild Cards stories than a game.

Quote from: CRKrueger;760133Well, how about the referee, that's first I've heard of that one and certainly points more towards the RPG side of things.  Where did you find that one out, I'd like to read more about it.

The description I read doesn't seem to include a referee at all. Seems collaborative. In the fanfic phase, Branwell and Charlotte seemed to outproduce Anne and Emily, which may explain why they created their own shared world: they couldn't keep up with all the details the other two were adding, so they split off to do their own thing, at a slower rate. They just weren't as obsessed.

Thanks. It's odd that people cite Gondal when Angria was first.

So have any fantasy authors crossed over like Orwell or Vonnegut's being re-classified from sci-fi to creative fiction?

This whole re-inventing of the wheel is not uncommon.

Quote from: RPGPundit;762402This whole re-inventing of the wheel is not uncommon.

No way.  This is the first time it's ever been done.