Formats›A borrowed character, in six lines

A borrowed character, in six lines

A reusable format for a gathering where everybody plays somebody another person in the room invented for them. Take it, fill it, use it again — once per gathering, and the reveal is fixed before anybody arrives.

What this is for

This is for making visible a thing that is happening anyway. We are all, continuously, characters in other people's accounts of us. They imagine us, project onto us, write a version of who we are and then meet that version. The process is invisible, it is not negotiated, and nobody involved experiences it as authorship.

This format makes it explicit and playable. Each person gives one true fragment about themselves. Somebody else — assigned, not chosen — receives that fragment and writes a whole person out of it. A week later everybody arrives as somebody else's creation, and somewhere in the room their own creation is walking and talking without knowing who wrote it. The primitive question is what it is like to be imagined by a stranger, and the format's whole design is in service of getting a group to that question honestly rather than being told about it.

The chain is closed and the assignment is random. Each person writes for exactly one other and is written by exactly one other, and the two are almost never the same person. Reciprocal pairs are the thing to avoid: a pair who write for each other are negotiating, and the asymmetry is what produces the feeling this format exists for.

The reveal is guaranteed and its time is fixed in advance. Unlike arrangements where a secret might never surface, everybody knows from the beginning that at a stated hour every authorship becomes known. The question is not whether you find out. It is how you arrive at that moment.

The format

THE FRAGMENT    one true detail each person gives about themselves,
                seen by exactly one other person

THE CHAIN       who writes for whom — assigned at random, closed,
                and never reciprocal
THE DOSSIER     what the written identity must contain, and its
                ceiling
THE INTERVAL    how long somebody holds their character before
                using it
THE REVEAL      the fixed hour at which every authorship is known,
                stated before anybody agrees to come

NO              any person may end any interaction with that word,
                unexplained, and it is absolute

A fragment above, a floor below, and four lines between. The last line is not a safety notice appended to the format. It is the condition on which the other five are possible.

What each line is asking

THE FRAGMENT. One true detail, given willingly — a hobby, a fear, a memory, a hope. It goes to exactly one other person and to nobody else. Small is better than significant. A fragment that carries too much obliges the author to be careful with it, and care produces a flattering portrait, which is the one outcome that teaches nothing. What you want is a detail that gives the author almost nothing to go on, so that what they build is mostly invention and the invention is the material.

THE CHAIN. Who writes for whom. Assigned at random by whoever is running it, closed so that everybody writes once and is written once, and never reciprocal — if two people write for each other they will find out, and a pair who know are collaborating rather than being imagined. A single ring is the simplest form: A writes for B, B for C, and the last person writes for A.

THE DOSSIER. What the written identity must contain. A name, an occupation, a want they have brought with them, something they would rather nobody knew, a distinctive way of speaking or moving, and a reason for being here. Set a ceiling — a page or two. The ceiling is doing real work: enough to inhabit, not so much as to constrain. An over-written character leaves its wearer nothing to decide, and the wearer's decisions are half of what the evening is.

THE INTERVAL. How long somebody holds their character before using it. A week is about right. Long enough to have thought about it, argued with it, and to have arrived at some private theory of who could possibly have written this. Too short and everybody improvises, which is a different and lesser thing. Too long and the character becomes a costume that has been rehearsed rather than a person being carried.

THE REVEAL. The fixed hour at which every authorship becomes known. Fixed in advance, stated to everybody before they agree to come, and not moved on the night. Everything before it is shaped by it. A gathering where the secret might hold forever produces guardedness; one where the revelation is promised produces the opposite, because the guessing has a deadline and there is no advantage in never finding out.

NO. Any person may end any interaction by saying that word. No explanation, no negotiation, no in-character justification, and nothing overrides it. This is not a brake on the thing. It is what allows people to accelerate. Without a reliable exit nobody can fully enter, and a room that cannot fully enter produces a polite evening in which nothing happens.

And the rule under that rule, which is worth stating in the same breath: if somebody continues after NO is spoken, the frame is over. Not a foul inside the game — the end of there being a game. What is left is a person who has done harm, and ordinary rules apply to them. This is not a punishment mechanism; it is a statement about what a game is. Bernard Suits defined game-playing as the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles, and voluntary is the load-bearing word. When voluntariness ends, so does the game. Both rules are printed on everybody's materials and read aloud at the start — the fragility of the frame is part of the design and is not hidden.

The question underneath this format — what it means to be imagined by a stranger — is a preoccupation of mine and there is no public source for it.

A worked one

THE FRAGMENT    "I once got off a train two stops early because I
                didn't want the conversation to end."
                Given by one person. Seen by one other.

THE CHAIN       Fourteen people, one closed ring, assigned by
                drawing names. Two reciprocal pairs came up in the
                draw and were redrawn.

THE DOSSIER     Name · occupation · what they want from this evening
                · something they would rather nobody knew · a way of
                speaking or moving · why they accepted the invitation.
                Two pages, hard ceiling.

THE INTERVAL    Eight days. Dossiers sent out on the Friday for the
                following Saturday. Nobody is told who wrote theirs.

THE REVEAL      Eleven o'clock, stated on the invitation. Everybody
                names who they think wrote them, then the authors
                identify themselves. Nothing is unmasked earlier,
                including by people who have worked it out.

NO              Printed at the head of every dossier and read aloud
                at the door before anybody is in character.

Note that the two reciprocal pairs were redrawn rather than allowed. That is the least glamorous decision in the list and it is the one most likely to be skipped by somebody in a hurry, with the largest effect on the evening.

How to use it

1. Collect the fragments before you draw the chain, so that nobody is choosing what to reveal on the basis of who will receive it.
2. Check the draw for reciprocal pairs and redraw them. In a group of fourteen this will happen most times you draw.
3. Send the dossier without the author's name and do not let anybody confirm a guess before the hour. A confirmed guess collapses the whole arrangement for both people and quietly for everybody standing near them.
4. Read the NO rule and the rule under it aloud, at the door, before anybody is in character. Not in the invitation only. Said in the room, to everybody at once, so that each person knows the others heard it.
5. Hold the reveal at the stated time even if the evening is going well. Especially then. The hour is what everything before it was shaped by, and moving it retrospectively changes what people were doing all evening.

Three ways it goes wrong

The dossier is written kindly. The author receives a fragment about somebody they like and writes them an admirable person. It is generous and it produces nothing, because the wearer recognises the portrait as a compliment and inhabits it comfortably. The interesting dossiers are the ones built out of almost nothing by somebody who does not know the person well.

Somebody confirms a guess early. Usually meant warmly — you got it, it was me — and it ends the format for that pair an hour before the format ends. There is no way to un-know it and the pair spend the rest of the evening out of the arrangement while appearing to be in it.

The NO rule is present and untested. Printed, mentioned, never said aloud, and nobody in the room is sure whether it is real. An untested exit is not an exit: people behave as though it might have to be justified, and the caution that produces is exactly what the rule was there to remove.

Prayas Abhinav. Licensed CC BY 4.0 — copy it, change it, build on it, including commercially. Say where it came from, and if you changed it.

Take a copy: borrowed-character-format.md. Yours to alter.