Tales of Immersion: Chair Cultures and Floor Cultures

I’ve written before on how immersion in games can be seen as a series of trade offs. An example of this is what I’ve long dubbed The Problem with Chair Cultures.

So, many have decried the scourge of plastic camping chairs at live roleplay events. The chairs are seen as ugly and modern looking. Some games have consquently opted to discourage their use.

My point, however, isn’t about whether or not they are more “immersive”, but that there is more to immersion than the visually appealling. That to say, some cultures are Chair Cultures.

A Chair Culture is one that needs to sit on chairs, such as the knights and ladies of Dawn (high middle ages as imagined by the Romantics), the high elves of Urizen, the upstanding people of the League or the refined people of Flambard (think: Georgian era nobility crossed with Italian Renaissance). The proliferation of long trailing skirts, tight hose, flowing robes and clanking armour, the body language that comes with sitting on a chair (as opposed to lounging on the ground) as well as the general associations that come with sitting on chairs (civilisation, refinement, etc) means that it is more immersive to be off the ground.

And being off the ground for these cultures is more important than that chair one that is made of wood instead of plastic. For an earl or an exarch or a guild head, there is a certain commanding posture that is much harder to adopt when on the floor (barring, of course, the need for some of these cultures to occasionally lounge).

Other cultures are, of course, not Chair Cultures and they do not suffer significantly from the ban on modern chairs. Most of the Odyssey cultures such as Persia, Egypt, Carthage are all Floor Cultures. Cultures drawing on most eras of Japan, for example, can comfortably be Floor Cultures.

The ideal is, of course, that everyone can have at their live roleplay game the beautiful, appropriate-looking wooden chairs and discard the unsightly camp chairs. Short of that, organiser-provided benches have become an excellent stopgap.

But this example is less about a solution to not having enough chairs and more about how immersion and embodying a character is a lot more than just the visual effect.