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Top2. Roles And Functions
As this work is based on the role as a key component of the role playing and storytelling, we believe it is appropriate to start with a precise definition of “role”.
According to Hayes-Roth, a role is a class of individuals whose behaviors, relationships and interactions prototypes are known to the actors and the audience (Hayes-Roth, Van Gent, & Huber, 1997).
In order to develop this meaning of role in interactive virtual environment, we have also based on the seminal work of Vladimir Propp's morphology of the fairy tale, published in Russian in 1928, but largely unknown in the West until its first translation in 1958 (Propp, 2010).
In the present work, Propp’s typology is useful “because the narrative progression depends on function rather than content. The functions are arranged in a consistent sequential order but the content within the functions can change. It thus allows us to swap content without derailing the narrative of the story” (Aylett, Lim, Louchart, Petta, & Riedl, 2010; Gibson, 2010).
One of the most fruitful developments of the theory of Propp, in fact, concerns the function of the characters in the tale. When the linguist and anthropologist called the thirty-one functions that make up the story, offering its world-famous scheme, he wanted to put the accent on what the characters do, on what they experience, rather than on their identity, including that of gender.
To characterize, namely, the development of the story plot, nodal actions are carried out from time to time by the hero-protagonist and deuteragonists, by antagonists as well as by simple “characters”, even outlined for a short time. The function is, for Propp, “an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of action”. According to Propp, “functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled” (Propp, 2010).