Elements of Narratives in the Role-Playing among Thai-Speaking Facebook Users: A Short- and Long-Term Study

Abstract

            Employing social media as a platform, the role-playing acts among Thai-speaking users on Facebook are characterized by their fictional and multi-authored nature. Each of the various participants of this virtual storytelling, whose interactions are limited exclusively online, assumes two roles simultaneously: on the one hand, the participants are role-playing as fictitious characters in the story, ones which they originally created for themselves; on the other, they collectively act as the author, pushing the narrative thread forward.

            This study aims to illuminate how the participants of this virtual role-playing on Facebook develop and connect the chains of events within the story. The data is gathered from four role-playing groups on Facebook, two of which are short-term (lasting 7-10 days), while the others are long-term (extending from over three months to a year). The subjects of the study have been drawn through accidental sampling, with at least 7 days of constant activities within the group, and analyzed through Eric Miller’s framework of storytelling (Miller, 2010), which defines “story” as the chains of events, and “storytelling” as the connections between such chains of events.

            It is found that the role-playing acts in all the four Facebook groups were driven by improvisation. None of the participants were aware of the exact direction of the storyline toward which they were heading together. Instead, each would take turns generating an event based on the one previously introduced by the last participant. The process was then repeated, pushing the story forward, as individually generated events were strung into a single, unified chain of events.