thread: 2005-07-05 : Setting and Source Material
On 2005-07-07, John Kim wrote:
John Harper: You seem to be arguing for an imitative approach—i.e. the RPG players should get the same materials and behave the same way as series scriptwriters. That strikes me as equally fetishistic in a way.In my opinion, concern for detail is a good thing. When Firefly episodes were filmed, the film-makers didn't use numeric stats—but they would have had extremely fetishistic concern for visuals, since it is a visual medium. Someone would have obsessive polaroids of set dressing and exactly reproduce them each time; someone else would be fetishistically niggling over costumes; someone would be obsessively texturing a 3D computer model of an Alliance ship; and so forth. These are the things which make it a work of art. Watching the film-makers at work, some naive person might shout at them "Oh, who cares about how the shot is framed, what matter is the character-focused action/drama!" And of that person would have completely missed the point.
Such concern for detail and continuity improves the artistic work, even though it isn't by itself original creative thought. The later episode which uses continuity from the earlier episode gets to deepen its meaning by making subtle additions and changes to what has gone before. The same is true, in my opinion, of the better role-playing adaptations. There are few examples of such in game designs, but in my opinion James Bond 007 is among the best. In JB007, for example, having a long list of cars with stats and descriptions aids the game. It contributes to and comments on the source.
Still, by playing a roleplaying game, I am inherently doing something different than writing a television script. If I wanted to exactly reproduce the patterns of the scripts, I would use the same approaches and write my own scripts. But doing a role-playing game, I'll accept differences and indeed value them. But I would also value effort to be similar, because doing so highlights and enhances the parts that I want to emphasize.
