I really should do more blog posts on the history of my gaming. They're interesting to write and allow me to reflect some upon past adventures and achievements. Anyway, incoming ramble:
I'm reflecting on what I've been doing lately, gaming-wise, and I sort of miss doing more artsy stuff. I'm not exactly sure on what I mean by "artsy", here, and it's not something I can easily define; I just know that in the past I've ran some games which really felt deep and meaningful, games to which you could apply literary analysis and find, well, cool stuff. The old Arcana Evolved game had a solid theme of Free Will vs. Destiny; the Vampires In Berlin game had recurring motifs of juxtaposition between ugly and beautiful.
Basically, some of the games I've been in have really felt like they have meaning, like there is a message to them. Maybe I'm just being pretentious here, I don't know. Don't get me wrong: Roleplaying games are first and foremost about being fun, not about being meaningful. Kicking in doors and killing orcs is every bit as "good" roleplaying as is debating the meaning of (un-)life with an elder vampire, and the former is probably more fun in a direct sense - but still, I feel the latter can be very interesting and I don't know if I've done anything like it for a while.
I'm not sure if there's a point to trying, either. When it happens it's almost always by accident, though it can be consciously planned into existence. It just takes a lot of planning, so much that I don't know if it's worth it.
Art is certainly not the opposite of entertainment - they can exist together, despite the connotations that "art" has to a lot of people today. But in the case of roleplaying games, maybe there's no point in trying to have both? Or at least, not enough of a point to be worth the effort?
I'm not sure. Often times when I've really tried to get a tight, structured, themed game, the effort has failed; and a tight, structured, themed game is kind of what you need for the story to actually tell a message (unless the message is invented and delivered by the players, which is totally awesome; the Mutant game was arguably of this variety, but such game experiences are rare treasures indeed). So there's a lot of work going into it, and a huge risk that the whole thing might just collapse, but...
...I dunno. Somehow I still feel like roleplaying games are still stories, and ought to be treated as such. Crafting a meaningful story is certainly, well, meaningful, and usually well worth the time: In literature, these are the stories we tend to remember. So it is as well, at least for me, concerning RPGs: The games and the characters I remember are those that really had something to say.
Maybe I'm just being pretentious. Trying to craft art out of a medium that was built for "I hit it with my axe" seems a little fruitless, sometimes. Then again, all of the literary tradition of the entire world has grown out of something like "Once there was this guy who killed a really big animal", so...
3 kommentarer:
I'm not quite sure what you mean. The depth of a game generally tends to fall where the players can be assed to put it; that is, you can plan a grand philosophical discussion with a vampire lord, but it ain't happenin unless at least one of the players pick up the ball. And that in turn only happens if the players *and* the character they're playing get enough into sync, and are that type of personalities.
Remember the rule-less game we played? A rule-less game can't be said to be based on "i hit the orc with an axe". Now like I said, I'm not sure what you mean by "artsy" stuff, maybe the existential stuff you played with some certain someones at the start of IB? If a game is good, and it basically always is with you, I always connect to my character. There is epic, epic stuff going on in that character's head, whether it's about slaying the master dragon, or opening a jar of jam. My guess would be that magic happens when the whole campaign manages to tap into that for all the characters? I think enough as it is in real life, I tend to want to let my roleplaying be more about taking action than having dramatic discussions. My fault could be that I tend to keep what's in my character's head to myself, unless it's revealed by story. Maybe I should talk to you about it?
Having thought about this a little, I find this a bit elitist, like literary Nobel prizes only going to fine-tuned war-zone stories. What you mean, I hope, is stories that speak to you, and that is really your own responsibility of writing stories and settings you think will feed your own storymonster. I try to make characters (and stories) that feed my storymonster, not yours, because I know what mine wants, and you should be just as selfish, I think.
Your last two sentences sum up pretty much exactly what I was trying to say. Except I say it with more words because I'm pretentious like that.
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