Movie Kisses
Framing scenes. Conflicts. Story arcs. Main and minor characters (or PCs and NPCs if you prefer). The characters don’t see it but the audience does. Fade to black.
Roleplaying games imitate media. More and more they model themselves after movies, television and (to a far lesser degree) books. The thing of it is, movies, television and books are themselves imitations of reality — sometimes reality as it would be if there were romantic vampires and magical middle schools, sometimes reality that looks just like ours.
Like it or not, when we game, we’re imitating an imitation. We’re twice removed from our source material, which is life.
Life Imitates Art Imitating Life
How many people have you watched kiss in real life? I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess that you — along with everyone else in the world — have seen far, far more people kiss in movies and television than in reality. You probably saw long lines of people kiss on the big or little screen years before you ever put the playground moves on Chris in the third grade (yep, gender neutral name, fill in the blanks as you see fit — no angsting, late bloomers!).
Lacking firsthand experience, we model our behavior after that great secondhand experience, the media.
You learned to kiss from watching movies and television. So did Chris.
Hold off being disturbed about that for a moment, because here’s where it gets weird: you learned to kiss from watching an imitation, a staged re-enactment, but the directors and actors creating the fiction you learned from went through the same thing back in their own youth: they learned from an imitation as well. So it’s an imitation guided by watching an imitation of an imitation of an imitation. Cue the rabbit hole.
Who’s having an original experience, untainted by this media training? Anybody?
How far removed from the original does this spiral of imitation get?
What does this have to do with gaming? I could launch into the whole roleplaying games => video games => roleplaying games feedback loop and drag poor D&D 4E into the mix, but I won’t, for now. That’s later.
I will say this: aggressive scene framing, building conflicts, and razor-focused story arcs all make really fun games. When it’s done right, it feels tight… but that’s because it’s successfully imitating the media we know and love. It’s like we just made a movie, which is pretty awesome, because we like movies. But to the exact same degree that it’s an awesome movie, it doesn’t model real life. Not really. In real life we don’t cut when a scene becomes disinteresting, we just keep moseying along.
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You’re spot-on about Microscope, Jamie.
The art-videogame people have a similar complaint about videogames: we’re spending too much effort trying to be like movies and dropping the ball. We should be focusing on what makes videogames special and running with that.
After playing Microscope last night, I see how it dovetails with this post. It’s a bold experiment in getting away from traditional story structure. So, on the one hand, it feels awkward, because where’s my Hollywood 3-act structure? On the other hand, we told a story spanning all of human civilization from the first settlement to the last human taking his last breath…ever see a movie do that?
I think I really dig this point, there can be a lot gained in inserting the mundane, the real, into any sort of roleplaying for example. You can turn a quick ‘you reach point ba fter x days and fight one mob’ into an interesting roleplay experience, planning the trip, asking for routes and so forth. I think there’s a much better execution of the idea, but it’s a thought nonetheless.
I think everybody should have a name if they talk to the PCs, keep a big ol’ list of names you can dole out to the unimportant, because the world feels more alive if it’s real.
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I was surprised when reading your piece…but then I thought, wait, I saw a lot more kissing between my parents than on TV. So I picked it up there :)
Wim
Ah, I see. You weren’t talking about the tight framing, etc., directly, you were talking about where we borrow them from and why. Gotcha.
Definitely worth thinking about. I think the place to start looking it outside the rules, in the interactions at the table: what are we already doing that we don’t have names for, that we ignore because they don’t fit into our concept of medium-specific techniques?
One that comes to mind is the feedback between audience and authors/actors. It’s rarely talked about in texts or play reports, but many groups seem to step back after a bit of action to discuss what just happened, as a way to absorb the events and get a sense for what everyone thinks about it. Meaning and implications are drawn from this process that are inevitably fed back into the more focused part of play, so it can’t really be said to be not a distinct part of the playing overall. It’s definitely a thing that is a response to the medium’s needs, and forms part of the structure of actual play.
I’m sure there are lots of similar things right under our noses.
I’m not suggesting we need more mundane / real life subject matter.
It’s that each medium invents its own methods. Some are reactions to constraints in the medium. Tight cinematic scene cutting is at least partially an artifact of time constraints, because movies are short compared to novels. Written stories invented paragraphs and chapters to convey conceptual breaks, etc.
By imitating other media we may blind ourselves to the possibilities that are unique to gaming. Gaming becomes a “movie simulator” or a “video game simulator,” instead of exploring its own potential. It’s most dangerous when we don’t even realize we’re doing it, or that it’s not the only option.
I cut a bunch of longer discussion from the original article because I’m not sure it was entirely germane, but part of that was saying that this isn’t exactly a call to action, because I’m not sure what that action would be. More of a “think about it.”
“Slice of life” roleplaying is most compelling when the aim is deep immersion in a place or a circumstance, which can work fine for mundane places and circumstances. There are so many other things to get out of roleplaying game though, and movie-like pacing is just so much more efficient for games aiming to hit multiple play motivations.
Even then, playing with mundane people and places isn’t going to reflect real life either, but a kind of idealised facsimile of “mundane” life in that place and time, so you’re right on that point. That kind of “drifting along” play is actually why I find Archipelago II an intriguing game.
And to be fair to D&D 4e, I think its inspiration-drift has as much to do with its designers designing reactively to 3e and being unfamiliar with editions prior to it (let alone their lack of familiarity with D&D’s original literary inspirations) as it does with being influenced by videogames.
When it’s done right it’s fun and feels tight because that’s what humans find interesting. People don’t find movies interesting because they’re movies, but because movie makers have learned (in some cases) how to use movies to make stories that people find interesting. To a certain extent imitating other media can produce a fun RPG, because you can use things that artists in other media have learned to do as evidence of what people like, but to do more than that risks confusing the map with the territory. If the fun really came from successfully imitating other media then railroading would be widely adored instead of despised.
Is modeling real life a compelling goal?
Hm. Is there an implicit thesis here that we should be aiming for more lifelike narratives? Because if so, I have to strongly and vehemently disagree!
It’s the standard argument – stories exist… to tell a story; to effectively imprint themselves on the reader/watcher/consumer. It is explicitly not to model real life, because we’re already /living/ real life, and it’s /boring/.
Sure, learning from media is dangerous, but that’s not something I’d want to make media boring to fix.
Well, my guess would be that the original movie directors and producers got the imitation of the storytellers, who have been using this form of describing reality for as long as humanity have had language.
I see your point that we are just telling a stripped down version of reality, but as I see it we try to get to the essence. We are not losing realism; we are striping away the unimportant to get the core of what it is to live as a human. Back to the archetypes if you will.
The reason that we cut the scene when it becomes disinteresting is just that. The events in our lives that as boring will soon be forgotten, we will remember them just like a recap “you have a few boring months before you move to the new apartment”. My guess is that our tradition to cut scenes and focus on the more exciting is because it models our way of remembering and filtering our memories. It feels right because we see (or want to see) the world in that way.