[SF TV scribbles] Babylon 5, and introduction to the concept

[Ron Edwards]

From late 2011: Babylon 5 scribbles. I've been doing these "scribbles" for the last couple of years, begun on a whim with this one. They have to be done for a show I've never seen before or only seen long ago, as was the case here. I write whatever comes to mind as I watch.

I've got them for The Six Million Dollar Man, Alien Nation, Third Rock from the Sun, V (the original mini-series), Farscape, Lexx, Blake's 7, Planet of the Apes (the TV show), Quark, and Stargate SG-1. I can't do them for the original Star Trek as I already know it very well and frequently re-visit it, I can't do them for Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Battlestar Galactica, or The Sarah Connor Chronicles as I watched all those shows within recent memory. I didn't do them for UFO, Ghost in the Shell (recent series), Odyssey 5, Space: Above and Beyond, or Sapphire & Steel, all of which I like, solely because I wasn't in the mood while watching.

Please respect my request in the text not to answer questions I may pose in the scribbles. They were written to be rhetorical, and if not, I have already looked them up myself.

More information ...

1. According to my extreme TV-centric pal Maura, I don't watch "right." Or as she puts it, I watch shows, but I don't watch TV. This is true. I haven't seen a show aired since ... um, maybe back when I was watching B5, 20 years ago. And although plenty of people say they don't watch TV, I really really didn't from about 1980 until isolated Star Trek viewing 1990-1992, and then B5, some Seinfeld, some X-Files, and not much else. And ever since, I only watched recordings or (now) DVDs, long after the season is over. I only learn about shows through my friends' buzz and I'm deeply skeptical about their enthusiasm, deliberately waiting years until I am convinced it's lasted.

My viewing is completely divorced from following the show's production, caring about whether it's canceled or not, speculating about the back-story or the upcoming story, taking sides for or against it relative to another show, and anything like that.

For perspective on the above, please understand that when it comes to comics, for most of my life, I was contemptuous of those who merely read collections long after publication. Such people clearly didn't get it. Times have changed for comics and me, but I do understand Maura's comment. "Watching shows" is way more like reading books than it is, in her terms or most of the world's, "watching TV." I really don't do it right, making me almost impossible to deal with if you do, and want to talk about it.

2. I got into dedicated show-watching in the early 2000s, with The Shield. That and my later work on Spione prompted major investigation of MI-5s (Spooks), The Sandbaggers, and Callan; since then, my wife and I have become serious show-junkies, and I have an impressive shelf of shows. Lots of different stuff, but with a very low level of cuteness or cultural-confirmation. If it's not confrontational in some way, I am typically not entertained.

One solid sub-section, in fact a whole shelf of its own, is SF TV. I have been delighted to discover an incredible trove of exactly the SF I love - pure social confrontation, albeit battling its own constraints of commercial entertainment like almost all SF. I'll give you the list, in no particular order, and certainly not complete:
The original Star Trek (which I advise you not to discuss with me; I'm insufferable), Battlestar Galactica (re-boot), Babylon 5, Firefly, Alien Nation, Cowboy Bebop, Max Headroom, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex (and the others in this series), Blake's 7, Farscape, Third Rock from the Sun, Lexx, Futurama, The Six Million Dollar Man, Sapphire & Steel, V (original miniseries), Stargate SG-1 (first two seasons; the third tanked it for me); Space: Above and Beyond, Odyssey 5, Space Precinct, Quark, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, UFO, The Planet of the Apes (TV show); we watched Red Dwarf not too long ago but I don't own it.

You may be inspired to suggest something, but I ask that you don't. Some things aren't on there because I'm not interested, and others because I haven't bought them yet. I don't need any help with that.

3. I expected the horrified astonishment when I posted one time that shock: is the only actual SF role-playing game. It was a deliberate statement for shock, no pun intended, but I do mean it. There are now others, and I'm willing to include a very few games published before 2000 as well, but the total is still in the single digits. It's interesting to consider how to play SF TV in any way besides shock: or PTA with a strong shock: influence.

I also found the insane time-and-mind sink that is TV Tropes, and strive not to let it take over my understanding and enjoyment of shows, but you can imagine, I expect, that eventually I started thinking about a way to use the tropes concept constructively toward game design, rather than the pedestrian list of crap it would probably become if anyone tried.

4. Politics. That is all.

So! Even though my thoughts and notions for eventual game design are still mainly in my unconscious, and my notes about it are mostly covered with scrawls of "No!", I thought it might be fun to see the scribbles. They have nothing to do with game design except indirectly, but we'll see ...

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

The tentative creation-play process I have in my notes is not necessarily supposed to be randomized, but as I ran it fully randomized just now, this is what I just came up with:

The show as conceived for the first season:
- emphasized: smart machines, living in space, aliens
- maybe/possible/whenever: immortality, multiple systems/planets, awesome medicine, phlebotinum, energy zaps, dimensions
- absolutely not: freed from history, psionics

(to summarize: show mainly takes place in space-based living quarters, machines can be characters, aliens are involved; it's strongly connected to real-world modern-day history, there are no mind-powers of any kind; many other whacked SF features are available to draw on as we see fit, implying a wide-open conceptual framework)

With the characters' situation as conceived as of the end of the pilot:
- religions as institutions, recent or impending ultra-disaster, cops, dissidents, identity at stake
- non-random choice: given the above, metaphysical claims and effects are probably decidedly not involved

Individual character effects available to all the protagonists on an ad-lib basis:
- not normal morality, cloudcuckoolander, nasty habits, marginalized fictional group, undying loyalty

Individual starting character concepts (note: these are absolutely starting, intensity currently unknown, intended to be abandoned or developed):
- butt monkey + fish out of water
- raised by orcs + jerk-ass
- raised by orcs + logician
- I'm in charge + bad-ass
- idealist + trauma child

Please understand that my tropes list is influenced by the TV Tropes site, but is not synonymous with it. I have a very specific starting list which does not include more developed and dramatic components; the point of play is to drama-arc the hell out of some characters (which ones, we don't know), and to grow the beard for the show if play indicates that it can.

But sort of interesting, right? I still don't know if all this is either (i) dumb or (ii) completely redundant with or inferior to what shock: and PTA can already do.

Best, Ron

[Moreno R.]

First: the very, very important question when there is material to read/see/lister about a show: it's better that I see the show to the end before reading it (for spoilers usually, but often for other reasons, too, like for example to be able to understand the references), or it's better to read it and then see the show?

Because Babylon 5 is one of the many, many TV shows I have on my shelf in a rather long "waiting list" (I like TV series with internal continuity much more than the time I have to watch them, so I, too, watch them in DVD after they end, one episode after another in a few days. I just did a Breaking Bad binge, for example...)

It's a pity you didn't do them for UFO (you mean the Gerry Anderson show, right?), that series has in my memory I think the same place Star Trek has in yours...

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Moreno,

By all means see the show first - my text is absolutely stuffed with spoilers and is intended - or rather emerged - to be read in parallel with it. Or another way to look at it is that it wasn't written for readers at all, so is entirely insensitive to any concerns of theirs. Even to concerns I would have toward readers if I were writing essays or reviews.

I am indeed talking about Gerry Anderson's UFO, one of the great gems; Space Precinct is another, if you haven't seen that. As it happens, I had the opportunity to show the first episode of UFO to a friend a couple of days ago. There is literally nothing like it, and I imagine, can never be - it's utterly a creature of its time. For those who don't know, it's a show from 1970, set in "the future" 1980. The episode about the flower-child is absolutely heartbreaking, especially when you realize that the flashbacks to 1970 are actually present-day material for the makers of the show.

Best, Ron

[Miskatonic]

This is pretty interesting. It's fun to try to fit the characters to your concepts above.(Although, 25 pages of notes!)

What's the point or context of this? I'm understanding it to be something like... preserving the initial viewing impressions as they unfold, as opposed to recalling them after the fact subject to all the nasty editing tricks memory plays. And this gives you... stronger insights into the techniques used to develop the story?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Larry! It's interesting to consider the point, since I started (with this one) totally on a whim, with no applications in mind. In retrospect or reflection, it serves as a kind of ... window for someone else to see what viewing the show was like for me. That also entails removing any and all context of fandom from the experience of watching it together. In the case of B5, you can see that it's not only a look at the show, but also into my mind. I have no idea whether what's visible in both, via the document, is a way to connect with another person in a distinctive way. In terms of game design, I'm kind of hoping that's what I might be able to achieve - that your engagement with the show and my engagement with the show become a bridge of some kind. That's why merely emulating tropes wouldn't be enough.

[Ron Edwards]

H'm, I realize that some miscommunication is going on. The list of tropes for a show I posted above has nothing to do with Babylon 5; it was merely randomly generated for fun. My list of stuff for B5, if it had been made using the sort-of system, would look like this:

BABYLON 5
As conceived for the first season
Specified: Living in space, Multiple systems/planets, Aliens, Psionics
Permitted: Time travel
Denied: Freed from history, Immortality, Smart machines, Phlebotinum, Awesome medicine, Energy zaps, Dimensions

Character context for the pilot, roughly
Explicit policy crisis, The unquiet past, Military, Religons as institutions, Ultra-disaster

Specifications: space station, rubber forehead aliens mostly with powerful ones lurking, UN-style governance breakdown, energy zaps are offense-only, directly tied to contemporary history, love and sex kept PG, unquiet past concerns recent military history and resulting treaties/alliances, ultra-disaster = past wars and impending multi-system war (possibly destruction of B4)

General character tropes - most tap into these at varying degrees (again, roughly for the pilot): Idealist, I've Got a Secret

Londo: Comic relief (stuffed-shirt aristocrat) plus Larger than Life – in this show, character tropes develop fast; by the end of the first season, Londo becomes the Born Loser and more slowly, replaces Comic Relief with Snarker; ultimately he ascends to Magnificent Bastard + Careful What You Wish For. Sheridan (when he enters): I'm in Charge + Hidden Depths; later, Romance and How; ascends to Really the Messiah. Vir: Cutie + some Comic Relief; becomes Idealist + Hidden Depths; ascends to Moral Voice.

I'm really focusing hard on the empirical introduction and later modification of characters, whether justified by the events or simply altered as if they never had been any different. I've noticed that fandom tends to elide/blend such empirical changes to arrive at a much more fixed and archetypal concept which isn't actually in the show very much, and I want to get at the dynamism and adjustment rather than the idealization/fandom.

Best, Ron
editing this in: hey, 110 episodes! 25 pages is actually pretty efficient.

[Erik Weissengruber]

I know that you are on a TV trip, but this: http://bldgblog.blogspot.de/2013/12/conic-sections-interview-with-sol-yurick.html

You might get something out of the relationship between social thought and sci-fi speculation. Here he is on the genesis of The Warriors.

To move on to the next step, I wrote The Warriors. I did it in about three weeks. By this time, a lot of these ideas had matured. I'd been thinking about the whole question of gangs. First of all, the youth gangs at that point in time, running into the 1950s and '60s, had no economic basis whatsoever. They mostly came from poverty-stricken families. You remember the film Rebel Without a Cause, right? That kind of stuff. It was viewed as kind of a national problem.

However, there were also gangs that came out of the suburbs—gangs nobody had ever heard about. No sociologist had wrote about this. In fact, I was big on sociology at the time, especially the works of Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the founders of modern sociology. I wanted to write about stuff that approached reality—that was based in social reality—and that was not bound by a lot of the clichés or conventions of fiction as I knew it. I wanted to deal with a different stratum of society, something that wasn't getting the attention it deserved in fiction at the time.

And this ...

I grew up in a Communist household. Starting in the 1960s, I went back to reading Marx. In the back of my mind, though, there were aspects of Marx that seemed inadequate as a theory. It was very Western-centered; the number of classical and historical references in all of Marx's work was just overwhelming to me. For all of his references, it felt limited. Then, as well, I began to think more in terms of neo-Darwinism. I don't mean social Darwinism. Leftists and liberals deny the question of human nature, but what if it's true? So that also became a consideration in my thinking—mixing the two: Marx and Darwin.

Peter Singer might chime in on the last bit.

[Ron Edwards]

Yes. Just "yes." People who think like this, which includes me, are so thin on the ground there isn't even a name for us. The really great work on human evolutionary biology/nature (Wilson, Goldsmith, Alexander) has been eclipsed by idiots (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris) and turned into yet more Social Darwinism. Furthermore, sociology and related disciplines developed a grotesque, anti-intellectual hate-on for biology during the 1990s which seems unshakeable. That's actually and exactly why my academic career bounced from first priority (mid-90s) to last priority in my life.

[Erik Weissengruber]

It seems that sic-fi deals with social models far more than it engages in scientific speculation. Larry Niven might have been trained as an engineer but even his and other "hard" sci-fi is speculation about social models. Heinlein was brining in Morgenstern's work on game theory and decision making into his work: an engineer attentive to rigorous social theory working it into fiction.

If a sci-fi game comes together I has to engage players' thoughts about alternative social arrangements far more than it does their knowledge of physics, Newtonian or otherwise.

[Erik Weissengruber]

I mean "it" has to engage ...

[Ron Edwards]

Absolutely. It's really the only reason I like science fiction, or rather, the substantial set of material by that name which fits that description. I also recognize no rigorous boundary between science fiction and surrealism, and I do consider SF to be a subset of fantasy, or "the fantastic" if you prefer. Which makes me a very poor SF fan and no fun at all to talk to, and completely out of place at an SF convention.

See my Farscape scribbles for a good example.

[Ron Edwards]

Forgot to mention, it is completely appropriate that as I typed that post, I am watching the last few episodes of Blake's 7 - which I am rating at the very top of the heap for my fave SF TV. And beating out Lexx is pretty damn hard.